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Source: Xinhua News Agency

On the 16th, Hezbollah in Lebanon released a video showing armed personnel transporting weapons in a tunnel. Experts believe that Hezbollah's move is intended to "deter" Israel.

According to Reuters and AFP, Hezbollah's carefully edited video, titled "Our Mountains Are Warehouses," is 4 minutes and 35 seconds long. The video shows a team of Hezbollah fighters performing tasks in a wide, illuminated confined space, some driving trucks carrying missiles, some riding motorcycles, and some working on laptops. At the end of the video, two metal trapdoors open to reveal a forest and sky, suggesting that the location previously filmed is in a tunnel. A truck carrying missiles adjusts the angle of the launcher at the rear of the vehicle to prepare for launch. The time and location of the video could not be confirmed.

It is reported that the underground facility displayed by Hezbollah is called "Imad 4", which is intended to commemorate Imad Mughniyeh, the former No. 2 figure of Hezbollah, who was killed in a car bomb attack in the Syrian capital Damascus in 2008. Hezbollah believes that Mughniyeh died of Israeli assassination and vowed to avenge him.

In the video, large posters of Mughniyeh, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and the late commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qassem Soleimani, are hung on the walls of the tunnel.

Riad al-Kawaji, director of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, a UAE security consultancy, said this was the clearest video Hezbollah had released so far showing the scale of the tunnels and the first time Hezbollah had shown the missiles the group possesses, which appeared to include ballistic missiles.

Kavaji believes thatHezbollah released this video in an attempt to "deter" Israel and warn it not to launch major military operations against Hezbollah.

Shortly after Hezbollah released the video, the Iranian Embassy in Lebanon said Iran had its own underground missile warehouse that could be used to strike Israel.

Since the current round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict broke out in October last year, Hezbollah has been exchanging fire with Israeli troops on the Lebanese-Israeli border almost every day in support of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). According to statistics from AFP, since October last year, the conflict between Hezbollah and the Israeli army has resulted in the deaths of about 570 Lebanese people, including at least 118 civilians. Israeli military data shows that the conflict has resulted in the deaths of 22 Israeli soldiers and 26 civilians.

At the end of July, Hezbollah senior military commander Fuad Shukur and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh were assassinated. Iran and Lebanon pointed out Israel as the murderer and vowed revenge. Israel admitted to killing Shukur, but neither admitted nor denied the assassination of Haniyeh.

Nasrallah said on the 6th of this month that Israel will "inevitably" take "strong revenge" for the assassination of Shukur. The revenge action may be carried out alone or in cooperation with other "resistance forces" such as Iran and Yemen.

After the assassinations of Shukur and Haniyeh, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a tough stance in the face of retaliatory rhetoric from Hezbollah and others, saying Israel was prepared for both "defense" and "offense" and was "determined to defend itself."

According to Kavaji, since the outbreak of this round of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Hezbollah has been testing its tactics and arsenal while searching for loopholes and weaknesses in Israel's defense system.

On June 18, Hezbollah released a nearly 10-minute aerial video showing important Israeli military industrial facilities and oil storage equipment, logistics facilities and other important strategic facilities in the port city of Haifa. This is the first time Hezbollah has released an aerial video so close to Israel's inland areas.

Regarding Hezbollah's "investigation" of Israel's military forces, some experts believe that this move is a double-edged sword. Hezbollah has found Israel's defensive blind spots in order to launch strikes, but it has also exposed its own strength.

Hezbollah began to expand its arsenal and upgrade its weapons and equipment after a large-scale conflict broke out between Lebanon and Israel in 2006. In a speech in 2018, Nasrallah said that Hezbollah "has weapons such as precision and non-precision missiles. Once Israel goes to war with Lebanon, Israel will face an unexpected fate and reality."

According to Reuters, the Israeli government claimed in 2019 that it had destroyed several Hezbollah tunnels that had been used by Hezbollah to sneak into Israel from Lebanon. Nasrallah responded at the time that Hezbollah had "several years" of experience using tunnels to sneak into northern Israel, implying that Hezbollah's tunnels were difficult for Israel to defend against.