Despite Israel’s constant air attacks on Gaza, Hamas has still been able to fire rockets at Israeli cities five days into the fighting. While checking the possibilities, Israel’s intelligence community believes much of the money and material the world gave to the people of Gaza to rebuild after previous wars has been taken by Hamas and reused in establishing the elaborate system of tunnels and bunkers.
The Gaza Strip smuggling tunnels are tunnels across the Gaza–Egypt border, used to bypass the Rafah Border Crossing, which is used for exceptional cases only, when opened at all. The first recorded discovery of a tunnel by Israel was in 1983, after Israel had withdrawn from the Sinai the border, redrawn in 1982 after the Egypt-Israel peace treaty divided Rafah into an Egyptian and a Gazan part. The tunnels used to start from the basements of houses in Rafah on the one side of the border and end in houses in Rafah on the other side.
Hamas’ tunnels have frightened Israeli soldiers and civilians for years. They were weaponized around 2006. More scary fact is that nobody in Israel seems to know how long the tunnels are but they know it’s a big network often euphemistically called “Gaza’s Metro.”
An Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson, in a news report was quoted as saying, “Think of the Gaza Strip as one layer for civilians and then another layer for Hamas. We are trying to get to that second layer that Hamas has built. These aren’t bunkers for Gazan civilians. It’s only for Hamas and other terrorists so that they can continue to fire rockets at Israel, to plan operations, to launch terrorists into Israel.”
Following a conflict in 2021, the IDF said it had destroyed more than 100km of tunnels in air strikes. Hamas on the other hand reportedly claimed that its tunnels stretched 500km and that only 5% were hit.
Dr Daphné Richemond-Barak, an expert on underground warfare who teaches at Reichman University in Israel, shared with a publication, “The tunnels inside Gaza are different because Hamas is using them on a regular basis. They are probably more comfortable to be in for longer periods of time. They are definitely equipped for a longer, sustained presence.”
She also shared that Hamas appears to have “perfected the art” of tunnel building and warfare in recent years, having learned a huge amount by observing the tactics of Syrian rebel fighters in Aleppo and jihadist militants from the Islamic State (IS) group in Mosul.
Checking all these history and background with regard to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. As per reports, it is possible that a cross-border tunnel was used by Hamas militants during last weekend’s attacks in Israel, in which at least 1,300 people were killed, most of them civilians, and more than 150 others were taken as hostages. Also, there were reports that a tunnel exit was discovered near the kibbutz of Kfar Aza, where dozens of civilians were massacred.
