The Israel Defense Forces placed a camera into Hezbollah’s secret cross-border attack tunnel before sunrise on Dec. 4. They pushed it into the Lebanese side, under the Blue Line that separates the two countries. At dawn, two Hezbollah operatives reached the spot on their morning rounds. In the video disseminated by the IDF on Tuesday evening, one of the operatives is seen approaching the camera with suspicion. He stuck his nose in its direction and started to sniff around until something exploded in his face and he ran back the way he'd come.

This was surely the moment Hezbollah understood that Israel is on its way to neutralizing the terror group’s most important asset in its attack option to conquer Israeli localities in the Galilee in their next confrontation. Israel's robotic camera scored a small but qualitative victory in the battle for hearts and minds between Israel and Hezbollah. The video went viral in seconds, but the war itself has not been won. The decisive rounds are still ahead of us and they are not connected to tunnels but to the precision missile project and the direct flights that have begun to land in Beirut’s international airport, straight from the Revolutionary Guard Corps of Tehran.

Still, a 12-year nightmare is set to be resolved over the coming weeks. Ever since the end of the Second Lebanon War in August 2006, Israel’s northern residents living near the border have been complaining of digging sounds at night from the Lebanese side or from the depths of the earth. And despite the IDF’s extensive experience with Hamas' tunnels in Gaza, the army was not able to locate the tunnels in the north for many years. The stony ground makes digging very difficult, so the Israelis assumed that Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hasssan Nasrallah would not invest resources in copying Hamas’ methods in what Israel calls the "underground domain."

It turns out that this assumption was wrong. The unique Israeli technology for identifying tunnels that works so successfully on the southern front made the difference, together with intelligence work on what goes on behind the other side of the border fence. It turns out that there is synergy between Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel used to say that Hamas tries to imitate Hezbollah and establish a Hezbollah-based model in Gaza. Now it turns out that Hezbollah has learned from Hamas with regard to opening a subterranean front against Israel.