IDF bombed Hizballah weapons shipment? Um, no.

YNet, Haaretz and Times of Israel all report:

Israeli warplanes hit a convoy of advanced missiles heading out of Syria and into Lebanon where they were to be delivered to Hezbollah, a Kuwaiti newspaper reported on Wednesday.

According to the report, in the Kuwait-based paper Al-Jarida (Arabic), the attack was carried out earlier this week in the vicinity of the Lebanese-Syrian border.

However, the report, which relied on an unnamed “official source” in Jerusalem, did not say whether the targets were in Lebanon or Syria at the time of the strike.

Kuwaiti newspapers, and specifically Al Jarida, make stuff up all the time.

This is not the first time that Al Jarida reported huge scoops from Lebanon. Only a couple of days ago Al Jarida claimed that Iran had transferred missiles with a 1500 km range to Lebanon.

Last year, Al Jarida - again quoting a "high-ranking Israeli defense officials" - claimed that there was an assassination attempt against Ehud Barak in Singapore.

How is it possible that a Kuwaiti paper has such great connections with Lebanese and Israeli officials - better than any Israeli or Lebanese newspaper?

I found this interesting tidbit from 2011 where an analyst admits that Al Jarida and other Kuwaiti papers fabricate stuff, but then bizarrely claims that some of the their reports might be true anyway, because Hizballah operatives were imprisoned in Kuwait in the early 1990s, so I guess these newspapers kept in touch with them. Yeah, right. And they are really close with Israeli officials, um, why?

Journalists need to to some basic fact checks of their own before featuring such sources so prominently. True, they say that the reports are unconfirmed, but the salient fact is that Al Jarida's scoops are never confirmed.