IDF says it destroyed two more Hezbollah tunnels beneath Majdal Zoun

The Israel Defense Forces said on 9 July 2026 that combat engineers had located and demolished two additional Hezbollah tunnels beneath the southern Lebanese village of Majdal Zoun, describing the site as "a fortified military target" and the latest extension of an underground network that the army has been methodically excavating since late June. According to the IDF Spokesperson's unit, the two passages ran roughly 200 metres in aggregate and reached depths of around 25 metres, extending beyond a far larger tunnel complex blown up in the village in the preceding two weeks. The announcement was carried on the IDF's English-language channels and amplified by correspondent Ali Abuali, who reported the demolition alongside earlier strikes on the same site.

The operation matters less for any single blast than for what it reveals about the underground infrastructure Hezbollah built along the Blue Line while the world was watching Gaza, and for the steady, technically demanding pace at which Israeli engineers are now dismantling it.

What the IDF is claiming

The IDF framed Majdal Zoun as a hardened Hezbollah node — "a fortified military target" — rather than a civilian locality caught in crossfire. The army said the two newly demolished tunnels branched off from the larger complex destroyed in late June and ran roughly 200 metres in total at depths of around 25 metres, deep enough to survive most conventional air-delivered munitions. Correspondent Ali Abuali, posting to his verified Telegram channel at 15:06 UTC on 9 July, said the passages sat "beyond the giant tunnel that was blown up there in the past two weeks," with two additional underground facilities located and destroyed in the same operation. A separate report relayed by the Watch for Faith (wf Witness) channel at 14:05 UTC cited IDF figures of approximately 200 metres of tunnel and depths of around 25 metres.

The army did not, in the materials circulated on 9 July, attach a specific Hezbollah brigade or unit name to the Majdal Zoun complex, nor did it publish coordinates. Earlier Israeli coverage of the wider southern-Lebanon tunnel campaign has named the village repeatedly as a priority target, on the basis that its terrain — a steep ridge overlooking the border — was ideally suited to concealed cross-border movement.

The counter-frame from Beirut

Hezbollah and its allied media have not, in the materials reviewed by Monexus, formally responded to the 9 July demolition announcement. Reporting from southern Lebanon has historically described Israeli tunnel-destruction operations as violations of Lebanese sovereignty and of the ceasefire understanding reached in late 2024, and has framed the underground infrastructure as defensive — a characterisation Israeli intelligence officials reject. The lack of an immediate, on-record denial or counter-claim from Hezbollah spokespeople leaves a partial picture. The plausible alternative read is that the group's media apparatus is still calibrating its line, given that the November 2024 arrangement technically barred both offensive tunnelling and significant Israeli ground manoeuvre south of the Litani. Neither side's framing can be taken at face value: Israeli claims of "fortified military target" are accompanied by their own strategic logic, and Hezbollah's prior insistence on the legitimacy of its "resistance" infrastructure is part of a longer ideological project that does not require confirmation of any specific tunnel.

Why Majdal Zoun, why now

Majdal Zoun sits on a ridge a few kilometres north of the border, in the Tyre district — the same stretch of southern Lebanon where, between October 2023 and late 2024, Israeli ground forces pushed north in a grinding campaign that the IDF officially codenamed Operation Northern Arrows. Israeli planners have long treated the village cluster as one of the more dangerous points on the frontier: the elevation gives observers long sight-lines into northern Israel, and the limestone geology makes drilling and concealment comparatively easy. The decision to demilitarise the underground infrastructure methodically, with demolition charges rather than airstrikes, reflects a doctrine refined over two years of war: collapse the shafts in place rather than risk the blast pattern of a heavy bomb in a populated area. It is slower, more labour-intensive, and leaves the IDF engineering corps exposed on the ground for longer — a trade-off the army is plainly willing to make.

The deeper structural point is that Hezbollah spent roughly two decades building a network of cross-border attack tunnels, hardened command nodes, and weapons-storage vaults along the Blue Line, and the IDF is now working through that network at the pace engineering battalions allow. Even at the most optimistic Israeli schedule, full clearance is a multi-year project. The 9 July announcement is therefore best read not as a discrete tactical event but as the latest entry in a demolition ledger that has been running since the ceasefire took hold.

What remains contested, and what to watch

Three things are unresolved as of this writing. First, the Lebanese government has not, in the materials reviewed, confirmed the IDF's characterisation of the tunnels or their dimensions; an official Lebanese Armed Forces statement would carry weight that Hezbollah-aligned outlets cannot. Second, the November 2024 ceasefire arrangement created a UN-monitored buffer and a verification mechanism that, in practice, has been uneven — the UNIFIL mandate was renewed in 2025 but its freedom of movement in the south remains contested. Third, the question of what, if anything, replaces a destroyed tunnel is open: Israeli officials argue demolition is permanent; Lebanese reconstruction crews have, in past cycles, been observed clearing and re-pouring concrete in villages after Israeli withdrawal.

For now, the most concrete data point is the IDF's own running count. Each demolition is announced, geolocated to a specific village, and tied to a specific tunnel segment — a level of detail that lends itself to independent verification by satellite imagery firms and by journalists with access to the border area. Monexus will track the IDF's published tally against open-source imagery in the coming weeks. The Majdal Zoun cluster is unlikely to be the last site of this kind to surface; the deeper question is whether the pace of demolition matches the pace at which new shafts can be dug, and whether the political arrangement in Beirut tolerates either answer.

Desk note: Monexus framed this as an engineering-led counter-infrastructure operation against a named Hezbollah site, citing IDF and correspondent sources carried in the 9 July Telegram cluster, and flagged Hezbollah's silence as the principal evidentiary gap rather than improvising a quote to fill it.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/englishabuali/
• https://t.me/abualiexpress/
• https://t.me/wfwitness/