SOUTHERN LEBANON – Nestled in the scenic hills of southern Lebanon in the backyard of a private home near the Israeli border is the entryway to a 1.5 kilometer Hezbollah tunnel with the capacity to house hundreds of enemy fighters.
Until last week, when the IDF’s Yahalom Unit uncovered the tunnel, this home would have been the launching pad for an October 7-style attack against Israel, with soldiers pouring from the ground to head to and cross the border.
On Saturday the IDF destroyed the tunnel. But on Monday night before it was blown up, Brig.-Gen. Guy Levy, who heads the IDF’s 98th Division, led a group of Israeli journalists to see firsthand the subterranean battlefields, which first marked the IDF’s war with Hamas and is now a significant part of the army’s battle against Hezbollah.
“We are at a central intersection of this tunnel,” which is also a “very significant underground combat compound,” said Levy as he stood in the concrete underground shaft.
“The enemy built this over many years to prepare to attack Israel,” he said. “It can hold hundreds of terrorists for an extended stay of weeks” and extends “hundreds of meters.”
The late-night journey into Lebanon began in the parking lot of a supermarket in Kiryat Shmona, a city that has been under rocket fire since the IDF-Hezbollah war began on October 8, one day after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel.
Hezbollah tunnel media tour
Israel evacuated its northern residents from that border area, including the border city of Kiryat Shmona, fearing a Hezbollah invasion.
Close to one year later, on October 1, when the IDF entered southern Lebanon, the army declassified documents relating to a long-planned Hezbollah operation to attack Israel called “Conquer the Galilee.”
In the weeks that followed, the IDF has discovered tunnels that would have been involved in the attack and has shown them to journalists, to underscore the danger Israel had faced and would face if its forces were not in southern Lebanon.
But the tunnel it revealed to the media on Monday night was unusually large and extensive.
In Kiryat Shmona, reporters donned flak jackets and helmets before entering army jeeps, where they sat on rickety benches and a cloth covering. The road became darker as the jeeps drew closer to the border itself and to a base, with a large Israeli flag hanging from an outer wall.
From here, reporters were asked to turn their cellphones onto airplane mode to avoid detection.
As the jeeps crossed the border, an intelligence officer with the group quipped, “Since I’d like to live, actually just turn them off altogether to be safe.”
In the still darkness, one could hear only the jeep’s engines and explosions in the distance. Dust from the jeeps hung in the air. One could see the shapes of trees dotting the Lebanese landscape and the occasional deserted structures, including homes, before the jeep came to a stop next to several scattered single-family homes.
“Welcome abroad,” one of the soldiers joked after the reporters had descended from the jeeps.
Another soldier silenced him, urging the reporters to move quickly down and then up a small unpaved road to what looked like a residential home.
Reporters walked down a side stone stairwell and onto a first-floor side porch. Here they were shown a map of the tunnel drawn by a magic marker on a white door that had been removed from its frame and was now used as a whiteboard.
From here, reporters climbed over the porch wall, into the yard, and then down into the tunnel with a winding stairwell that led to the larger intersection point of three of the tunnel’s arched alleyways, which were only wide enough to fit two or three people side by side.
Levy addressed the group. Although he stood next to a utility box and an electric light designed to be generator powered, these were no longer operating, so his face was lit up by flashlights and camera bulbs.
IDF forces went through a 48-hour battle to take this village, including a fierce fight at the entry to the tunnel shaft, he said.
Reporters were shown a storage room with rifles, RPK machine guns, Kornet anti-tank missiles, and boxes of ammunition. Some of the weapons originated from Iran, according to Lt.-Col. Yoni HaCohen, the commander of the 890th Paratroopers Battalion.
Intermixed in the same storage room were boxes of food and medical supplies.
The tunnel, which had a lighting system throughout, also had multiple bathrooms, as well as large chambers with mattresses or cots so that soldiers could sleep.
In one room, a rifle had been left on a bed with a purple sheet and a water bottle.
There was more than one exit point from the tunnel so that soldiers could enter and exit at different points. The soldiers that spoke to the media said they planned to continue searching for additional tunnels to make sure that Hezbollah could not pose a subterranean threat to Israel.
“I feel like I have entered the belly of the enemy, taken when they built over years,” said Lt.-Col. Yoni HaCohen.Finding this tunnel and destroying it, he said, “is a great success.”