BEIRUT, Aug 16 (Reuters) – The powerful Iranian-backed Lebanese armed group Hezbollah published footage on Friday that appeared to show its fighters driving trucks with rocket launchers through a maze of tunnels to an apparent underground launch site.
The footage, 4 minutes and 35 seconds long, is the latest in a series of videos by the group flaunting its purported military capabilities, as it trades fire with the Israeli military in parallel with the Gaza war.
The newest video depicts fighters riding motorcycles, working on laptops and driving around a dozen trucks through the rocky tunnels. Reuters was unable to independently confirm when or where it was filmed.
At the end of the video, two large metal doors open to reveal a wooded area and sky, indicating the passages are underground. One of the trucks tilts its bed back to point its cargo of rockets towards the opening.
The video identified the facility as being named “Imad 4”, an apparent reference to Imad Mughniyeh, a shadowy Hezbollah commander killed in 2008.
Posters of Mughniyeh were shown on the tunnel walls in the footage, alongside others that showed Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s slain Quds Force commander, Qasem Soleimani.
Shortly after Hezbollah published its video, the Iranian embassy in Beirut said Iran had its own underground missile stations that could strike Israel.
In 2019, Israel said it had uncovered and destroyed Hezbollah “attack tunnels” that were dug into Israeli territory from Lebanon. Nasrallah said at the time that the group had had the capability “for years” to cross into northern Israel.
Tensions have soared in the region in recent weeks, after a deadly rocket strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that Israel blamed on Hezbollah. Israel responded with the killing of a top Hezbollah commander in the suburbs of Beirut.Hezbollah has also vowed to retaliate against Israel, as has Iran, for the killing in Tehran of the political chief of the Palestinian Hamas group, Ismail Haniyeh.
(Reporting by Maya Gebeily; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
