Among the tanks, armored personnel carriers and bulldozers that the military uses to tear apart infrastructure in the south Lebanon, in order for ground forces to advance, in recent days the site has also been gathering dozens of concrete mixers.
Israel’s army, which has been operating on Lebanon’s southern border since early October, has the main objective of finding Hezbollah’s tunnels and destroying them. Just yesterday the IDF released footage of a tunnel totaling 800 meters in length in which 30 men of the Shiite organization were staying, and in addition to the infrastructure, they had supplies for a month.
To date, the IDF has announced that within five kilometers of Israel’s northern border alone it has found and cleared more than 30 such tunnels that Hezbollah has been building in the mountains of the region for decades. The Israeli military followed the same practice and during the ground operation in Gaza only for the operation in the north the data for the destruction of these underground infrastructures is different.
In Gaza Israel chose the short length tunnels to flood them with seawater essentially destroying them while in the long ones special bomb squads trapped the entrances and exits and blew them up.
On the northern front the orders are different because of the conditions. Israel is carrying thousands of tons of cement as it cannot destroy the tunnels with explosives – it takes a very large amount of explosives to blow up a structure under stone – and it does not have the ability to flood them with water…
The IDF essentially seals the concrete tunnels with cement which, by default, is cheaper than explosives and also disintegrates the underground tunnels forever.