JERUSALEM—The Israeli army is using advanced technology along the border with Lebanon to probe the possibility that Hezbollah has been digging tunnels into Israel under the border fence the way that Hamas did from the Gaza Strip.
A senior officer quoted by Israel’s Channel Two said this week that the search has thus far shown no indication of tunnels. "But the army does not rule out the possibility," he said.
Residents of villages along the border have said they could periodically hear the sound of digging from the direction of the fence. Similar reports had come in recent years from residents of Israeli villages along the Gaza border. However, it was not until the war last month that the Israeli public became aware of the dozens of attack tunnels built by Hamas, some reaching under the border into Israel itself.
Meanwhile, two weeks after an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire brought the Gaza confrontation to a halt, Hamas has warned that fighting and tunnel digging will resume if its demands are not met. There has been virtually no movement thus far towards answering any of those demands.
Reconstruction of the extensive war damage has not begun and the demand by Hamas that the Palestinian Authority (PA) authorize payment of salaries to tens of thousands of Gazan public employees has been ignored.
Israel and the Palestinians will meet in Cairo on September 26—one month after the ceasefire went into effect—in order to begin negotiations on a long-term settlement.
In what was taken as a Hamas warning, Al Jazeera television this week showed masked men with digging equipment in what was said to be a Gaza tunnel. Hamas military spokesmen had said immediately after the ceasefire that they were resuming the digging of tunnels and the construction of rockets. However, Israeli defense officials, relying on intelligence sources, said there no evidence that would verify either claim. One official said that if there was any digging in tunnels it was probably to uncover the remains of Hamas fighters buried there during Israeli bombing last month.
Although Hamas has held several "victory" celebrations in Gaza’s streets in the past two weeks, and its leaders have repeatedly warned Israel that its days are numbered, Hamas is isolated in the Arab world.
Egypt, which Gaza borders, has made its hostility plain even though it has undertaken the role of intermediary with Israel in order to bring about the cease fire. The Egyptian government sees Hamas as an ideological extension of its own Muslim Brotherhood, which the military regime in Cairo overthrew, and an ally of jihadi elements in Sinai, which have been warring with the Egyptian army.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other Arab countries now equate Hamas with the radical jihadists of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which they despise and fear. Qatar is the only Arab state that backs, and bankrolls, Hamas. Non-Arab Iran has promised to send more rockets to Gaza but Egypt has blocked the tunnels through which they had been smuggled in the past.