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JERUSALEM – For the past three months, Israeli ground troops fighting in the war-weary Gaza Strip have sent almost daily letters and pictures of tunnel shafts or underground complexes, including weapons distribution points or bunkers, discovered beneath homes, schools, etc. mosques and hospitals.
In some cases, the tunnels are simple labyrinths that allow Hamas militants to ambush Israeli soldiers. In other cases, the shafts are huge, elaborate structures with elevators, electricity and complete ventilation systems.
Some are even equipped with bedrooms, bathrooms and dining rooms, as well as command centers for Hamas to carry out its ongoing military operation against Israel. At one of these command centers, the IDF discovered a video showing Hamas Southern Brigade commander Mohammed Sinwar, brother of the group's top leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, driving a car through a wide underground passage.
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According to Israeli military estimates shared with Fox News Digital, Hamas, the Islamic terror group that sparked the war with Israel — and ruled Gaza for the past 16 years — has spent tens of millions of dollars on planning, excavation and cementing an entire underground system that rivals the London Underground or the Paris Metro.
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Israeli soldiers on Dec. 15 in a tunnel that the military said Hamas terrorists used to attack the Erez border crossing in the northern Gaza Strip. (AP/Ariel Schalit)
A report sent Thursday by IDF troops said Hamas likely “used more than 6,000 tons of concrete and 1,800 tons of metal to build hundreds of kilometers of underground infrastructure.”
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While the existence of what Israelis call the “Gaza Metro” and what Palestinians call “lower Gaza” has been widely known for years, and Hamas leaders even boast about it, the question remains as to how it would happen in one of the nation's most important metropolises World Happens In poverty-stricken areas, most of which rely on aid from UN agencies and regional and Western powers, the terrorist group had the financial resources to invest in such a complex and extensive terror tunnel network.
“I don’t know if anyone knows exactly how much money Hamas spent building this tunnel system,” Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, president of Shurat HaDin, the Israel Law Center, told Fox News Digital.
Darshan-Leitner, whose 2017 book “Harpoon” delves into how terrorist groups including Hamas find funding, said she doesn't believe that at this point even the IDF understands the extent of Hamas's underground capital understand.
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken shakes hands with Qatar's Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani after their meeting and press conference in Doha, October 13, 2023. (Karim Jaafar/AFP via Getty Images))
“Every day they are surprised to find another tunnel; they are surprised at its length, its complexity, how many floors it has, how wide it is. I don’t think they have the whole picture yet,” she said.
She added that building such an elaborate system likely would have cost “tens of millions of dollars, if not more.” The question is, where did the money come from?
As a government body in the Gaza Strip, Darshan-Leitner said that much of Hamas's funds are collected from Gaza's 2.2 million residents through normal taxes, although aid agencies such as the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees, UNRWA; the Palestinian Authority, which governs Palestinians in the West Bank; and regional powers such as Qatar provided important humanitarian services or built key infrastructure projects in the coastal enclave.
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A man walks in front of the UN relief agency building as UNRWA staff goes on strike, demanding a salary increase due to the high cost of living in Gaza City, Gaza, January 30, 2023. (Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“Hamas took taxes from its residents and made others pay for everything that it was supposed to take care of as a government,” said Darshan-Leitner. She described how, for much of the past two decades, Qatar has supplied oil and funded humanitarian projects, the Palestinian Authority has covered the costs of electricity, water, health and education, while UNRWA has taken care of a variety of tasks, including with US funding Need for around 75% of the population who are considered refugees.
“Hamas doesn't have to pay a cent for the population. Everything is done by others,” she said. “This allows them to use their money for military purposes.”
UNRWA communications director Juliette Touma told Fox News Digital the agency had no knowledge that its activities, which she said were ordered by the UN General Assembly, allowed Hamas the freedom to build the tunnels.
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“We are a United Nations humanitarian agency,” she said. “We provide humanitarian assistance to people that has been verified and verified by UNRWA staff. There is no third party.”
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Two of the rooms were found in the tunnel in Khan Younis, according to the IDF. (IDF)
However, Hamas leaders have admitted that they have taken advantage of the fact that the UN and others are caring for civilians to build a vast network of tunnels under the enclave. In a recent interview, Qatar-based Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouk said the reason Hamas did not build bomb shelters for the people of Gaza, only tunnels where Hamas fighters could hide and fight, was because It is the responsibility of the United Nations to “protect” the majority of Gaza’s population. Population.
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However, funding the tunnel project from excessive taxes and minimal government responsibility accounts for only a small portion of Hamas' terror revenue, Dr. Ronnie Shaked, a Palestinian affairs researcher at Hebrew University's Truman Institute, told Fox News Digital.
He said the U.S.-designated terror group, like other Islamic organizations in the region, was closely linked to Iran and secretly received millions of dollars a year as well as weapons and military training from Tehran.
“This is all part of an Iranian doctrine,” said Shaked, a former senior correspondent and commentator on Palestinian affairs for the popular Hebrew daily Yedioth Aharanoth and author of a book examining the rise of Hamas in Palestinian society.
