Israel turns subterranean secret weapon on Hizbollah
Under construction for 14 years, Jerusalem is using militant group’s tunnel for diplomatic warfare
FOR years, the hand-picked squad toiled beneath Lebanon’s southern border, punching through rock with crude drills as they edged closer to Israeli soil.
The tunnel, half a mile long and 260ft deep, was the work of Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group widely regarded as Iran’s foot soldiers in its proxy war with Israel.
Had it not been discovered last year, Israel says the tunnel would have been used to kidnap soldiers, or even launch a shock invasion of parts of its northern Galilee territory.
“You need to hate Israel very much to build these things,” said Col Roy Levy, the Northern Border brigade commander for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), as he gave The Daily Telegraph a tour of the tunnel. “[It took] 14 years to build it and only a few people inside Hizbollah knew about it.”
Now, Israel is putting the tunnel to another use, as a key part of an intensive lobbying campaign to get Hizbollah banned in the European Union.
Only Hizbollah’s military wing, and not its political wing, is currently identified on the EU terrorism list. The US and Israel have been pushing individual governments to go further and ban the entire Iran-allied organisation.
Most European governments have resisted such a move, fearing it would anger Iran, damage ties with Lebanon, where Hizbollah’s political wing is a major player, and further complicate relations with Russia, which considers Hizbollah a legitimate organisation.
But a diplomatic breakthrough came in April, when Germany followed the UK and Netherlands in banning both branches. The UK banned the political wing in 2019, saying it could no longer distinguish it from the armed group.
An IDF spokesman said “multiple delegations of German officials” visited the tunnel ahead of Berlin’s decision.
Hizbollah has faced repeated accusations of plotting terrorist attacks and gathering funds through an organised crime network.
Last year, The Telegraph revealed that Hizbollah-linked radicals were caught stockpiling three tonnes of explosives on the outskirts of London.
In 2016, an investigation by the US Drug Enforcement Agency and Europol said the group was funding its activities with a “massive” drug-trafficking and money-laundering scheme.
Hizbollah denies any role in drugtrafficking, money-laundering, or terrorism. It also denies being a proxy for Iran, insisting that it only receives moral and political support from Tehran. For its part, Iran denies any role in funding or supporting terrorism. As for the tunnels, in a recent interview, Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader, said he was surprised it took so long to discover them and suggested they would be rebuilt.
But the diplomatic campaign in Europe is less about Hizbollah itself, than a broader regional confrontation between Israel, the US, its Sunni Arab allies, and Iran. Israeli military chiefs believe the Lebanese group is so tightly subordinated to Iran that it must follow Tehran’s instructions even if it doesn’t like them. Like the US, they see the group as part of a network of Iranian proxies used by the Islamic Republic to exert influence across the Middle East.
Today, the main flashpoints in that conflict are the Straits of Hormuz, Iraq, and Syria, where Israeli forces appear to have ramped up airstrikes on Iranian targets that they say could threaten their northern border.
Israel does not comment on airstrikes in Syria, but in the past few weeks it is believed to have attacked targets near Aleppo, Palmyra and Deir Ezzor, where 14 Iranian soldiers and allied militia fighters were killed.
Back on the border with Lebanon, Col Levy said he was somewhat in awe of the lengths to which Hizbollah has gone in building the tunnels. And he suspects that he has not seen the last of the group’s tunnelling squads.
“They are not resting,” he said. “They wake up every morning and say, ‘what can I do to help for the day of war?’”