‘Very dangerous’: Israel faces months-long marketing campaign in opposition to Hamas Gaza tunnels | Israeli-Palestinian Battle Information

International Courant

As Israeli forces advance additional into northern Gaza, they’re additionally aiming deeper. Their goal, a labyrinth of tunnels that the Palestinian armed group Hamas has painstakingly constructed over time to construct the core system of its operations.

However whereas the Israeli military confronted few obstacles in storming the besieged strip for greater than a month, specialists recommend that eliminating the underground spider net of tunnels may pose a lot better challenges to the military.

“It might be a gradual, arduous, months-long process to push them again utterly, and possibly the digging will proceed because the (Israeli navy) tries,” mentioned Richard Outzen, non-resident senior fellow on the Atlantic Council in Turkey and senior fellow on the Jamestown Basis, a protection coverage assume tank.

Though few know the total extent of what some Israeli officers name the “subway,” the tunnels are believed to cross your complete enclave for tons of of kilometers, with specialists estimating a depth between a spread of 15 to 60 meters (50 to 200 ft). . In 2021, the Israeli navy mentioned there have been 300 km of tunnels operating underneath the strip.

A few of these are outfitted with oxygen tanks, water pipes and electrical energy lighting. An unique video from Al Jazeera Arabic from 2021 exhibits concrete-reinforced corridors resulting in an underground workplace with a functioning phone line and rooms storing weapons.

The system is believed to have a periphery, with shallower tunnels which might be simpler to destroy from the floor, and a core housing the command facilities, weapons caches, missiles and, extra not too long ago, a number of the roughly 240 Israeli prisoners captured by Hamas. situated. believed to be so. Tunnels enable fighters to hold out shock assaults and transfer rapidly throughout the strip with out Israeli eyes having the ability to observe them.

“One in every of Hamas’s foremost efforts over the previous 17 years has been to dig tunnels that might make them resilient, this was not a sideline,” mentioned Andreas Krieg, affiliate professor at King’s Faculty London’s protection research division. And what works above floor does not work underground. “Israel has the technological benefit in every little thing, however they’re engaged in a low-technology battle the place that aggressive benefit is worn out the second they need to go underground,” he added.

An Israeli military officer provides journalists a tour of a tunnel reportedly utilized by Palestinian fighters for cross-border assaults, on the Israel-Gaza border, July 25, 2014 (File: Jack Guez/AP)

The present system is the results of greater than 20 years of labor, beginning within the Nineteen Eighties, when tunnels had been passageways used to smuggle items out of Egypt, says Joel Roskin, a geomorphologist at Bar-Ilan College in Ramat Gan, Israel . has lengthy been investigating tunnels in Gaza.

Farmers within the space used to dig wells to entry underground water for his or her fields – a data that was then utilized to dig deeper for tunnels. The soil of the coastal strip was simple to domesticate. “It is not rock, however sediment made from sand and clay. It goes a number of meters deep, so it is simple to dig,” Roskin mentioned.

On the time, tunnels had been primarily non-public makes an attempt to smuggle items. The primary signal that they had been additionally being utilized by armed teams was in 2001 when an Israeli navy submit was blown up with an explosive coming from underground. However it was 5 years later that the mysterious tunnels burst into Israeli public consciousness when Palestinian fighters emerged from a shaft and kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

After Hamas took full management of the Gaza Strip in 2007, gained elections and kicked out rival Fatah celebration after violent clashes, Israel imposed a suffocating blockade. Tunnels have turn into the one method to break the siege and get meals, items, weapons and reportedly even lions into Gaza. Their numbers unfold.

“Hamas began constructing a metropolis underneath the town, understanding that in the event that they began an armed resistance, they might have been capable of retaliate and so they may have accomplished it underground,” Krieg mentioned.

Palestinian smugglers convey sheep by way of a smuggling tunnel from Egypt to the Gaza Strip within the Rafah refugee camp, within the south of the Gaza Strip (File: Eyad Baba/AP)

Since October 7, when Hamas fighters entered southern Israel and killed 1,200 individuals, the Israeli military has retaliated by bombing Gaza. In accordance with the Palestinian Ministry of Well being, Israeli airstrikes have killed greater than 11,000 individuals, greater than a 3rd of whom are kids. Central to the Israeli military’s argument for concentrating on the civilian and medical infrastructure, the place 1000’s of individuals are sheltering, is the presence of underground tunnels the place Hamas fighters function. The armed group and medics deny these accusations.

Whether or not or not Palestinian fighters dug tunnels underneath civilian infrastructure, human rights teams have accused Israel of failing to take satisfactory precautions to stop civilian deaths and violating worldwide regulation.

On the navy entrance, airstrikes can’t attain deep sufficient to destroy the core of the tunnels, specialists say. For them, the Israeli military must take management of all entrances and exits – an especially prolonged and harmful operation. Even when an space has been meticulously cleared, a tunnel shaft can stay hidden behind enemy traces, permitting Palestinian fighters to assault Israeli troopers from behind.

“It’s a course of that takes numerous time and could be very dangerous,” Krieg mentioned. Different choices used previously embrace pouring moist cement or sewage, as Egypt did alongside the border in 2013, into tunnels. However these methods wouldn’t work if the tunnels had a number of entrances and exits.

Palestinians seek for victims as they examine the positioning of an Israeli assault on a home in Rafah within the southern Gaza Strip (Hatem Khaled/Reuters)

Coming into tunnels additionally poses challenges, and Israel will attempt to keep away from it until strictly essential, analysts mentioned. Oxygen is scarce, if not absent. Visibility is proscribed. And troopers are weak to ambushes and booby traps.

Outzen, who can also be a former colonel within the U.S. Military, believes the navy will possible use a mixed strategy.

“Raids into sure tunnels thought of priceless due to hostages or militant management, brute power bombings the place the tunnels are near the floor, and demolition operations the place technical groups with demolition specialists (explosive and mechanical) are deployed to enter central tunnels landfill the place attainable,” he mentioned.

However such operations take time, a useful resource that some consider Israel is rapidly depleting. Stress is mounting on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s authorities to conform to a ceasefire as pictures of the catastrophic humanitarian state of affairs in Gaza obtain worldwide condemnation.

Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US and former deputy minister, mentioned at a convention this week that Israel has a time bomb that’s “ticking quickly.”

“If the navy thinks it has infinite carte blanche to finish this operation, I might say no.”

‘Very dangerous’: Israel faces months-long marketing campaign in opposition to Hamas Gaza tunnels | Israeli-Palestinian Battle Information

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