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The Israeli government believes that the terrorist group Hezbollah has quite likely dug a number of tunnels across the border from Lebanon in preparation for any future war, although the Jewish state has no conclusive evidence of such a development, an Israeli army general stated on Wednesday.
Israel’s vulnerability to tunnels that could be used for infiltration into its homeland came to glaring light during its war against Hamas in Gaza this past summer. Exchanges of shellings with Hamas escalated into a ground offensive by the IDF after it was discovered that Palestinian terrorists had constructed dozens of complex secret underground passages from Gaza into Israel for the purpose of launching surprise attacks on Israeli citizens.
Residents of northern Israel, who were forced to contend with an onslaught of Hezbollah rockets during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, have at times reported hearing underground noises suggesting that guerrillas were burrowing their way across the frontier in a new threatening tactic.
But the Israel Defense Forces concede that the searches it has conducted have turned up nothing. “We have no positive information meaning that there are tunnels. The situation is not similar to what there was around the Gaza Strip,” Major-General Yair Golan, commander of Israeli forces on the Lebanese and Syrian fronts, proclaimed, according to Reuters. “That said, this idea of going below ground is not foreign to Lebanon and is not foreign to Hezbollah, and so we have to suppose as a working assumption that there are tunnels. These have to be looked for and prepared for.”
The Israelis have disclosed that they hope to develop effective tunnel-hunting technologies within the next two years.
Major-General Golan said that Hezbollah, which is fighting in support of President Bashar Assad in the lengthy civil war in Syria, appeared unlikely to instigate a renewed conflict with Israel. But if the group would make such an attempt, he said, Israel would hit Lebanese targets hard, while likely having to withstand the influx of a Hezbollah rocket arsenal believed to be 10 times more potent than the one possessed by Hamas.
There have been occasional attacks from the terrorist organization along the border over the course of recent weeks, however, including a roadside bomb planted by Hezbollah that wounded an Israeli soldier. Israel’s response was to fire artillery shells into southern Lebanon.
“We will not be able to provide the umbrella that was provided in the south by Iron Dome,” Golan stated. “We and Hezbollah are conducting a kind of mutual-deterrence balance,” he explained, conceding “There is no absolute deterrence. Each side has its pain threshold, its restraint threshold, which when passed prompt it to take action.”
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