Gaza’s sandy soil is Israel’s worst enemy. It was excavated almost by hand and away from prying eyes for more than three decades to drill one of the largest tunnel and transit networks in the world in one of the smallest areas. The Israel Defense Forces General Staff has dubbed the strategic network of dozens of kilometers of military-grade galleries a subway, considered Hamas’s secret weapon against invasion. Unlike the smuggling tunnels on the border with Egypt or the attack passages dug under the border with Israel, no one can ever claim to have seen the subway of the Palestinian Strip.
The central target of the upcoming invasion is likely to be the network of underground safe houses where Hamas’ political leaders and the commanders of its armed wing, the Ezedín al-Qasam Brigades, are hiding. In 2014, Israel launched a full-scale war that included an extensive two-month ground operation to destroy the underground galleries. In 2021, in the army’s last major incursion, it again proclaimed its destruction while justifying the bombings of the Rimal neighborhood in the enclave’s capital, where dozens of civilian casualties were recorded. The craters and sinkholes created by the bombs in this district only revealed Gaza’s characteristic sandy soil, with no remnants of concrete or metal supports, after eleven days of intense bombardment, when the foreign press was able to visit the area.
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“Hamas claims there are 500 kilometers of tunnels. But I think that this number is a means to deter Israel from breaking into Gaza,” explains Harel Chorev, historian and researcher at the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. “What is certain is that there are dozens of kilometers of constructed areas from which rockets are fired and weapons are stored. There are also supply rooms, water reserves, electronic devices and everything that is needed in the event of an attack,” he said in a video call.
The labyrinth of tunnels, some more than 30 meters deep, is one of Hamas militia commanders’ best-kept secrets. Unlike the cobwebs of al-Qaeda’s corridors in Afghanistan’s mountainous east two decades ago, or the underground cities the Viet Cong dug out of Vietnam’s jungle borders 50 years ago, Hamas’s subway galleries run underground. of densely populated urban areas. To destroy their tunnels, they must flood them, as Egypt did with the southern smuggling underpasses, or blow them up, like the assault and penetration tunnels under the border. The Israelis also have the ability to use bomb robots to defuse booby-trapped bombs before storming.
The United Nations, through its agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, was the only source other than the parties to the conflict to document the existence of the tunnel network. Last year, a “man-made cavity” was discovered beneath the grounds of one of the agency’s schools in Gaza. UNRWA condemned the discovery as a violation of its neutrality in the conflict and called it a threat to student safety.
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A militiaman from the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad, takes position at the entrance to a tunnel in Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip on May 18, 2022. SOPA Images (SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett)
Israel has captured dozens of militiamen from the secret services of the Nujba, the elite unit of Ezedín al Qasam, emphasizes Professor Chorev. “They have been trained in the tunnels and know exactly the entrances and exits of the network,” he claims. “One of the biggest challenges for the armed forces is that it is not known what kind of weapons Hamas has in the tunnels, just as they did not know Hamas’s attack capability before October 7,” he warns.
“The construction of the tunnels cost many millions of euros. “It is a really expensive infrastructure because it requires cement, iron and other elements that increase costs,” concludes the Tel Aviv University expert, pointing out that the materials were diverted from international humanitarian aid to the civilian population.
Before Israel built an underground barrier around the Gaza Strip at a cost of almost a billion euros, it systematically bombed the tunnels in which dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad militiamen were buried alive. Egypt, for its part, flooded with seawater pipes the smuggling galleries used to bypass the Gaza blockade. In addition to attacks and smuggling routes, Hamas has also resorted to rocket fire to counter Israel. The Army responded by deploying the Iron Dome defensive shield, which intercepts projectiles. But given the tunnels within the Gaza Strip, there is still no alternative other than massive bombings causing high civilian casualties or a ground operation against a guerrilla specializing in urban warfare.
“In 2014 we knew that there were tunnels crossing Israel, but now we know that there are dozens of networks moving within the Gaza Strip itself,” confirms Raphael Cohen, a researcher at RAND specializing in the Middle East -Analysis Center. “Israel prefers to fight in the air. Once the military invades by land, much of the army’s intelligence will be obsolete. At the moment they only have a general idea of these networks and have trained for a fight [subterránea]”, adds this expert contacted via video call.
“There is no clear possibility of acting militarily in Gaza. Job. “With its population density (more than 2.2 million inhabitants in just 365 square kilometers), there will always be problems protecting the civilian population, whether in air strikes or a ground attack, which is essential to rescue the kidnapped people,” Cohen previously stressed concluded that “an extensive network of tunnels cannot be destroyed by bombing alone, as has been attempted so far.”
The attack on the 7th left more than 1,400 dead in Israeli territory, mostly civilians, and two hundred kidnapped prisoners now underground in the Palestinian coastal enclave, and revealed a new type of tunnel not previously known. Attack passages that no longer cross the Israeli border, protected by an underground metal and cement barrier and equipped with electronic sensors. Its exit was inside the Gaza Strip, just meters from the separation fence, so that the attackers could tear it down without Israeli observation systems detecting their movements before attacking barracks, kibbutzim (agricultural cooperatives), nearby towns or the site of a music festival young people near the Gaza Strip in the deadliest single attack in the history of the Jewish state.
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