By Jana Choukeir
DUBAI (Reuters) – Lebanon’s Hezbollah published a nearly 10-minute video on Tuesday showing images of 17 military sites in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights that it said were collected by the armed group’s surveillance aircraft.
The video is the second episode in a series that aims to show how far Hezbollah’s surveillance of Israel has gone, as tensions rise due to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and frequent exchanges of fire across Lebanon’s border with Israel.
The Iran-aligned group published a more than nine-minute video in June of what it said was surveillance footage from locations in Israel, including the airport and seaports in the city of Haifa.
“Publishing this video sends a clear message to the enemy and his army,” said Hezbollah media relations officer Muhammad Afif.
“The importance comes from demonstrating our technical and technological capabilities in the field of surveillance and obtaining the necessary information in times of war”, added Afif.
The pro-Iranian Lebanese television channel Al Mayadeen said in June, after publishing the first video, that unmanned aircraft had bypassed Israel’s defense systems and returned to Lebanon without being detected or shot down.
Hezbollah has sent surveillance and attack drones to Israel since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last October, and has said the drone launches are in solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The conflict between Hezbollah and Israel has been gradually intensifying for months, raising fears of a full-scale war, which both sides say they want to avoid and which diplomats are working to avoid.
The United States and France are working on a negotiated solution to hostilities along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel.
(Reporting by Jana Choukeir and Laila Bassam, editing by Timothy Heritage)
