Not Even Phoning It In

Rusty and Allah are all over this example of just how lazy Hezbollah has become in their efforts to provide fake news. The official Hezbollah web site (with an appropriate Iranian URL) is showing a picture of a ship being ripped apart in an explosion. Hezbollah claims that the ship was an Israeli ship hit by a Hezbollah missile.

Here is the picture as shown on Hezbollah's site:

And Hezbollah did hit an Israel ship, the INS Hanit, a Saar 5 class missile boat, most likely with an Iranian-made C-701 "Kosar" type missile, on July 14, 2006.

This is the INS Hanit (photo credit: Sweetness & Light):

Note the damage (most noticeably the scorch marks) near the waterline directly under the Hanit's helicopter hanger, roughly three-quarters of the way to the stern. Note also that while the ship was reported to have serious internal damage and four Israeli sailors died in the attack, the ship is largely intact, the keel unbroken, and the ship otherwise, from this view, externally undamaged, where the ship in the Hezbollah photo to has literally been broken by the blast, the aft half of the ship behind the explosion several degrees out of alignment with the fore.

The two ships, as noticed by Andrew Bolt of the Australian Herald-Sun, are not nearly the same.

HMAS Torrens, a decommissioned Australian destroyer escort, was purposefully sunk in a torpedo test on June 14, 1999. If you look at first picture in the second row on this page, it becomes quite likely that Hezbollah stole the image from this wikipedia entry, cropped it, and then enlarged it to get their end result.

A ship built in the mid 1960s and decommissioned in 1971 is not going to be mistaken for a modern vessel launched in 1994.

Of course, seeing is believing.

The INS Hanit (picture mirrored 180 degrees from above for comparative purposes):

HMAS Torrens, just prior to the torpedo test:

Not even close. You would expect that a recently unemployed Adnan Hajj would have been make it at least this close:

These days, Hezbollah isn't even phoning it in.

Update: Blue Crab Boulevard uncovers more Hezbollah pictures.