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Nasrallah Planned to Shock Israel with Hizbullah Attack Tunnels
(Ha'aretz) Amos Harel - After years of searching, the army located a vital component of Hizbullah's offensive plans in the north. When Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah began issuing threats about his intention "to conquer the Galilee" in the next war, Israel's military intelligence set about trying to decipher his meaning. After the 2014 Gaza war, Israel realized that Hizbullah was aiming to copy the Hamas model of attack tunnels, in a slightly different form. Hizbullah's attack tunnels were fewer in number and shorter, but were designed for the quick and secret transfer of hundreds of fighters into Israel, to lay the groundwork for a wider ground offensive that would immediately follow. A member of the IDF general staff said, "This was the cornerstone of Hizbullah's approach, a move that was supposed to take us by surprise without us knowing what hit us." In early 2017, credible information about tunnels on the Lebanon border began to accumulate. The effort to locate the tunnels covered 130 km. of border. In October 2018, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot traveled to the U.S. and presented the tunnel threat to the American administration for the first time. The tunnel found next to Metula was dug from beneath a cement block factory in Kafr Kila in Lebanon. When the army noticed that the factory was not receiving materials but just transporting cargo from the site on trucks, it realized what was really going on there.