BEIRUT: One day after Hizbullah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah warned Israel it would be defeated if it launched another war, an Israeli newspaper on Thursday published excerpts from an alleged Hizbullah document suggesting the group knows everything about Israel’s military activity along the Lebanese border.
An article in Yediot Ahronoth said the top-secret 150-page document suggests Hizbullah spies have successfully infiltrated the Israeli Army and Israel, spying on regular communication and coded communication networks.
The report, which could not be independently verified by The Daily Star, reportedly runs on the paper’s front page with the headline: “[Nasrallah] knows everything about us.”
It says the document “shows to what extent Hizbullah intelligence succeeded in penetrating the Israeli Army, and proves that Hizbullah has enough sources of information,” according to Hizbullah’s Al-Manar television.
Hizbullah is particularly informed about the activities of Brigade 91, stationed along the border, and describes the Israeli Army’s land, naval and aerial activities, surveillance equipment and binocular monitoring, As-Safir said Friday.
“Israeli experts and retired servicemen who served in the north have said that the data gathered by Hizbullah by means of the document was highly sensitive and that part of it had been cloned by Hizbullah from secret documents belonging to the 91st brigade,” Al-Manar reported Yediot Ahronoth journalist Ronen Bergman as telling Israeli television Thursday. “They detail the nature of the Israeli Army’s deployment in the north. Those who see the documents know that they have been copied page by page from the original top secret documents. Hizbullah might have gathered the data by means of spies or by infiltrating into the Israeli side to take pictures,” he said.
An Israeli Army official serving on the Lebanese border told the Israeli paper that after reading the document, “everything went black.”
“I was astonished by the accuracy of Hizbullah’s description,” he said.
In an ongoing war of words between the hostile neighbors, the Israeli report appears to have ruffled feathers at home, with one commentator saying Nasrallah was the only Arab leader properly following Israeli affairs.
“Nasrallah reads all our journals, reads all the details and memorizes them,” Al-Manar quoted Tseva Yehezkili, an expert in Arab affairs, as saying. “We can say that he is the sole Arab leader who is aware of what is taking place in Israel.”
In a speech to mark Martyr’s Day on Wednesday, Nasrallah said that while Hizbullah was not looking for another war, it would respond to an offensive.
Israel could “send whatever military brigades, five or seven, and if you want send the whole Israeli Army … we will destroy and crash it in our hills, valleys and mountains,” he warned.
Nasrallah’s speech prompted Giyora Eiland, former head of Israel’s National Security to tell reporters that Israel wouldn’t win a future war with Hizbullah because the group possessed too many missiles.
“If we want to win, the war should instead be waged against the Lebanese government and its infrastructure of which Hizbullah has become a part,” he said, echoing similar remarks made by Israeli officials in the past.
Also on Wednesday, the Israeli military released documents and photos it said proved Iran was responsible for an alleged weapons shipment intercepted by the Israeli Navy last week. Tel Aviv claims the cargo ship it seized off the coast of Cyprus was carrying 500 tons of Iranian-made weapons to Hizbullah. Both Iran and Hizbullah have denied the allegations.
Israeli Army Chief of Staff Major General Gabi Ashkenazi meanwhile said Tuesday Hizbullah had rockets capable of hitting the cities of Tel Aviv and Occupied Jerusalem, as well as the country’s secretive nuclear reactor at Dimona.
“Some of [the rockets] have a range of 300 kilometers and some of them have a range of up to 325 kilometers,” Ashkenazi was quoted as saying.