On Feb. 18, the French newspaper Liberation shared a report on alleged Hezbollah tunnels in Jbeil, conducted by the Israeli Alma Research and Education Center, sparking discussions on Lebanese social media.
Who is ‘Alma’?
In 2014, Sarit Zehavi retired as an officer in the Israeli army’s Northern Command after a 15-year career in military intelligence, but her retirement didn't keep her from working against Hezbollah. In a 2019 interview with the Israeli magazine Tablet, she expressed her readiness to "kill Nasrallah with my own hands," should the party’s secretary-general prevent her son's Bar Mitzvah.
Her determination led her to establish the Alma Research and Education Center in 2014, as noted on her LinkedIn page and the website's domain registration date.
In 2017, the Alma project was launched under the auspices of the Galilee Foundation, which funds development projects in northern Israel. Among the attendees was Sivan Yechieli, a member of another Israeli intelligence think tank, Confrontation Line. Yechieli is better known for denying Palestinian residents access to property when he was the mayor of Kfar Vardim, to preserve the town's "secular-Jewish-Zionist nature," according to Haaretz.
In 2021, the center published a report detailing an extensive network of tunnels across Lebanon based on a « secret Hezbollah map found online » by the center's volunteers. The map was originally published on the Lebanese Forces website, a strong opponent of Hezbollah, in 2008, but there is no way to authenticate it.
The report mentions the discovery of actual Hezbollah tunnels at the border in 2018, which the authors use to claim, without substantiation, their presence throughout Lebanon.
Despite their alleged strategic significance, the Israeli army has not reported the destruction of any of the alleged tunnels during the past eight months of confrontations with Hezbollah at the border.
Former head of Israeli censorship in the team
The website, available only in English, claims it shares its "deep geopolitical knowledge of the Middle East" with an international audience.
Out of a team of 20 members, nine are Israeli army veterans. Among them are Sima Vaknin Gill, former head of Israeli censorship, and Miri Eisin, former media relations manager for former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2006. The list of members also includes former Israeli intelligence official, Ram Yavne, who held key positions in the Northern Command.
Generally, the center's publications closely follow the official statements of the Israeli army. In an article published the day after Hamas member Saleh al-Arouri was assassinated in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the center attributed his death to an unspecified "explosion."
The alignment with the official Israeli narrative is omnipresent. In a few lines dedicated to Hezbollah's diversion of military equipment intended for the Lebanese Army, no examples are cited.
Dina Arakji, a security researcher in the Middle East, said that "the LAF has, from an American perspective, an excellent track record in terms of traceability of the allocated equipment." Despite the lack of factual data to support its accusations, the Alma Center calls for an end to international aid to the army.
This article originally appeared in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.