As Israeli forces advance into northern Gaza, they also aim deeper. Their target, a labyrinth of tunnels that the Palestinian armed group Hamas has meticulously dug over the years to build the central system of its operations.
But even though the Israeli army has encountered few obstacles in pounding the besieged strip for more than a month, experts suggest that clearing the underground spider’s web of tunnels could present its army with far more challenges. important.
“It would be a slow, tedious, months-long task to reduce them entirely, and the excavations will likely continue as (the Israeli military) tries,” said Richard Outzen, non-resident lead researcher. at the Atlantic Council in Turkey and a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a defense policy think tank.
Although few people know the extent of what some Israeli officials call the “metro,” the tunnels would span the entire enclave for hundreds of miles, with experts estimating a depth of between 15 and 60 meters (50 to 200 feet). ). . As of 2021, the Israeli military said there are 300 km (186 miles) of tunnels beneath the strip.
Some of them are equipped with oxygen tanks, water pipes and electric lights. An exclusive Al Jazeera Arabic video from 2021 shows reinforced concrete corridors leading to an underground office with a working telephone line and weapons storage rooms.
The system would have a periphery, with shallower tunnels that are easier to destroy from the surface, and a core where commando centers, weapons storage, missiles and, more recently, some of the approximately 240 captured Israeli prisoners are located. by Hamas. believes he is. The tunnels allow fighters to carry out surprise attacks and move quickly across the Gaza Strip without Israeli eyes being able to track them.
“One of Hamas’ main efforts over the past 17 years has been to dig tunnels that would make it resilient, this was not a sideline activity,” said Andreas Krieg, associate professor in the Department of Defense Studies. from King’s College London. And what works on the surface doesn’t work underneath. “Israel has the technological advantage in everything, but they have been lured into a low-tech war where that competitive advantage is destroyed as soon as they have to go underground,” he added.
The system that exists today is the result of more than two decades of work, beginning in the 1980s, when the tunnels were passages used to smuggle goods from Egypt, said Joel Roskin, a geomorphologist at the Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, which has long studied tunnels in Gaza.
Farmers in the region dug wells to access groundwater in their fields – a skill that was then applied to dig tunnels deeper. The coastal strip soil was easy to sculpt. “It’s not stone, but sediments made of sand and clay. They go down several meters and are therefore easy to dig,” Roskin explained.
The first sign that the tunnels were also being used by armed groups came in 2001, when an Israeli military post was blown up with an explosive coming from underground. But it was not until five years later that the mysterious tunnels entered Israeli public consciousness when Palestinian fighters emerged from a well and kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
After Hamas took full control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, winning elections and ousting the rival Fatah party following heavy fighting, Israel imposed a stifling blockade. The tunnels became the only way to break the siege and transport food, goods, weapons and, it seems, even lions, to Gaza. Their numbers have proliferated.
“Hamas began building a town below the city, knowing that if it launched armed resistance, it could have fought back and it could have done so underground,” Krieg said.
Since October 7, when Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel and killed 1,200 people, the Israeli army has responded by bombing Gaza. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 11,000 people, more than a third of them children. At the heart of the argument put forward by the Israeli army for targeting civilian and medical infrastructure, where thousands of people are sheltering, is the presence of underground tunnels where, it claims, Hamas fighters operate. The armed group and doctors deny these allegations.
Whether or not Palestinian fighters dug tunnels under civilian infrastructure, human rights groups have accused Israel of failing to take adequate precautions to prevent civilian deaths and of violating international law.
Militarily, airstrikes cannot reach sufficient depth to destroy the core of the tunnels, experts say. For these, the Israeli army will have to take control of all entrances and exits – an extremely long and dangerous operation. Even if an area has been meticulously cleared, a tunnel shaft could be hidden behind enemy lines, allowing Palestinian fighters to attack Israeli soldiers from the rear.
“It’s a very time-consuming and very risky process,” Krieg said. Other options used in the past included dumping wet cement or sewage, as Egypt did in 2013 along its border, inside tunnels. But these techniques wouldn’t work if the tunnels had multiple entrances and exits.
Entering the tunnels also presents challenges, and Israel will try to avoid doing so unless strictly necessary, analysts say. Oxygen is rare, even absent. Visibility is limited. And soldiers are vulnerable to ambushes and traps.
Outzen, who is also a former U.S. Army colonel, believes the military will likely use a combined approach.
“Raids into certain tunnels considered high value due to hostages or militant leaders, brute force bombings where tunnels are close to the surface, and demolition operations involving the insertion of engineering teams with demolition experts (explosives and mechanical) to collapse the central tunnels where possible,” he said.
But such operations take time, a resource that some believe Israel is quickly running out of. Pressure is mounting on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to agree to a ceasefire as images of the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza spark global condemnation.
Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and former deputy minister, said at a conference this week that Israel has a time bomb “that ticks quickly.”
“If the military thinks it has endless carte blanche to end this operation, I would say no. »
