Israeli opposition chief says Netanyahu overplayed border ops

JERUSALEM: Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday of over-dramatising the army’s discovery of Hezbollah tunnels infiltrating its territory from Lebanon for political gain.

Livni told public radio that while she and the rest of the opposition welcomed the army’s discovery of the tunnels and their eventual demolition, “the incident must be kept in proportion”.

“We are not now in a situation where our soldiers are behind enemy lines,” said Livni, who served as foreign minister during Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah.

“We are talking about engineering activity within the sovereign territory of the state of Israel,” she added, accusing Netanyahu of “blowing the incident out of proportion”.

Israel announced on Tuesday that it had discovered Hezbollah tunnels infiltrating its territory from Lebanon and launched an operation to destroy them.

Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus said the “attack tunnels” dug by the Shiite militant group backed by Iran, Israel’s main enemy, were not yet operational.

He declined to say how many had been detected or how they would be destroyed, but stressed all activities would take place within Israeli territory.

Netanyahu, whose electoral appeal rests to a large extent on his image as the Jewish state’s ‘Mr Security’, went on television on Tuesday evening to explain the tunnel threat, with armed forces chief of staff Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot at his side.

On Wednesday, he told UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on the phone that “he expects the UN to strongly condemn the violation of Israel’s sovereignty,” according to his office’s Twitter account. — AFP