"Hizbullah does what it wants and is building a state beneath a state," Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said Wednesday morning at a session of a committee in the Italian parliament. "The result is that [Hizbullah leader Hassan] Nasrallah announced in his own voice that he possesses 40,000 missiles – and I believe him," Ben-Eliezer said.

"Lebanon is not the country we knew in the past," the Infrastructures Minister said. "The Christian majority that used to be there has eroded completely and what is left is the largest terror base in the world."