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JERUSALEM – The vast underground labyrinth dug by Hamas is so menacing that Israelis have dubbed the structures “terror tunnels” in past battles. This underground world of corridors, weapons caches and escape routes beneath Gaza may now prove even more terrifying.
As Israel’s ground forces encircle Gaza City, both sides could find themselves in a “three-dimensional” urban war – with fighters firing from the roofs of destroyed buildings, from rubble-strewn streets and from underground labyrinths, for example, military analysts said.
All of this could happen in neighborhoods where civilians – and children – still reside.
Israeli officials estimate that there are 1,300 tunnels stretching over 300 miles through the Gaza Strip, which itself is only 25 miles long. The military describes the network as one of the most sophisticated underground networks in the world. It is said that there are underground bunkers beneath hospitals in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian doctors have denied this.
What a ground war in Gaza might look like
Israeli military protocol generally prohibits regular ground troops from entering tunnels because the chance of being killed or captured is too high. The Israelis have seen their soldiers grabbed and dragged into tunnels, so the likely strategy will be to try to destroy them from a distance.
In an interview with The Washington Post last week, senior Hamas leader Ali Baraka, based in Beirut, said that “the fighters are underground, waiting to fight.” He claimed that there were 40,000 militants in the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, and 20,000 in other factions. “You can’t handle 60,000,” he said, shouting at the Israeli military.
Hamas’s corridors, dug with hand tools over decades, are reinforced with precast concrete and feature handcart trams, electric lighting, communication nodes and ventilation fans.
Most are narrow from elbow to elbow and barely big enough for a short man. But some are wide enough for small vehicles. Previous battles suggest that booby traps may be hidden in many tunnels.
There are so many tunnels that Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari calls the subway system the “Gaza Metro.”
These tunnels could allow Hamas fighters to quickly spread over long distances – not just street to street – and to resupply, rearm, evacuate their wounded and escape. The Hamas leadership has stressed that the tunnels are not intended for civilian use as bomb shelters. Hamas insists the network is only for fighters.
Footage taken in 2014 shows people moving through tunnels in Gaza. Israeli officials estimate that there are 1,300 tunnels in the Gaza Strip, stretching over 300 miles. (Video: Portal)
Israeli forces have already engaged in firefights with Hamas fighters emerging from the tunnels. The air force also attacked suspected tunnel sites, targeting Hamas commanders, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.
Mapping the Israeli ground assault in the Gaza Strip
Heavy bombing of the Jabalya refugee camp in recent days left behind huge craters that were likely caused by Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAM, bombs, according to Marc Garlasco, military adviser to the Dutch organization PAX for Peace and a former U.N. war crimes investigator. Using a delayed backup.
“When a 2,000-pound bomb hits the ground, the earth becomes liquid,” Garlasco wrote in a message to The Post. “It’s like an earthquake.” These attacks killed and injured hundreds of civilians living in the area.
In 2014, in the last major ground offensive in Gaza, which lasted 50 days, the Israeli military reported that it had “neutralized” 32 tunnels, 14 of which led to Israel.
These “assault” or “assault” tunnels, dug from the Gaza side toward Israeli territory, were designed by Hamas to launch attacks on Israeli military bases and farming villages along the Gaza border. A key Israeli goal in the 2014 war was the destruction of tunnels.
How Hamas attackers broke through Israel’s Iron Wall
As the world has seen, Hamas did not rely on tunnels to breach the country’s security zone when it invaded Israel on October 7th. Militants crossed Israel’s walls, embankments and fence lines above ground with relative ease, body cameras worn by Hamas operatives showed.
In this invasion, Israel has stated that its goal is to destroy Hamas as a government and military power in Gaza while rescuing the 240 hostages held by Hamas and other militants. The whereabouts of the hostages are unclear, but the IDF believes many are being held in the tunnels.
One of the prisoners, Yocheved Lifshitz, the 83-year-old released by Hamas last week, told a crowd of reporters in Tel Aviv that Palestinian gunmen gave them a ride on the back of a motorcycle “until we reached the tunnels.”
