Israel demolishes 2 kilometres of Hezbollah tunnels under Ali Taher and sets off a 4.1 tremor

The Israeli military said on Thursday night, 10 September, that it had demolished a Hezbollah underground complex under the Ali Taher ridge in southern Lebanon, using 1,100 tons of explosive on about two kilometres of tunnel. The United States Geological Survey recorded the detonation as a magnitude 4.1 seismic event. Agence France-Presse reporters in the area heard several blasts. Video released by Defence Minister Israel Katz showed a fireball rising off the hill.

The ridge sits near Nabatieh, inside the buffer zone Israeli forces now occupy in the south. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he wants that zone kept to stop fire into northern Israel. A joint statement from Netanyahu and Katz called the tunnels “strategic terrorist infrastructure that was built over two decades, with Iranian funding and planning.” They said the blast “completes the achievement of operational control over the Ali al-Taher ridge, above and below ground.”

What troops said they found

The IDF put the excavated length at more than two kilometres of an eight-kilometre system inside the hill. RFI, citing its Beirut correspondent, said the site had served as headquarters for one of three Hezbollah territorial units assigned to defend the south. Inside, troops reported a command node for the Badr Unit, living quarters, food stores, weapon rooms, dozens of Iranian-made rockets and missiles, unmanned aircraft, machine guns, anti-tank missiles, and hundreds of mines and charges.

About 50 Hezbollah fighters were thought to be under the ridge when a ceasefire took effect in June, the military said. It said many were killed during the later offensive to take the site, including men who tried to flee shafts or to bring reinforcements. A video released on Friday shows two fighters shot after opening fire from a shaft. Soldiers found about a dozen bodies in the tunnels. The IDF said some fighters still got away. It also said it found no members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the complex, contrary to recent claims.

Footage published on 11 September shows soldiers walking the tunnels before the charges went off. That sequence is the army’s proof of control: first the interior, then the demolition, then the seismograph.

Why a hill became a security-zone marker

Israeli units took the ridge in recent days and then spent time mapping what ran beneath it. Destroying the tunnels is meant to stop Hezbollah from using the high ground as a covered firing point against Israel and as a place to wait out air strikes. A 4.1 tremor is the by-product of packing 1,100 tons into two kilometres of rock. Lebanese reports picked up the same magnitude figure as USGS.

The wider war around the ridge has not paused. Israel still holds ground in the south. Hezbollah still exists north of the zone. Talks billed as the next Israel-Lebanon round are listed for next week in Rome. A demolished command hill does not settle those talks. It changes the map the talks would describe.

Netanyahu and Katz said troops will stay to keep Hezbollah from coming back. That is an occupation statement dressed as engineering. The engineering is real: two kilometres of tunnel gone, a tremor on the record, a fireball on tape. The political question is how long a buffer that has to be blown out of a mountain remains a buffer.

For Iran the file is inventory. Rockets and UAVs stamped as Iranian-made inside a Lebanese ridge are the supply line made visible. For Lebanon the file is another hill in the south that no longer looks like the hill it was on Wednesday. For Israel the file is closed on this particular underground, and open on every other ridge in the same belt.