The IDF caught Hezbollah by surprise – and to the same extent the people of Israel. The operation to eliminate the underground tunnels in the north, which was essentially launched two years ago under the codename "White Gold," was kept secret and compartmentalized to such a degree that even some generals in the high command were unaware of its existence.
The only people not caught off guard, who are apparently impossible to catch unprepared – are the opposition mouthpieces. These folks are ready with their automatic response: It's all because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under police investigation; that is to say, "the deeper the investigation, the deeper the digging for tunnels." IDF officials are furious that elements on the Left have tried politicizing the operation. The timing of the operation, it has to be understood, was meticulously chosen to minimize the number of functional tunnels over the coming year.
IDF officials say the operation will be ongoing. There are still more tunnels. The combat protocol against the tunnels infiltrating Israel in the north is tethered to the general approach to Hezbollah, which since the Second Lebanon War has abandoned open areas – its so-called "nature preserves" – in favor of urban cover, in the villages. The terrorist organization began building an underground network beneath these villages, and the United Nations peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, has not dared step foot in them.
The underground development in Lebanon runs parallel to similar developments in Gaza, and IDF officers understood the sides were sharing information. In October 2014, intelligence, engineering and technological teams began hunting Hezbollah's tunnels in south Lebanon, as Hassan Nasrallah's declared plan to "conquer the Galilee" clearly implied a cover element – tunnels allowing massive forces to slip into Israel to cause mayhem behind the front lines.
Over time, these teams filled in pieces of the puzzle and sketched out a map of Hezbollah's tunnel system. The conditions for launching the operation, from the IDF's perspective, was to wait until after they were built but before they posed a threat to the residents of the north. An operation of this sort, although some geniuses among us say it isn't an operation at all, requires considerable forces to secure the drilling and digging teams.
It was also important for the IDF to fashion an Israeli narrative around the tunnels – and control it. The Israeli story, IDF officials say, is also the one being told in Lebanon. Among the IDF's high command, however, the attempts to cast doubts over the integrity of the operation – which is part of a multipronged systematic approach to pre-emptively negate the enemy's extremely dangerous capabilities – have been a source of consternation. In this regard, Hezbollah's precision missile capabilities and infiltration tunnels are one and the same. IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot set the mission parameters nearly two years ago: Eliminate the underground threat. This objective runs parallel to the ongoing campaign of bombing anything and everything in Syria that is connected to the precision missile facilities.
This week, an Israeli news outlet reported Hezbollah presently possesses a relatively small amount of precision missiles. The people who have tracked developments in Syria and Lebanon for the past five years, however, know the reported numbers are completely inaccurate, and for one simple reason: At present, Hezbollah doesn't have any precision missiles. None of the organization's missiles are laser-guided. Those sounding the alarm bells over exploding ammonia warehouses need to understand – the danger lies in the randomness of large missile salvos. Ergo the IDF's efforts in recent years to dismantle this danger before it can materialize.