“There we walked for miles underground in the wet soil,” she said, adding that the network of tunnels was “like a spider web – lots and lots of tunnels.”
“We reached a large chamber where about 25 of us were gathered,” she said. They were held there until their release more than two weeks later.
Joel Roskin, a geologist at Bar-Ilan University, said the sandy silt layers deposited in Gaza over the last 500,000 years were perfect for shallow tunnels.
“We are not talking about stone and rock, and simple tools can be used to dig, tools that you cannot hear from above,” he said.
The Rafah border crossing into Egypt was a route to safety for some
Digging water wells for agriculture is an ancient practice in Gaza, Roskin said, and this expertise was used in the 1980s to dig tunnels in Rafah between Gaza and Egypt to facilitate smuggling, a business that Gaza prospered under Hamas after Israel’s withdrawal in 2005.
These smuggling tunnels were large enough to transport fertilizer, livestock, electronics, cement and even dismantled Mercedes-Benz sedans as well as weapons for Hamas.
Later, Hamas undertook a tunneling operation through the Gaza Strip. The underground infrastructure is used for command and control centers, armories, food and fuel depots, weapons depots, and underground missile manufacturing factories.
Ben Milch helped lead a limited strike against the Tunnels in 2014. This summer, the Iowa-born immigrant to Israel was commander of the Combat Engineering Corps in Gaza, where his unit destroyed 15 tunnels.
“In 2014, our goal was to destroy the tunnels leading into Israel – so we didn’t go very far into the Gaza Strip,” he said, estimating that Israeli troops advanced less than two miles into the area.
This war could be very different, he said.
In previous fighting, Milch said, the army used smoke bombs to detect the ventilation shafts of Hamas tunnels, then dug them out with armored excavators and bulldozers and destroyed the tunnels with explosives.
He remembers throwing smoke bombs into the tunnels and seeing plumes of smoke from not just one or two ventilation shafts, but “20, 30, 40” over an area the size of a football field. “So it was clearly interconnected and essentially a maze,” he said.
Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Israel Institute for National Security Studies, said: “We will not penetrate the tunnels themselves; We will not fight in the tunnels, 30, 40 meters underground.”
“I assume that we have some creative means and manners that will allow us to destroy these tunnels on the heads of Hamas terrorists who are hiding in them,” Michael said, declining to comment on the operation to speculate about secret sensors in this area.
There are IDF special forces trained in tunnel warfare. The Israelis have also used robots.
For the Israelis, identifying tunnels relies on gathering information about their locations, as well as sensors and other methods.
Israel has spent a fortune building a hard “obstacle wall,” a kind of underground shield on the periphery of the Gaza Strip. Ground sensors were used to hear shovel noises, find cavities and detect movement. Many of the tools were originally developed for oil and gas exploration.
The challenge, some experts say, is that while these “geo-phones” work well in sterile, quiet environments, they perform less well in a battle with tanks rumbling nearby and guns exploding.
Daphné Richemond-Barak of the International Counterterrorism Institute at Reichman University in Israel said tunnel warfare has always been a challenge, pointing to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.
“But if you now put this into an urban environment where there may be civilians, it becomes almost impossible to accomplish the task,” she said, noting that the overlay of urban and underground terrain creates an “unprecedented level of complexity ” brings with it.
“In some ways it’s exponential,” she added. “Not only is it worse; It’s exponentially more complicated to fight in that environment.”
Israeli military spokesmen say hundreds of underground targets have been hit in the four weeks of bombing that officials in Gaza say have left thousands of civilians dead.
Military analysts believe the Israeli attacks used bunker busters, precision-guided strikes, thermobaric weapons and possibly even high-pressure water.
“What we are likely to see is Israel using a combination of these different methods – and possibly even new ones, depending on the type of underground structures, depending on its location in the Gaza Strip, and depending on the civilian population around the structure, if…” “There are still some there,” said Richemond-Barak.
Sarah Dadouch in Beirut and Miriam Berger in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.