The Blast That Shook the Galilee — and Broke Hezbollah's Promise to the Shiites

Thursday, September 10, 9:08 p.m. In Metula, the ground shakes. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) records a magnitude 4.1 tremor, felt across southern Lebanon and the northern Galilee. It is not enemy fire. It is the IDF detonating, with more than 1,100 tons of explosives, the tunnel network and Hezbollah command center buried beneath the hill of Ali al-Taher, which overlooks Nabatieh.

For scale: the charge that ripped open the Beaufort fortress on the night of July 30–31, the record until then, weighed 700 tons. Thursday's, Tribune Juive calculates, is equivalent to more than one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

What the soldiers found in the two galleries, more than two kilometers long, says everything about Hezbollah's project: Iranian-made rockets, anti-tank missiles and drones, hundreds of mines, but also "command centers, weapons storerooms, generator rooms, living quarters, showers and a kitchen." A base designed to hold out for weeks, dug beneath a Shiite town. A state within the state — in the most literal sense, a state beneath it.

The price: five Israeli soldiers killed, thirty wounded, some seriously. On the other side, more than fifty dead. That ratio consoles no one; it only reminds us who built his fortress under other people's homes.

First lesson, on the Tehran side. Iran officially warned Washington that it would retaliate against any Israeli offensive on the installation at the foot of the hill. Except that, according to Reuters, the warning arrived after the IDF had already taken and secured the site. A deterrent that threatens to defend what has already fallen is no longer a strategy; it is a press release. Strangled by American measures in the Strait of Hormuz, the regime is instead multiplying gestures to avoid provoking Israel, even by accident. Its temptation to attempt a desperate strike is real; its ability to protect its proxies, however, has just been measured on the Richter scale.

Second lesson, the most important one, and it cannot be read in tonnages. The Lebanese army deployed in Nabatieh and its surroundings, in place of the fleeing militiamen. Residents greeted it with roses. Local officials in the South, including Shiites, called for its presence, understanding that they would never live in peace if the militia returned. Reader comments in L'Orient-Le Jour call for Hezbollah to disappear.

Why is this decisive? Hezbollah never held the South by force alone. It held it by a promise: to be the shield of the Shiites. When a Shiite town offers flowers to the national army replacing the "shield," it is not a bunker that collapses — it is the promise. Israel will never win the battle for Lebanese opinion on behalf of the Lebanese. But it can make the lie visible. That is exactly what 1,100 tons did.

Then there is the point that euphoria makes people forget. Three test localities are due to pass from Israeli to Lebanese control. Yet no reliable information indicates that Beirut's soldiers have recovered the organization's weapons. Roses have an expiration date. If the Lebanese army merely replaces fleeing militiamen without collecting their arsenals, it will become a screen, and Hezbollah will come back through the cellars.

Israel holds a card here that firepower cannot replace: patience. Hand back each village only at the pace of seized weapons depots, never in exchange for a promise. The quake measured 4.1. The aftershock will play out in the Lebanese army's warehouses.