
Israeli soldiers advance towards the Israel-Lebanon border in 2006, (Reuters).
Israeli daily Maariv revealed in its Tuesday issue that Israeli occupation forces had built an underground city in Northern Israel to train for an imminent war against Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah.
The army command allowed two reporters and a camera crew from Maariv to enter the city.
The reporters were told by a military commander that the concept of the city is based on Củ Chi, the Vietnamese underground network constructed in the wake of the US invasion and used for transferring intelligence and preparing for battle.
The commander stated that Hezbollah had already dug tunnels in southern Lebanon.
He added that it was necessary to launch the project following the second war on Lebanon where the Israeli military was only able to incur a limited number of injuries to Hezbollah fighters until they emerged from their underground defences.
According to Maariv, Israeli soldiers are training to ambush such tunnels once they’ve acquired their locations and also how to storm Lebanese villages surrounded by woodland.
In the investigation that spanned 26 pages, Maariv’s military sources said that the tunnels are what prevent Israeli fighter planes from destroying Hezbollah’s rocket launchers.
Military sources evaluate the number of those tunnels to be in the hundreds despite the rocky nature of the region where they are dug.
The sources asserted that the only way to effectively destroy Hezbollah’s rocket capability is to succeed in locating the tunnels and attacking from within.
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