Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman MK Avi Dichter (Likud) warned Wednesday that any offensive action by Hezbollah will see the IDF "crush" the Shiite terrorist group.
In a Facebook post following the discovery of Hezbollah terror tunnels snaking under the Israel-Lebanon border, Dichter wrote that "if Hezbollah digs tunnels as a means of transporting hundreds of thousands of terrorists into Israel, aiming to seize control over Israeli territory and wave the Hezbollah flag there, they will soon find that they will be crushed in Lebanon by Israel's power."
"They will also drag Lebanon's puppet government [to war] and Lebanon will end up paying a heavy price. It will find itself back in the 19th century," Dichter wrote.
Hezbollah, he continued, "is trying to imitate Hamas in Gaza, but Hamas understands that digging tunnels means digging graves for its operatives. As of yesterday [Tuesday], Hezbollah understands this, too."
"The tunnels breaching Israeli territory are a clear operational manifestation of Hezbollah's policy shift. They demonstrate that Hezbollah is preparing an offensive action, not just building its defenses. This is perhaps the most significant lesson Nasrallah learned following the [2006] Second Lebanon War," Dichter wrote.
In another post, days after the Israeli military launched Operation Northern Shield to destroy the Hezbollah tunnels, Dichter dismissed the Zionist Union's demand to convene an urgent meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee to explore the timing of the operation.
The opposition claims the operation was launched to distract the public from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's latest legal troubles and the fact that the police recently recommended he be indicted on corruption charges.
"The members of the opposition chose to link the operation in the north to political interests. To them, that is what the IDF does. After failing to shorten the term of the current coalition, the opposition leaders chose to tie the Hezbollah tunnels in Lebanon to the prime minister's and the coalition's personal political interests. They are not letting the fact that the IDF chief of staff supported and pushed for this operation change their mind. There is no operational aspect to the timing, in their eyes – it's all political," he wrote.