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He said Hamas not only invested billions of dollars in building the tunnels, but also expended enormous manpower and effort to build an underground city where top Hamas leaders have been hiding for nearly 100 days.
The entrance to what the Israeli military says is the shaft of an underground Hamas tunnel exposed during Israel's ground operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip on December 3, 2023. (Israeli Defense Forces/Handout via Portal)
“To build a tunnel about 400 km (250 miles) long over 15 years requires millions of dollars. “It also takes tools and tens of thousands of workers to dig and find ways to remove all the sand and dust from the tunnels,” he said. “Then there’s the electrical system, the ventilation system and the specialized machinery required to build the whole thing.”
Shaked said that planning and mapping such tunnels in a coastal area like the Gaza Strip would also have required world-class engineers who could cope with the unique topography and proximity to the sea, as well as designers who would design complex routes beneath the densely populated enclave.
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According to the former journalist, Hamas' tunnel project began in the early 2000s with underground passages used to smuggle goods from Egypt into the enclave. The terror group quickly moved to attacks on tunnels under the border with Israel, most notably used in 2006 when Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was attacked and kidnapped back to Gaza. At the same time, Hamas also began building its complex network of tunnels under the homes, schools and medical centers of its own people.
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Mohammad Sinwar in a car in a Hamas terror tunnel near the Erez border crossing in the Gaza Strip. (IDF Spokesperson Unit)
While much of the covert funding came from Iran, Shaked also noted that Qatar has also been directly involved in sending millions of dollars to the Gaza Strip over the years. In the early days, much of the money arrived in suitcases filled with cash, which were initially smuggled into Gaza via Egypt. But later, after a special Mossad unit tasked with tracking and thwarting the flow of money to Hamas was disbanded, it was added under a special agreement with Israel.
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As of 2018, Qatar's special envoy to Gaza, Mohammed Al Emadi, was allowed to enter the Gaza Strip and hand over millions of dollars in cash for humanitarian projects. Now it appears that the money has also flowed directly into the hands of Hamas.
“Instead of fighting terrorist financing, Israel has in recent years begun to allow funds to flow into the Gaza Strip, including the possibility of Qatar passing the money directly to Hamas,” Darshan-Leitner said. She described an official Israeli policy aimed at keeping the Palestinian leadership – Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank – divided, thereby preventing the creation of a unified Palestinian state.
“Israel also thought that if it gave money to Hamas and allowed Palestinian workers to enter Israel – if it gave the people of Gaza even a little bit more quality of life – then there would be no reason to terrorize Israel Reason to terrorize Israel,” she said.
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A Hamas (Israeli Defense Forces) tunnel
That plan backfired on October 7, when thousands of highly trained Hamas terrorists stormed across the border and massacred about 1,200 Israelis at military bases, their homes and at a music festival in the area. That attack sparked the current war, and now Israeli forces are working hard to dismantle Hamas's underground terror threat and locate more than 130 Israeli citizens it believes are being held hostage in the tunnels.
Brig. General (retired) Yaakov Nagel, Israel's former acting national security adviser and now a senior research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Hamas had built “an entire city beneath a city.”
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“We knew about the tunnels, but we didn’t know how wide, deep or long they were,” he said. “People estimated it was about 200 kilometers [125 miles]but it now looks like it's thousands of kilometers.
“In some places there are three layers of tunnels. And in other places it’s wide enough to drive a Jeep,” Nagel said. He noted that it was clear that much of the Qatari money intended to help civilians in the Gaza Strip rebuild after an earlier round of fighting in 2014 “went into the terrorist group's programs, its tunnels, its rockets, its weapons production facilities and went into the pockets of corrupt leaders.
An infographic created by the Israel Defense Forces shows where Hamas has set up a command center beneath Al-Shifa Hospital, according to officials. (Israeli Defense Forces)
Before Oct. 7, he said, the military focused only on destroying the tunnels that crossed the border into Israeli territory. After the 2014 war – and mass border protests in Gaza in 2018 – Israel expanded its border defense system, investing $1 billion in an underground barrier to block those tunnels and developing new above-ground intelligence technology to monitor, what happened on the other side.
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“Unfortunately, we now know it was a mistake because it forced them to attack the weakest part of our defense, the one that relied solely on technology,” Nagel said. “We had the intelligence, but we didn’t fully understand or digest it. So when 3,000 terrorists with heavy machinery entered Israel in 33 locations along the border, there weren't enough people on our side of the border to physically stop them.”
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The IDF's Yahalom unit is part of its Combat Engineering Corps, which specializes in underground warfare. (IDF Spokesperson Unit)
The surprise attack and now the surprises revealed by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip are one of the reasons, he said, that Israel is pushing for greater control over the Gaza Strip once the war is over.
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“What we have to do now is so big, and it will be a lot of work to dismantle everything,” Nagel said. “If Israel is not in it in the future, it cannot control what happens. And that’s why Israel is in favor of having stronger control over Gaza the day after the war – so that we don’t have any further surprises.”