I was in a Hezbollah tunnel – this is what awaits Israel

[Pelican Press 0]

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I was in a Hezbollah tunnel – this is what awaits *******

As I took my first steps into the vast tunnel, stretching from an opening in the Galilee region deep into the bowels of the earth, the air turned sour and dusty.

The vast tunnel,

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and promptly sealed off in 2019, was half a mile long and 260 feet deep – all of it dug with handheld drills by Hezbollah fighters, piece by piece.

Descending the steps into the gloom, past walls dimly lit by glowing electrical cables, it was almost hard to believe that such a colossal tunnel had been dug by a secretive squad, and not industrial excavators.

But the evidence was right in front of me: all over the tunnel walls were cylindrical marks left by the hand drills of the

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, who must have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours toiling away in the darkness.

It took several minutes to meander down to the bottom of the tunnel, which ended in a wall of rubble where the IDF had blocked the pathway leading to Lebanon.

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The tunnel Telegraph reporter James Rothwell toured in 2020

It was May 2020 when I toured the tunnel with an ******** army commander, a time when a full-scale ******** invasion of Lebanon was only a vague possibility.

But with a

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, the tunnel offers just a glimpse of the type of enclosed, difficult territory ******** troops will be facing. It is also just one component of Hezbollah’s vast arsenal, which also includes huge quantities of precision strike Iranian missiles smuggled into Lebanon via Syria.

Col Roi Yosef Levy, then *******’s Northern Border brigade commander for the ******* Defense Forces (IDF), said as he showed me around the tunnel. “[It took] 14 years to build and only a few people inside Hezbollah knew about it.”

Had the tunnel not been discovered, ******* suspects it would have been used to launch a surprise ******** on the north, perhaps to capture hostages and then take them back to Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s tunnel network is now feared to have grown

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in the four years since its discovery, posing a challenge for ******* should it opt for a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

******* estimates that the tunnel network, which can be used for hiding shock troops for attacks or moving supplies, stretches for hundreds of kilometres.

Hezbollah recently published footage that showed a truck mounted with rocket launchers passing through long, winding tunnels. The same slick *********** clip also features Hezbollah troops driving on motorcycles through tunnels surrounding a command centre, Imad 4, passing posters of Hassan Nasrallah, their leader.

Imad 4, a nod to Imad Mughniyeh, the late Hezbollah army chief, is a complex inspired by similar bases in Iran and North Korea, likely built in the Beqaa Valley rather than southern Lebanon.

Nasrallah claims to have started expanding the tunnels in the wake of the 2006 *******-Lebanon war, and ******* says the tunnels are enmeshed with houses in villages and other communities across southern Lebanon.

The tunnel network ******** largely shrouded in secrecy, something of an unknown quantity in any future war between the two countries. Some ******** analysts call it the “land of tunnels”, and say they draw inspiration and possibly direct expertise from similar underground networks in Iran, Hezbollah’s main military backer, and North Korea.

Ronen Solomon, an ******** intelligence analyst who served in the ******** military as an ******* for the engineering team that detonated tunnels as far back as 1984, said destroying them would be a hugely complex operation.

“If ******* is to ******* the tunnels, ******* needs to ******* buildings, and doing that, especially in Beirut, will be the start of a war,” he said.

He said there are five different kinds of tunnels: the offensive tunnels as seen on the border with *******, logistics tunnels – a network of tunnels under bricks that Iran built for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon – and tunnel systems built for the purpose of smuggling supplies via Syria.

There are also tunnels for storing missiles and air defence systems cut into the mountains of the Lebanon Valley area, and in other parts of Lebanon. Finally, there are tunnels used for underground missile launch facilities.

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“Now, the tunnels are more like what we see in Iran. There are the tunnels under the villages in south Lebanon, hidden by trees, housing missile launchers, and in Beirut, they are under buildings like we have seen in Gaza. There are also football fields above them in south Lebanon,” Mr Solomon said.

But tunnels are just one component of Hezbollah’s arsenal, which is far more sophisticated and vast than the crude weapons amassed by ****** in the Gaza Strip.

Hezbollah is said to hold tens of thousands of missiles, including sophisticated precision-guided weapons such as the

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and the Syrian-made M-600. The short-range ballistic missiles have a range of 250-300 km and carry 450-500kg high explosive warheads.

