The Iranian president meets Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah before leaving, attacks Israel. In an open letter, Iranian journalists criticise the visit.

Beirut (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad left Lebanon after a two-day visit that left a lot of awkward and troubling questions without an answer. Before he ended his “historic” visit to Lebanon, the Iranian leader met overnight with Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the Shia organisation said in a statement. Nasrallah presented to Ahmadinejad with an unusual gift, an Israeli rifle seized during the 2006 Israel-Hizbullah war, as a token of “loyalty and gratitude”.

At the end of the visit, Ahmadinejad attacked Israel during a visit to Bint Jbeil, where he was welcomed by an adoring crowd. The town, described by Nasrallah as the capital of the resistance, was destroyed by Israel during the 2006 war.

“The whole world knows that the Zionists are going to disappear," he said. “The occupying Zionists today have no choice but to accept reality and return to their countries of origin,” he added.

In Beirut, the decision by organisers of a film festival to spare Ahmadinejad’s feelings and scrap the screening of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s ‘Green Days’,  a movie about the green wave movement in Iran, was badly received.

Today, 27 Iranian journalists used the occasion to publish an open letter to the people of Lebanon. Ahmadinejad, they wrote, “is only using his trip to Lebanon for political show” to distract people from domestic problems in Iran. Close to the opposition, they wrote that the Iranian president failed to bring peace, tranquillity and prosperity to his country and now he does not want peace for Lebanon.

• lebanon
• iran
• israel
• ahmadinejad
• visit
• zionists
• nasrallah