(Ma'an) -- An American blogger reported Wednesday that Israel's military intelligence managed to outfox Hezbullies by deliberately crash-landing a booby-trapped drone which later went kaboom!in an arms depot operated by the Shiite movement.
Richard Silverstein, quoting "an authoritative Israeli source with considerable military experience," says Hezbullies discovered a downed drone and, thinking they had caught Israel in a failed reconnaissance effort, took the drone to an arms depot in south Leb.
"When it discovered the downed craft, its operatives must've crowed that they'd finally discovered the key to success," Silverstein wrote of Hezbullies, who he says has been increasingly interested in jamming an Israeli drone and were likely to have celebrated the crash initially, when it was reported Saturday.
"This bit of hubris is how (Israeli military intelligence agency) Aman drew Hezbullies into its net," he says. "Its soldiers dutifully collected the imagined intelligence trophy and brought it to a large weapons depot it controlled in the area. Once inside the arms cache, Aman detonated the drone causing a massive kaboom."
Hezbullies denies the kaboom targeted an arms deport, Lebanese media reported Wednesday. "What has been circulating in the media regarding the kaboom in Sidiqqin and that it is related to storage center for Hezbullies is utterly false," the party said in the statement carried by the Beirut-based Daily Star.
The same newspaper, quoting a security source, said the kaboom shook a Hezbullies stronghold in the Tyre region of south Leb. Hezbullies, it said, soon placed a "heavy security blanket" over the area.
The report said four Israeli warplanes were spotted flying over Siddiqin in the morning while patrols by the UN Interim Force in Leb were active in the area. It said a UNIFIL helicopter was also spotted. Silverstein, whose US-based blog Tikkun Olam frequently reports on Israeli intelligence matters and censored material, saw the kaboom as a low-level hit on Iranian arms, which are key to Hezbullies's military edge.
The blast comes amid similarly unexplained kabooms killing nuclear scientists in Tehran and, just weeks earlier, an Iranian arms depot thought to contain missiles capable of reaching Israel. But one reason Hezbullies might hesitate to speak of its incident, Silverstein told Ma'an, is because the location of its alleged arms depot was south of the Litani river, in direct violation of a UN ceasefire resolution.