Israel Blows Up Hezbollah Tunnel as Lebanon Truce Cracks

For Belgrade, which has spent two years trying to balance its Western partners against its own ties to Tehran and the Arab world, every fresh escalation in the Levant is not a distant story but direct pressure on oil prices, on migration flows toward Europe, and on an already crowded diplomatic agenda in which Serbia works hard to offend no one. That is why Israel’s June 28 announcement that it had destroyed Hezbollah’s underground infrastructure in southern Lebanon is more than a local military incident.

The Israeli military said it had demolished a roughly 200-meter tunnel in the village of Majdal Zoun, where, according to the army, weapons and shafts for launching rockets and drones were found. The operation was carried out from inside, since the underground system could not be destroyed from the air. Washington, the Israeli side says, was informed in advance. The message is twofold: Israel is showing that it controls the ground beyond the official line of separation, and that it has no intention of leaving the belt it calls a security zone.

Why did one tunnel strike at the core of the talks?

The timing is what makes this episode dangerous. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced an Israel-Lebanon framework on June 26, presented as the basis for lasting peace and security along Israel’s northern border. Hezbollah rejected that framework, demanding a full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanese territory before any discussion of disarmament. That opened a gap neither side is currently trying to bridge.

The Israeli position, as relayed from the prime minister’s office, amounts to this: the army stays in southern Lebanon until the Hezbollah threat is removed, with no announced withdrawal date. The group, for its part, reads that presence as occupation and as proof that any American framework is biased from the start. Destroying the tunnel in the middle of this dispute looks like a deliberate show of force that strips negotiators of room for concessions. When one side demolishes the other’s infrastructure while a mediator offers a peace document, the document loses weight.

Iran pulls its hand back from the table

The most far-reaching consequence lies not in Lebanon but in Switzerland. Iran, Hezbollah’s key patron, has already postponed the nuclear talks that were meant to be held on neutral ground over the very tensions surrounding Lebanon. Tehran is using its withdrawal from the talks as leverage: as long as Israel holds positions in southern Lebanon, Iranian diplomacy has no incentive to make concessions on uranium enrichment. In this way two seemingly separate crises, the border belt and the nuclear file, are tied into a single knot.

For European capitals this is the worst possible scenario. Brussels had counted on a renewed nuclear deal to calm the region and open space for easing the sanctions regime against Tehran, which would indirectly ease the continent’s energy math as well. Instead, a single tunnel in a Lebanese village sends the talks back to square one. The EU’s High Representative currently has no mechanism to force either side back to the table, and an American framework, once rejected, can hardly be recycled without new guarantees.

Serbia remains a spectator in all of this, holding an expensive ticket. Rising oil prices driven by Middle East instability hit the budget and consumers more directly than most news from that part of the world, and every new escalation narrows the room for Serbian foreign policy to maneuver between Washington, Brussels and partners Belgrade does not want to lose. The question that stays open is this: can lasting peace exist in southern Lebanon at all while one side demolishes and the other refuses to talk until it withdraws?