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Several days before being discovered, he said, an airstrike in the vicinity had cut his contact with a nearby cell of four operatives. Then, the three men he had been stationed with fled, leaving him alone.
“The village was emptied,” he said. He added that the regional commander and his deputy both abandoned their posts before the fighters did, speculating that they did so because “they had conflicts among themselves.”
A member of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces is seen in an interrogation video published October 15, 2024. (Israel Defense Forces)
Pressed on the matter by the interrogator, the Radwan fighter posited that those who fled had “little faith,” having chosen to join Hezbollah for the money rather than ideology.
“Of course, they were scared of Israel,” he acknowledged.
The interrogator then turned his attention to a different topic.
“What was the Radwan Force’s goal over the last period?” he asked.
Pausing momentarily before answering, the operative responded that the first objective was to respond to any strikes that came their way. The second long-term goal was “to perhaps push forward to the Galilee.”
“To enter Israel?” the interrogator asked, receiving an answer in the affirmative.
“That was the plan if there was fighting.”
Hezbollah operatives that the IDF said it arrested in south Lebanon on October 15, 2024. (IDF)
The IDF said on Tuesday that it had nabbed three members of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces after discovering them in a shaft underneath a building in southern Lebanon, amid the ground offensive against the Lebanese terror group.
In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces said that troops from the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion discovered the Radwan operatives “entrenched” in the shaft “alongside many weapons and equipment needed for a long stay.”
The IDF did not say when the Hezbollah operatives were captured, and there was no immediate announcement from the Lebanese terror group on the matter.
The military also published a video clip of an alleged Radwan operative being interrogated about the terror group’s plans in southern Lebanon and the current state of its operations. It was unclear whether the suspect in the video was one of the three that the IDF said it arrested.
In the video, he painted a picture of chaos within Hezbollah at large and the Radwan forces in particular.
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Several days before being discovered, he said, an airstrike in the vicinity had cut his contact with a nearby cell of four operatives. Then, the three men he had been stationed with fled, leaving him alone.
“The village was emptied,” he said. He added that the regional commander and his deputy both abandoned their posts before the fighters did, speculating that they did so because “they had conflicts among themselves.”
A member of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan forces is seen in an interrogation video published October 15, 2024. (Israel Defense Forces)
Pressed on the matter by the interrogator, the Radwan fighter posited that those who fled had “little faith,” having chosen to join Hezbollah for the money rather than ideology.
“Of course, they were scared of Israel,” he acknowledged.
The interrogator then turned his attention to a different topic.
“What was the Radwan Force’s goal over the last period?” he asked.
Pausing momentarily before answering, the operative responded that the first objective was to respond to any strikes that came their way. The second long-term goal was “to perhaps push forward to the Galilee.”
“To enter Israel?” the interrogator asked, receiving an answer in the affirmative.
“That was the plan if there was fighting.”
The remark on a plan to invade the Galilee was consistent with briefings from the army in recent weeks in which they revealed that days after Hamas’s October 7 mass onslaught in southern Israel, thousands of terrorists had been positioned near the Lebanon border in a plan to storm the Galilee and unleash similar carnage there.
Pivoting suddenly, the interrogator once more demanded to know why those stationed in the south — supposedly in preparation for an anticipated invasion of Israel — had all seemingly fled.
“After the assassination of Hassan [Nasrallah], I didn’t see any of them,” the operative responded, referring to the massive strikes in Beirut on September 27 in which the Hezbollah leader was killed.
The capture of Hezbollah forces has not been common. On Sunday, the military announced for the first time since the ground offensive began it had captured a Hezbollah fighter in an underground bunker.
Hezbollah has been badly hit over the last month, starting with sabotage attacks that saw pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to terror operatives explode in two waves on September 17 and 18, killing at least 39 people and injuring thousands more. The attack has been widely blamed on Israel, despite it staying silent on the matter.
Days later, Israel launched a major offensive against the Iran-backed Hezbollah on September 23 with the aim of allowing residents of northern Israel to return to homes they had been forced to evacuate during a year of cross-border rocket fire from Lebanon.
The attacks on northern Israel over the last year have resulted in the deaths of 28 civilians. In addition, 38 IDF soldiers and reservists have died in cross-border skirmishes and in the ensuing ground operation launched in southern Lebanon late last month.
