The leader of the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has repeated his threat to invade Israel’s northern Galilee region.
In a speech aired on Lebanese television on May 2, Nasrallah said: “The resistance can penetrate the Galilee and the enemy knows it.”
Commemorating three years since the death of Hezbollah’s former military chief, Mustafa Badreddine, the Hezbollah leader added: “Israel wants a war? Let it go to war.” He also warned that “Israeli units and brigades that dare to enter southern Lebanon will be annihilated and destroyed in front of the eyes of the media and the entire world.”
As part of Hezbollah’s “Conquering the Galilee” plan, the Shiite terrorist organization has constructed illegal attack tunnels along the Israel-Lebanon border since 2006. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) confirmed last month that a tunnel discovered by Israel earlier this year had crossed the border, in the third such breach of a ceasefire resolution.
At the beginning of December 2018, Israel launched Operation Northern Shield to seek and destroy attack tunnels built by Hezbollah. In announcing the campaign, the IDF also addressed the group’s plan to capture the Galilee.
“In 2012, we identified Hezbollah’s plan of attack inside Israel titled ‘Conquering the Galilee,’ to which the organization’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah refers, and which includes terror tunnels infiltrating Israel,” an IDF statement said.
“In 2013, the IDF examined suspicions the terror group was digging near the border after Israeli residents in the north reported hearing digging noises, but did not find anything,” it added.
The IDF believes that Hezbollah has built a sophisticated underground structure to allow members of its elite Radwan unit to infiltrate into Israel and to take hostage Israeli border communities, using Israeli citizens as human shields.
The Radwan force, which answers directly to Nasrallah, consists of an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 men, who have trained under Russian forces and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria, where they have gained significant experience in battle. The elite group was created eight years ago with the specific purpose to carry out mass casualty attacks in Israel.
[Photo: Anton Nossik / Flickr]