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A rare trip through Hizbullah's secret tunnel network
Monitor reporter Nicholas Blanford provides an exclusive view inside one of the militant Shiite group's wartime hideouts.
from the May 11, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
Most likely, no one outside Hizbullah knew it existed until two weeks ago, even with peacekeepers from the UN force known as UNIFIL (UN Interim Forces in Lebanon) patrolling the ground and Israeli aircraft watching from the skies above.
Every piece of equipment, every steel plate, every girder, every door had to be carried by hand up the side of the valley and fitted into place inside the bunker.
And there was no clue as to what happened to the hundreds of tons of quarried rock during the excavation work.
Six years of building
While it was widely suspected that Hizbullah had been building underground facilities in the six years prior to the war, it was only after the Aug. 14 cease-fire that their scale and sophistication was understood.
Israel had seriously underestimated its foe and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other top officials are fighting for their political survival as a result.
"It was a combination of a monumental intelligence failure – the Israelis only found these bunkers by stepping on them – and extremely professional and efficient work by Hizbullah," says Timur Goksel, a Beirut-based consultant on Mideast security issues and a former senior adviser to UNIFIL.
Now, the bunkers are useless. Their locations having been compromised.
Hizbullah has abandoned all the bunkers in the UNIFIL-patrolled zone along the border, redeploying to a newly constructed line of defense farther north.
In this bunker, only a green sleeping mat and a simple metal bed frame remained. At the far end of the bunker, the narrow steel-lined passage broadened out into a rock cavern.
In a niche to one side were four metal water tanks with the Arabic word for "sacrifice" painted across them. A twist of a tap at the bottom of one tank, and icy water gushed out. Several steep steps cut into the rock at the end of the cavern led to an access shaft about 15 feet high with a ladder soldered onto the lining of black metal plates.
Climbing up led us back outside into a thicket of stubby oak trees about 40 yards from the entrance and farther up the hill. The Israeli drone still prowled overhead, its cameras perhaps hunting for the three mysterious people who had suddenly disappeared into thin air on the hill.
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