Why I am not alarmed about Hezbollah’s videoclip of my home in Haifa

Hezbollah published a nine-minute videoclip of drone images taken over Haifa, confirmed as such by the IDF. The images are sharp and anyone familiar with the city and its environs can easily pick out the streets, the shopping centers, the homes, and perhaps some people will even recognize their cars driving from somewhere to somewhere as our enemy’s little camera was catching them on its microSD card.

Rambam Hospital, the navy base, ships in the harbour, the container docks, the chemicals storage facility, power plant, oil tanks, and more are clearly identifiable.

My own apartment building has a bit-part in this film.

But this does not disturb me. It’s just another instance of psychological terrorism. After all, everything in this film is easily available to anyone with access to Google Maps (which is anyone with Internet). Let me give you two examples.

I have no doubt that Hezbollah (Iranian) technology is sufficiently sophistocated to be able to provide a sharper close-up image than what is available to the civilian public whether by Google Maps or some other platform available to militaries without having to send drones over.

What alarms me more

than them having videos of my city is the very fact that Hezbollah was able to send a drone from Lebanon and that drone got back “home” unscathed.

We do not know when this video was taken but, whenever it was, the drone did not set off sirens sending us to our shelters. It did not even trigger an interceptor that could knock it out of the sky anywhere along its path between Lebanon and Haifa. What if that drone carried explosives and not cameras?

I have heard booms of interceptions over the bay near where I live when no siren ever went off because the drone was apparently headed for the water and not land. And there was a siren not long ago, that the official report claims was a false alarm. I do not believe that. I believe they shot down a drone, maybe more than one because, while I only heard one boom, others in another part of town heard two.

Why would they say it was a false alarm if it was not? Perhaps because we have been told that targetting Haifa (and Tzfat) would constitute crossing a red line that our military would interpret as a declaration of war. When Tzfat was targetted and missiles landed near the city just last week, however, the red line declaration was ignored. When residents of Nahariya and Acco were sent scurrying for shelter, it was not considered a declaration of war. But Haifa? The third largest city in the country? Surely that must be a really firm red line, no? Not yet, I suppose. The army is not yet ready for the war that will surely come. Just not yet.

But please tell me that the warning systems have been upgraded so that they can detect ALL drones headed our way and take care of them before they blow us up. Or that they can destroy the launch sites before thousands of these little buzzing flying under the radar objects can be sent on their way.

If you are interested, here is the complete Hezbollah video as released to us.