The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) revealed Sunday that it had discovered a Hezbollah terrorist hiding in a tunnel amid stockpiles of weapons, as fellow terrorists retreated north rather than face advancing Israeli forces in direct combat.
The IDF has encountered remarkably little resistance as its ground troops press forward across the border, after targeting Hezbollah outposts and weapons caches with artillery and airstrikes. However, the Hezbollah tunnel infrastructure is significant enough to present the threat of terrorists lying in wait and striking from the rear.
In a statement, the IDF said:
During IDF limited, localized, targeted raids based on precise intelligence in the southern Lebanon area, soldiers discovered an underground tunnel shaft in a building leading to a hideout area for terrorists with an adjacent exit shaft.
The troops encircled the building, scanned the tunnel shaft, and discovered an underground compound at a depth of approximately 7 meters and a 50-meter hideout area, where a Hezbollah terrorist was embedded alongside weapons and equipment for a long-term stay.
After the terrorist surrendered and was apprehended, the soldiers interrogated him on-site and then transferred him to a detention facility for further questioning within Israel.
IDF troops continue their operations in the area.
The IDF published a video of the terrorist being apprehended, during which the soldiers coax him out of the shaft after he has stripped to his underwear (to avoid the possibility of wearing explosives under his clothes). They promise he will not be harmed. The IDF also published a photograph of the terrorist under guard by an IDF soldier.
The purpose of publishing these materials appears to be to document the use of Hezbollah’s tunnels near the Israeli border, and also to send a message to the Arab world, portions of which remain in denial over Israel’s battlefield success in Lebanon.
Breitbart News is publishing a cropped screenshot of the IDF video. The Geneva Convention does not directly prohibit the publication of images of prisoners of war, but it does prohibit exposing prisoners of war to “insults and public curiosity” through such publication. Hezbollah is a terror organization that does not abide by the Geneva Convention, but its provisions apply under what is known as “customary” international law.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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