Report: Hezbollah Tunnels May Make Gaza's Look Like 'Child's Game'
Friday, 30 Jan 2015 09:58 PM
By Joel Himelfarb
After uncovering a Hamas underground tunnel network in last summer's Gaza war, the Israeli military has turned its attention northward in search of a Hezbollah tunnel network some speculate may make Hamas' network look like a "child's game," the pan-Arab al-Monitor website reported recently.
Israel uncovered more than a dozen tunnels running from Gaza into its territory last summer, and few would be surprised to learn that more have yet to be located, officials said.
Alan Dershowitz noted that during the Gaza war, there were reports that Hamas planned to use that underground smuggling network to carry out a large-scale terrorist attack on Israel on Rosh Hashanah.
It would have involved hundreds of terrorists simultaneously emerging from dozens of tunnels and "slaughter[ing] hundreds, if not thousands, of Israeli civilians and soldiers. If this report were true, as many in Israel believed it was, the Rosh Hashanah massacre would have been the equivalent of a hundred 9/11s in the United States," Dershowitz wrote.
But Israeli officials suspect that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah — whose cadres specialize in tunnel warfare and taught this skill to Hamas — may be putting together a more lethal state-of-the-art tunnel network running from its base in Lebanon into Israel.
In Zarit, a village of 230 people on the Lebanon border, Israeli military engineers this week began drilling underground in search of Hezbollah tunnels, The New York Times reported.
The operation began after village residents reported hearing strange sounds from underground, leading them to believe the terrorist group might be building tunnels to smuggle militants and weapons onto Israeli territory.
The issue has taken on new urgency for Israelis in the wake of Hezbollah's attack on Wednesday which killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded seven others. The terror group fired anti-tank missiles which struck the unarmored vehicle the Israelis were traveling in about a mile from the border with Lebanon.
Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, recently said his forces were prepared to invade the Galilee region of northern Israel, and Israeli military planners say they expect Hezbollah to try to invade and capture territory there the next time it goes to war against Israel.
Thus far, the engineers haven't found any evidence of terrorist activity underground. But village residents warily look across the border into Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon, where they see a large volume of construction equipment and houses being built.
"They are preparing for the next war," said village chairman Yossi Adoni. "They camouflage their intelligence activities and lookout points. They are watching us."
Just a short distance away from the village is a reminder of the danger from the other side of the fence. It's where Hezbollah staged the July 2006 cross-border raid in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two others kidnapped. That triggered a war lasting close to five weeks in which 160 Israelis and more than 1,000 Lebanese were killed.
If the next war comes, the tiny village will be in the line of fire.
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