The Deadly Hamas Network of Tunnels

"[Hamas] built this underground city to operate out of our sight. These tunnels will become death traps in the next war. My advice to them is, stay out of the tunnels."

"In officer-training courses, commanders are taught to make decisions on the battlefield based on the situation at hand -- to go left or right, forwards or backwards. But if  you dig a tunnel, once you enter it, you can only move in one direction. You can only decide to go forwards or not to go forward. The route is set."

"And I'm telling them, do not go in. Those who enter tunnels will not come out. The tunnels will either collapse with the people inside, or they will collapse empty."

IDF Southern Command, 2017

Israeli troops gather at Gaza border before entering, 23 October, AFP/Getty

It was in 2004 that the Israel Defense Forces first became aware of the Hamas tunnel threats, when the 'military wing' of the Islamist movement began digging tunnels directly beneath IDF positions within Gaza, then blowing them up. Hard not to notice under those circumstances. The IDF Engineering Corps was then prompted to set up a tunnels team to operate under the command of the Gaza Division.

Since then the capacity of Israel to map out what has been known as the Gaza "metro" has improved substantially, at the very same period when the underground city comprised of a vast network of tunnels has grown in leaps and bounds. There was enough cement entering Gaza between 2014 and 2019 to build tunnels whose total cement use would be sufficient to erect sixteen of Dubai's Burj Khalifa skyscrapers; the tallest building in the world 16 times over.

 

2016 photo showing tunnel exit from the Israeli side. Jack Guez, AFP/Getty

 

Diggers made rapid progress, given the soft sandstone comprising Gaza's geology during the peak days of tunnel-building. These are sophisticated tunnels, comparable to the subway systems in technologically advanced and wealthy world metropolisis, complete with rails, electricity, ventilation, communication lines and even oxygen tanks -- the latter sent to Gaza for humanitarian use in hospitals.

The tunnel network and bunkers are estimated to comprise hundreds of kilometres in length, embedded in heavily-populated civilian areas. They have emerged as a defining feature of the terrorist group's ease in moving their operatives and weapons beneath ground in the Gaza Strip, enabling the terrorists to launch strikes while remaining out of the bombsights of the Israel Air Force. Bomb a tunnel and you bomb a civilian site as well; another trademark of Hamas.

 

Israeli army officer tours journalists through a Hamas tunnel 2014, Jack Guez/AFP

 

The tunnels provide hiding places for Hamas operatives and their commanders. Of late, they are also where Hamas keeps the valuable hostages; Israeli infants to teens, soldiers, women and the elderly and infirm they captured and took as bartering assets into Gaza. And now, the critical mission of the Israel Defense Forces by air bombardment and ground operations is the destruction of the underground city while maintaining sensitivity to the hoped-for rescue of the Israeli abductees.

Aerial bombardment of the tunnels, after warning residents above to evacuate has been taking place for weeks. Hundreds of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza, tunnels included, were struck by the Israel Air Force on several days of the past week. The schematic for the attacks represent the fruit of intelligence gathering in locating tunnels and their shafts then converting data to air power.

For advancing ground troops committed to destroying Hamas and its apparatus as an ongoing deathly threat to Israel, the threat of the tunnels cannot be minimized. Given that the tunnels allow terrorists to pop up, fire, then vanish back underground in hit-and-run techniques. Israel has tunnel-detection capabilities including teams of specialists who sift through intelligence to map the network. 

Once the full ground offensive is underway specialized units from the IDF Engineering Corps and its elite Yahalom commando unit will spearhead the mission with the use of special explosives, bulldozers and robots to destroy the tunnels and shafts. And then there is the issue of fuel availability in Gaza rendering entire areas of the underground structures uninhabitable for lack of fuel when electricity and air ventilation in the tunnels will force operatives and their leaders to abandon these subterranean havens.

 

A black cloud of smoke rises from Gaza, 29 October, AfP/Gaza