UNDERGROUND WAR: IDF Destroys Eight Tunnels In Mansouri Offensive
Gallery
Videos
The Israeli military says it has wrapped up a major brigade-level operation in the southern Lebanese town of Mansouri, and the numbers are staggering: more than 600 Hezbollah infrastructure sites flattened, along with eight tunnels destroyed. The mission was carried out by the 55th Reserve Paratroopers Brigade working alongside the elite Yahalom Combat Engineering Unit, the same specialized team the IDF regularly calls in to handle underground demolition work. Mansouri sits inside Israel's southern Lebanon buffer zone, and residents there were told to clear out nearly two months ago, well before troops moved in. Soldiers reportedly also found dozens of rocket launchers Hezbollah had stashed in the area before the ceasefire took hold, gear the group apparently never got the chance to retrieve.
Israel is framing the whole operation around one goal, stopping Hezbollah from quietly rebuilding its foothold inside the security zone. It is part of a much bigger pattern the IDF has kept up since the ceasefire took effect, with troops conducting sweep after sweep across southern Lebanon to hunt down weapons caches, tunnel networks, and command posts before they can be reactivated. The scale of what was uncovered in Mansouri, hundreds of sites and a web of tunnels, suggests Hezbollah had been working to reestablish infrastructure right under the ceasefire's nose. For now, the message from Israel is blunt, every site it finds gets destroyed, and the buffer zone stays exactly that, a zone Hezbollah is not allowed back into.