If it is true that identifying those responsible for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, for the sustained campaign of killings that targeted “March 14” leaders over the years, for the Beirut port explosion, and for the loss of bank deposits threatens civil peace - then what of the consequences of the crime of building an "underworld" in southern Lebanon, exposed by Israel, no less appalling than what preceded it, and whose perpetrator is known?
We do not know when this crime began, nor the true scale of it and its expansion. But identifying who carried it out requires no international tribunal, no investigations, no interrogations: it is whoever violated Lebanese territory and public and private property, endangering citizens' lives, and turned it into military barracks over long years.
Since the war broke out in October 2023, the Israeli army has carried out dozens of demolition operations to destroy Hezbollah's tunnel network in southern Lebanon. Although no official tally exists, the available data point to at least 50 detonations for this purpose, the latest of them the destruction of a tunnel in Majdal Zoun in June 2026, 200 meters long and containing hundreds of weapons and launchers.
This was followed in July by the demolition of an extensive tunnel network and a command center near Beaufort Castle, using some 700 tons of explosives, in one of the largest such operations since the start of the war.
This issue is not confined to the brutality of the Israeli demolitions, their environmental and geological hazards, and what they have revealed about the scale of the military capabilities Hezbollah accumulated. It extends to the structure of the state itself: how was the party able to construct this vast network of tunnels over years without being held to account or confronted by Lebanon's state institutions, its political forces, or UNIFIL despite Israel's repeated declarations that it possessed intelligence on the network, and despite Lebanese territory being under the surveillance of multiple local, regional, and international intelligence services?
Whether Hezbollah began building this network in the 1980s or expanded it after the 2006 war, it was not created in a matter of months or a few years, but over the course of at least two decades.
During that period, four presidents of the republic and six prime ministers held office in Lebanon, alongside successive army and security service commanders. Nor should we forget the earlier period of Syrian tutelage and those it installed in positions of authority. Reducing the matter to Hezbollah's capabilities alone therefore overlooks a fundamental question about the responsibility and effectiveness of state institutions that are supposed to protect sovereignty and exercise oversight over the whole of Lebanese territory.
Here a pressing question arises: is it conceivable that everyone who successively ran the Lebanese state, together with the security and military leadership and the effective political forces, was unaware of a project on this scale? Or does the matter reflect varying degrees of knowledge and complicity - or of looking away, of incapacity to confront, and of acquiescence in a fait accompli imposed by the imbalance of power within the state?
There is no need to belabor the responsibility of Hezbollah and its allies for building these fortifications, particularly since what was constructed goes beyond the concept of military defense requirements and comes closer to the creation of a parallel infrastructure extending underground, mirroring the influence the party built above it.
And concern is no longer confined to the people of the south. It has spread to the residents of other Lebanese regions, from the Bekaa to Jbeil and the eastern mountain range, where many have begun to wonder whether such fortifications lie beneath their own towns and homes.
The Lebanese have long known that their state was politically booby-trapped above ground; today they are discovering that their country is, in the literal sense, booby-trapped beneath it.
In light of these facts, does this underworld not constitute a sustained breach of the ceasefire?
These tunnels and fortifications reveal an integrated military environment underground, matched above it by a closed ideological and political environment that has moved beyond the narrative of resistance and the defense of Lebanon to serving the Iranian project in all its dimensions.
This picture weakens the Lebanese position in any coming negotiations, while Hezbollah's military structure remains in place north of the Litani. The problem is no longer confined to a military deployment within the area covered by Resolution 1701, but lies in the existence of an armed system that cuts across regions, outside the authority of the state, and that leaves any border settlement liable to collapse.
What was built underground constitutes a new political and institutional scandal, added to a series of files that have gone without genuine accountability - from the string of assassinations to the Beirut port explosion to illegitimate weapons.
Each time, the truth was deferred and accountability postponed under the banner of preserving civil peace or avoiding sectarian strife, while the deep causes of the crisis went untreated. The result is that the policy of containing Hezbollah, rather than holding it to account, still governs Lebanese political life - and the Lebanese themselves, who by their silence are accomplices more than victims.
