Lebanon Justice Minister Ashraf Rifi slammed Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah for the speech he delivered Tuesday evening, in which he accused Turkey and Saudi Arabia of allying with Israel over the Syrian conflict.
Rifi tweeted remarks on Wednesday, suggesting that Nasrallah’s criticism of Saudi Arabia was hypocritical. He brought up the Hezbollah chief’s alleged ties to US intelligence during the 1980s Iran Contra scandal and his movement’s opposition to fellow Lebanese Shiite resistance group, Amal.
“The soldier of Iran-gate, the one who fights the Amal movement with Israeli aid and who fights in Syria thanks to an Israeli-Russian understanding, should stay silent and be ashamed,” the minister tweeted.
In addition, Rifi attacked Nasrallah’s attempts to paint himself as Palestine’s savior, saying that “those who paid with their blood in the fighting with Israel since 1948 are those who fight for the Palestinian issue and they do not need the aid of martyrs from the Iranian-Israeli alliance that has ruined the area.”
Rifi is considered one of the top opponents of Hezbollah within the Lebanese government. On February 11, he announced that he was suspending his participation in the government until the case of Michel Samaha is transferred to the Judicial Council. Samaha, a former minister and a Hezbollah ally, was released in January after being charged in August 2012 with forming a group to commit terror attacks in Lebanon in cooperation with the Syrian regime .
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