“As you can all see, there is no secret Hizbollah weapons warehouse here,” Gebran Bassil, Lebanon’s foreign minister, said wryly as he gestured down below the empty stands of the al-Ahed football stadium.

Just four days earlier, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, had publicly accused the Lebanese group of hiding precision missiles in the heart of the capital, Beirut.

“Here’s a picture that’s worth a thousand missiles,” Mr Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly as he held up a satellite image with three points marked with red dots. “Israel knows what you’re doing, Israel knows where you’re doing it, and Israel will not let you get away with it,” he warned.

In an unprecedented move, Mr Bassil decided to call his bluff on Monday, offering foreign ambassadors and journalists a tour of each of the sites in question.

“We are used to Israel fabricating information (...) but this time Israel lied in the presence of delegates from all over the world, which is why we took this extraordinary measure today,” Mr Bassil told the 73 envoys and reporters gathered.