Last night on Judge Jeanine, Defense Secretary Esper called it “regrettable” that “some in the media” were trying to divide him and the president over the Beirut explosion by just pointing out that he said it was probably an accident while Trump said it looked like an attack. pic.twitter.com/F5IuZE21pw
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) August 9, 2020
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told Fox News it was still unclear whether a massive explosion that turned parts of Beirut into a war zone was an accident gone horribly wrong or a deliberate attack.
“The bottom line is that we still don’t know. You know, on the first day, as President Trump said, we thought it might have been an attack. Some of us expected it might be, for example, a shipment of weapons to Hezbollah that exploded. Maybe a manufacturing facility,” Esper told Fox News host Jeanine Pirro.
“Some of us speculated it could have been for an example a Hezbollah arms shipment that blew up, maybe a Hezbollah bomb-making facility. I have said before that it looks like an accident,” Esper continued. “It is unfortunate that some in the media have tried to create divisions within the administration, perhaps between me and the president and others.”
He concluded, “It is simply not true. I mean, the truth of the matter, it is a great tragedy. Under the leadership of the President, we will do our best to help the Lebanese people and do what is right.”
President Trump, in the wake of the explosion, said U.S. military officials “seem to feel” that the explosion was the cause of an attack.
Journalist Richard Silverstein reported last week that the explosion was the result of an attack by Israel on Lebanon. A “confidential highly-informed Israeli source” told him Israel was targeting a Hezbollah weapons depot at the port and planned to destroy it with an explosive device of some kind, he says.
He added, the next-door warehouse, which was storing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, a highly explosive substance commonly used in fertilizer and manufactured explosives and the cause of most of he damage done, was not Israel’s intended target.