Israel finds tunnel big enough to drive Hamas leader’s car through

ISRAELI forces reportedly discovered a tunnel wide enough for a Hamas leader to drive his car down underneath Gaza.

The passage was found as troops unearthed more of the terror group’s subterranean network in recent weeks, The New York Times reported.

Until last month, the tunnels were assessed to stretch for some 250 miles beneath Gaza. But senior Israeli defence officials cited by the newspaper said estimates had been revised upwards in light of recent discoveries, with the network now thought to be between 350 and 450 miles in length.

One tunnel “stretched nearly three football fields long and was hidden beneath a hospital,” The New York Times reported.

Another, the newspaper said, “was wide enough for a top Hamas official to drive a car inside”.

Destroying the underground network has been one of Israel’s key aims of the war. An official told The New York Times that it could take years to destroy the system.

However, senior military officers told The Economist that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would not be able to destroy the entirety of the network.

Doing so would require each tunnel to be mapped, checked for hostages and made irreparable.

Recent attempts to destroy the network by flooding it with seawater failed.

The IDF has previously said that it has yet to destroy half of Gaza’s tunnels.

Military leaders have been surprised by the tunnels’ quality and depth, according to The New York Times.

Two officials cited by the newspaper assessed that there were nearly 5,700 shafts leading down into the network.

Daphné Richemond-barak, a tunnel warfare expert at Reichman University in Israel, said Israel’s stated goal of eradicating Hamas was dependent on destroying the tunnels.

“If you want to destroy the leadership and arsenal of Hamas, you have to destroy the tunnels,” he told The New

York Times. “It’s become connected to every part of the military missions.”

Israelis who were held hostage by Hamas in the wake of the group’s Oct 7 attack have spoken about the spiderweb-like structures stretching beneath Gaza after being freed.

Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, told reporters in October: “We went underground and walked for kilometres in wet tunnels, for two or three hours, in a spider’s web of tunnels.”