Having passed it around to foreign diplomats as a real thing, and tweeted it on Tuesday with the claim it proved Hezbollah’s “war crimes,” the Israeli military today was forced to admit that a map of “Hezbollah positions” around southern Lebanon was actually totally fabricated by the military itself, and not based on any intelligence.
The tweeted image claimed to have been “declassified,” and was hyped as proving Israel’s massive intelligence-gathering capabilities in southern Lebanon, in anticipation of Israel’s next invasion. Officials also say it was presented to foreign diplomats as proof Hezbollah poses a threat to Israeli territory.
This isn’t the first time the Israeli military made stuff up to hype the Hezbollah “threat.” In 2013 the military published a fake Facebook page which they declared would be what Hezbollah’s Facebook page would look like if they had one.
Officials dismissed complaints about them making things up, insisting that the map was illustrative of the sort of thing Hezbollah might well being doing, and that they put it out to underscore just how little intelligence the world has on Hezbollah’s operations.