Hezbollah managed to get its hands on *******’s Spike anti-tank missile during the 2006 war, in itself an achievement. It then handed over the missile to Iran, which began reverse engineering it to create its own version.

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The replica was named Alma (diamond in Farsi), and just like the original Spike missile it can hit targets beyond the line of sight, and be fired both manually by a soldier, from a vehicle, helicopter and from the sea.

The Alma missile poses a significant threat to ******** soldiers stationed along the border as the missile defence system isn’t equipped to detect or ****** them down due to their low altitude.

Hezbollah has thousands of smaller rockets at its disposal, most of which have been used since Oct 8 against northern *******, such as the unguided Falaq-1 Falaq-2 rockets and the Katyusha artillery rockets.

In the 2006 war, Hezbollah

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for the first time; The Iranian made Fajr-5 with a range of up to 75km. The unguided missile fades in comparison to what Hezbollah managed to acquire since then.

Dror Doron, a senior adviser at the campaign group ******* Against Nuclear Iran, who also served as a senior analyst in the ******** prime minister’s office, said that Imiyadh Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s military chief at the time, initiated the process of re-armament.

After Mughneih was ******* by ******* in 2008, “the IRGC took over the project. It was an Iranian based project”, Mr Doron said.

The smuggling of ballistic missiles and other long-range precision guided missiles into Lebanon via Syria caused ******* to launch a campaign of airstrikes in Syria in 2014 to target the convoy carrying the missiles, he added.  “******* identified Syria as being a critical element in the route of supplying those missiles,” Mr Doron said.

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Hezbollah produced weapons inside Lebanon, making it ******* for ******* to target them as it would be seen as an act of war. The chaos of the civil war in Syria and various regional factions joining the fray made it easier for ******* to carry out successive waves of air strikes from 2014 onwards.

In terms of ground forces, Hezbollah is estimated to have as many as a hundred thousand trained fighters, including 20,000 full-time combatants.

But last week’s enormous sabotage ******* on Hezbollah, in which pagers and walkie talkies belonging to senior Hezbollah members exploded en masse, has partly thinned down their numbers. Lebanese officials say as many as 3,000 people were injured by the pager explosions alone.

******* is currently conducting daily, extensive air strikes across southern Lebanon to target the large missile arsenals, which are said to be hidden inside civilian buildings. It’s unclear how many missiles ******* has destroyed, but the number is in the thousands, according to the IDF.

Following the 2006 war between ******* and Hezbollah, the UN Security Council resolution 1701 called for a permanent ceasefire as well as the removal of Hezbollah from southern Lebanon and disarmament of militant groups.

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IDF Colonel Roei Levy inside one of the tunnels with James Rothwell in 2020. The section of tunnel, which penetrated into ******* territory, was discovered by the ******** Army

But Hezbollah did the exact opposite according to ******** military experts and former high ranking officials, who told The Telegraph that Hezbollah began rebuilding its military capability, in particular its missile arsenal. Several countries would have been involved in this process, the most important being its

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.

As anticipation builds for a potential ground offensive, Yaakov Amidror, former ******** national security advisor, said *******’s “biggest mistake” was

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earlier, even prior to the 2006 war.

“Before 2006 ******* was addicted to the quietness and was not ready to make any efforts to prevent Hezbollah from building its military capabilities,” Mr Amidror told The Telegraph.

According to Mr Amidror, ******* now has two goals: to guarantee Hezbollah won’t be able to carry out their own version of Oct 7 in the future, and to damage Hezbollah’s military capability to such an extent that it won’t be able to deter ******* in the future.

During that 2020 tour of the Galilee ******* tunnel, Col Levy said even he was left in awe of its scale, despite being a veteran of the Second Lebanon War.

“They are not resting,” said Col Levy, who would go on to be ******* in action fighting ****** during the October 7 massacre. “They wake up every morning and say, ‘what can I do to help for the day of war?’

“You need to hate ******* very much to build these things,” he reflected.

Additional reporting: Jotam Confino and Melanie Swan in Tel Aviv

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#Hezbollah #tunnel #awaits #*******

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