Israel controls the skies over Gaza and can use the air or ground to level any building it deems a legitimate target. Their troops, supported by tanks, are advancing into Gaza City. As they advance through the rubble, they discover another battlefield: the vast network of concrete, reinforced tunnels built by Hamas.
“You’re looking at a city beneath this city,” said John Spencer of the Modern War Institute at West Point, “from 15 feet underground to 200 feet, 20 to 30 stories underground.”
A network of concrete-reinforced tunnels built by Hamas stretches an estimated 300 miles beneath the Gaza Strip, complicating the military’s efforts to combat the terrorists. CBS News
If Israel really wants to destroy Hamas, it needs to get into these tunnels, Spencer said. “Nothing created for surface combat works,” he said. “You can’t see down there. You can’t navigate, you can’t shoot. It’s literally the worst place a soldier would ever want to go.”
It is in this subterranean terrain that Israel’s final battle with Hamas could be fought.
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American special forces train in Colorado at a two-mile-long tunnel complex. The Hamas tunnel network under Gaza is believed to stretch 300 miles.
“These are the dirty, dark and dangerous things we don’t want people doing,” said Sean Humbert of the University of Colorado at Boulder. He led a team of graduate students in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, a Pentagon competition to develop technologies for use on this extraterrestrial battlefield.
“They don’t have GPS,” Humbert said. “Plus, communication is very difficult in such environments, so communication signals don’t propagate through the rock down here.”
Before humans go in, an autonomous robot explores the terrain, navigates using lasers (even when it’s pitch black) and operates independently, without orders from the base camp. “The robot creates the map, figures out where it is on the map, and then tries its best to expand the map and explore the places we haven’t been yet,” Humbert said.
Examples of MARBLE (Multi-Agent Autonomy with Radar-Based Localization for Exploration) robots deployed in a tunnel complex in Colorado. CBS News
On this terrain, the robot can cover about a kilometer in an hour and stops when it detects obstacles. “It will temporarily stop, plan a new path around those obstacles and then implement that path,” Humbert said.
The robot is a marvel of engineering, but when it comes to underground warfare, it has one glaring weakness: it’s an evasive maneuver for anyone with a weapon. “It would,” Humbert said, “but the point of using these systems instead of people is that they are expendable.”
Hamas fighters use the tunnels to survive bombing raids and set ambushes. The tunnels are their best chance of survival against the overwhelming firepower of the Israeli forces.
Spencer said: “Hamas built the tunnel systems to give Hamas time to slow down the IDF and so that the international community could say that the damage being done on the surface is too great for the world to understand.” could endure and stop. And Hamas lives to fight another day.”
In the past, Israel has simply sealed off the tunnels it has discovered, but that won’t work this time because hostages are almost certainly being held there. 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz was one of them. After her release, she described being forced through a vast network of tunnels beneath Gaza: “It looks like a spider web.”
Martin asked Spencer: “How does the likelihood of hostages being held in these tunnels change the way Israel would attack them?”
“It takes away my ability to say, ‘Any tunnel I find, I can destroy them all,'” he replied.
“Do the Israelis have no choice but to enter at least some of these tunnels?”
“There will be many situations where an IDF system or soldiers will have to enter the tunnels, yes,” Spencer said.
“How does the fight change when you crawl into that tunnel?”
“It’s a game-changer,” Spencer said. “All your normal tactics, options, all of that changes. The environment can be more challenging than the actual enemy.”
When asked which side had the advantage in the war because of the tunnels, Spencer replied, “Hamas has the advantage because they built such large tunnels, and they will use them to attack, defend, etc. to preserve time.” win.”
The Israelis have robots and specially trained tunnel units. But it could be more than any robot can do.
CBS News
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Story produced by Mary Walsh. Editor: Steven Tyler.
See also:
Israel and Hamas at war
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