Israel’s Foreign Ministry revealed on Monday that Hezbollah has in the past year constructed no fewer than 27 military posts along the Blue Line, a demarcation separating Israel and Lebanon.
The posts were built under the guise of Green without Borders, a Hezbollah-affiliated organization that poses as an environmental NGO.
Hezbollah launched the project in parallel to Israel’s construction of a fortified perimeter fence along the 140-kilometer border.
According to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War, the terrorist group is forbidden from operating near the frontier.
Israeli media reported last June that Iranian-backed Hezbollah had built more than a dozen outposts on the border, with each such site containing an outlook position or tower, two to three housing units and storage facilities.
“The problem is that as soon as Hezbollah builds a post like this, the Lebanese army and UNIFIL [the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon] no longer arrive [in the area],” the reports quoted a senior Israel Defense Forces Northern Command source as saying at the time.
The same month, the IDF said that the Lebanese terrorist group had established an intelligence-gathering outpost on the border disguised as an environmental protection facility.
Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan has demanded that the United Nations take action against Hezbollah.
In a letter to the Security Council and U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, Erdan warned that the “new reality on the Israel-Lebanon border points to a clear escalation that could ignite the entire region” and argued that the true objective of the posts is intelligence gathering.
“Under the guise of the so-called ‘Green without Borders’ environmental organization, Hezbollah is expanding its terror footprints on a daily basis, just mere meters from Israel’s northern border, and from within UNIFIL’s area of operations,” he writes.
The IDF has exposed Green without Borders as a fictitious group founded by Hezbollah in 2018.
“The use of this organization as a front for Hezbollah’s malign activities has been recognized by the U.N. and described in several periodic reports of the secretary-general. As has been flagged by several U.N. reports and noted in relevant U.N. resolutions, this perverse tactic, of terror organizations hiding behind non-profits and NGOs, is a growing phenomenon that is not only employed by Hezbollah but by many other terror groups across the globe as well,” states the letter.
“These are military outposts for all intents and purposes, established and maintained by Hezbollah terrorists and not innocent Lebanese environmentalists. This is part of the broader picture of Hezbollah’s growing presence in southern Lebanon and yet another example of its ongoing hostile activity in the area,” adds Erdan.