Israel’s UN envoy Erdan brings group of visiting ambassadors to Hezbollah tunnel

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan led a group of 12 UN ambassadors on a tour of Israel’s northern border with Lebanon on Thursday to show them a Hezbollah tunnel made for carrying out terror attacks in Israel.

The delegation, consisting of ambassadors from Albania, Argentina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Ecuador, Hungary, Nauru, Palau, South Korea, Samoa, Uruguay and Zambia, toured the tunnel on the border and heard from security officials.

Erdan said the visit was designed “to show them the murderous and extremist plan of the terrorist organization Hezbollah, whose goal is to burrow into the territory of the State of Israel and to kill or kidnap as many citizens as possible.”

“Hezbollah has been planning this for years, but the IDF uncovered it,” he added, according to a statement released by his office.

The tunnels were found and sealed off in 2018 and 2019 in a highly-publicized operation. Israeli military officials regularly give visiting dignitaries tours of tunnels on its borders with Lebanon and Gaza to demonstrate the threats it faces.

Erdan said he expects the UN and the international community “to hold the government of Lebanon responsible for what will happen in the next conflict in the North.”

The ambassadors need to understand that the IDF will have no choice but to destroy all of Hezbollah’s infrastructure in Lebanon if it opens fire on the citizens of Israel,” Erdan said.

Israeli soldiers stand around the opening of a hole that leads to a tunnel that the army says was dug by the Hezbollah terror group across the Israel-Lebanon border, near Metula, on December 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Israel has long called for a crackdown on the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, a heavily armed force that is believed to possess an arsenal of some 130,000 rockets that can reach nearly all of Israel.

The IDF conducted Operation Northern Shield between December 2018 and January 2019, in an effort to locate and destroy tunnels dug by Hezbollah into northern Israel from southern Lebanon.

In total, the military said, it found six such passages and rendered them inoperable — either using explosives or filling them with concrete.

The IDF said the six tunnels were built with the specific purpose of enabling thousands of Hezbollah terrorists to stage an infiltration attack on military and civilian targets in northern Israel as a surprise opening maneuver in a future war.

In January 2020, the IDF began installing a series of underground sensors along the northern border in order to detect any new subterranean tunnels being dug into Israeli territory from Lebanon.

Israel announced the completion of a massive barrier, both above and below ground, on its border with Gaza earlier this month. The NIS 3.5 billion ($1.1 billion) project took over three years to complete and is meant to end the threat of cross-border attack tunnels from Gaza, which the Strip’s Hamas rulers have utilized to deadly effect.