Jose Lev Alvarez Gomez
The views expressed herein are solely mine.

UNIFIL: Hezbollah’s UN Spy Network

UN chief Antonio Guterres walks past an honor guard of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) at the peacekeeping force's headquarters in southern Lebanon's Naqura, near the Israeli border, January 17, 2025. (Pascual Gorriz / UNIFIL / AFP)

Let’s be honest: UNIFIL does not monitor Hezbollah—it feeds it. Every Israeli movement, every patrol shift, every camera wired along the northern border is logged by blue helmets and funneled—through the joke they call “local coordination”—into the hands of Iran’s $700–900-million-a-year terror army.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s war machine sits in the open—and UNIFIL pretends to be blind.

100,000+ rockets? UNIFIL “cannot verify.”

Bunkers dug under family homes? UNIFIL “sees no violation.”

Precision missiles trucked in from Syria? UNIFIL “lacks evidence.”

Even the terror tunnels Israel revealed in 2018? UNIFIL shrugs with “limited visibility.”

This is not incompetence; it is institutional bias.

Hence, the same UN that branded “Zionism is racism” in Resolution 3379 never woke up one morning as Israel’s protector in southern Lebanon—unlike the South Lebanon Army. Its anti-Israel reflex predates most of the peacekeepers wearing blue helmets today.

And the precedent is clear.

From 1956 to 1967, UN forces in Sinai did not keep the peace—they acted as Nasser’s forward eyes, monitoring Israeli movements and relaying their assessments to Egyptian command.

And when Nasser told them to leave in May 1967, they evaporated in under two days, setting up the battlefield precisely the way Cairo wanted before the Six-Day War.

Fast-forward to Lebanon: same script, new cast.

Today, serious evidence confirms that UNIFIL does nothing to stop Hezbollah from building missile factories inside villages like Bint Jbeil, Aitaroun, and Khiam.

Simultaneously, it has never disarmed a single fighter and has never had the strength to block a single arms convoy.

Meanwhile, IDF data—and even UN audits—show Hezbollah fighters tail UN patrols like shadows, not the reverse.

But if the IDF shifts a camera pole by five meters? UNIFIL rushes to write it up.

This is not peacekeeping; it is strategic malpractice that lets a terror army gear up for its next war beneath an international shield.

Here is the blunt truth: Hezbollah gets protection. Israel gets surveillance. And the UN dares to call that “balance.”

If the world wants stability on the Lebanese front, it needs less blue-helmet pageantry and more honesty: only the IDF can stop Hezbollah. UNIFIL merely helps it aim.

About the Author
Jose Lev Alvarez is an American-Israeli scholar specializing in Middle Eastern security policy. A multilingual veteran of both the IDF Special Forces and the U.S. Army, he holds a B.S. in Neuroscience with a Minor in Israel Studies from American University, three master’s degrees (international geostrategy, applied economics, and intelligence studies), and a medical degree. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in Intelligence and Global Security in the Washington, D.C. area. In addition to blogging for the Times of Israel, he contributes to the Washington Examiner, is a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum, and regularly provides geopolitical analysis on Latin American television networks.
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