ISRAEL FEARS TUNNEL WAR BY HAMAS
Government devotes engineering, intelligence to foil threat that could be building underground
The last Gaza war began in the air when Hamas militants fired rockets at Israel. Israelis living next door to the Palestinian territory see worrisome signs that the next war will be waged underground.
They live above ground zero: Hamas appears to be building tunnels under their feet that could be used to smuggle fighters into Israel to kill or kidnap residents.
In response, the Israeli government is stepping up efforts — and developing secret high-tech methods — to detect and destroy the labyrinth of tunnels Hamas builds to circumvent a tight embargo that Israel and Egypt imposed around Gaza.
Israel is “concentrating considerable engineering and intelligence efforts to combat this threat,” Israeli military chief Gadi Eizenkot said Tuesday in Herzliya. The army notified Kibbutz Nir Am residents that soldiers are on alert in the case of a surprise tunnel attack.
Such assurances aren’t calming the nerves of this community a little more than a mile from the Gaza border where several tunnels were discovered and destroyed during the war in 2014.
“This conflict has reached a point where you’re fighting not another army but terrorism, which ... makes all public spaces into a battlefield,” said Betty Gavri, an insurance agent who lives on the kibbutz.
Hamas claims it has built more than 50 tunnels in the past 18 months, but Israel rejects that as an exaggeration. The Israeli army noted Hamas took more than four years to dig the 32 tunnels discovered in 2014.
A military assessment published Wednesday in the Yediot
Ahronot newspaper said more than 1,000 Gazan diggers pro- gress at roughly 160 feet per week on one long, high-quality tunnel. The tunnel is being constructed on top of smaller tunnel systems estimated to be 6 feet high, 5 feet wide and 80 feet deep, the report said.
After winter rains last month caused tunnels to collapse, killing at least 11 diggers, Hamas — a U.S.-designated terror group governing Gaza — boasted that it has greatly expanded its network of tunnels.
“East of Gaza City, heroes are digging through rock and building tunnels, and to the west, they are experimenting with rockets every day,” Hamas political leader Ismael Hanieyeh said Jan. 29 at a funeral for seven of those killed.
Hamas’ tunnels provide a rare advantage against a vastly superior Israeli military, which de- ployed its Iron Dome defense system to intercept most of the rockets fired in 2014 by the militants. Some tunnels have electricity and telephone lines, but most are small and require only manpower and persistence, both of which are abundant in Gaza. The tunnels have been virtually impossible to detect from afar by Israeli technology.
A long-awaited breakthrough may be near. The Defense Ministry received a $120 million grant from the United States this month to develop an underground defense system able to detect the digging of tunnels dozens of yards below ground, according to Israeli media. The Financial
Times reported that two Israeli security companies are racing to complete the so-called underground Iron Dome.
Much like the original Iron Dome anti-missile system, an underground equivalent could represent a major military defeat for Hamas and a big psychological boost for Israelis.
Since its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Israel has destroyed Hamas tunnels only to see new ones built.
The most notable incident occurred in 2006, when a team of Palestinian fighters exited a tunnel on the Gaza border, killed two soldiers and abducted a third, Gilad Shalit. Shalit was held captive for five years before he was released in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including Yehiya Sanwar, who has become a dominant figure in Hamas’ tunnel building initiative.
“Israel’s only short-term option is to go into Gaza to destroy the tunnels, as was done in the 2014 war, which was enormously costly in terms of casualties and also politically,” said Eado Hecht, a military doctrine researcher who testified last year before a United Nations commission examining the Gaza war. “But that does not actually prevent the tunnels from being rebuilt.”
“This conflict has reached a point where you’re fighting not another army but terrorism, which ... makes all public spaces into a battlefield.” Betty Gavri, an insurance agent