A Haaretz newspaper report revealed that an assessment of public opinion that has not yet been published concluded that the Israeli army will not be able to destroy all the tunnels of the Islamic resistance movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and perhaps it will not be able to destroy most of them.
The newspaper reported that the assessment was distributed to all military ranks in the Israeli army, starting with the generals, who are trying to plan for what they call a “year of war” in 2024, passing through the brigade and battalion commanders who spend entire weeks on the ground to destroy only one part of the tunnel network, and ending with the armed forces. The combat engineers who have now begun to leave the Gaza Strip after more than 3 months of war with mixed feelings.
On the one hand, they have carried out an unprecedented number of tunnel demolitions, and on the other hand, they realize that there are many tunnels that are still intact, according to a report by Haaretz’s chief correspondent, Anshel Pfeffer. The Israeli army is reducing its forces in Gaza, and is fully aware that there are many tunnels that have been overlooked.
Old story
However, Pfeiffer believes that this neglect should not surprise anyone, and he claimed that a number of those tunnels under the Gaza Strip were there even before the founding of Hamas.
He claimed that various Palestinian groups had used the tunnels since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Gaza The 1967 warHowever, the first drilling operation took place in the early 1980s.
He added that hundreds of tunnels were operated during the first years of the siege imposed by Israel after what he called “Hamas’s seizure of power” in 2007, and some of them were wide enough for cars to pass through for the purpose of selling them in Gaza.
Pfeiffer claimed that when he visited the Egyptian city of Rafah on a press mission in 2005, it was easy for him to see the tunnels “constructed inside the villas and gated compounds that spread in informal areas on both sides of the border.”
According to Haaretz, the first solution offered by the Israeli army for the tunnels on the Rafah border was to demolish hundreds of Palestinian homes and establish the Philadelphia border axis extending between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.
Arms race
The author of the report believes that the Philadelphia Axis has witnessed an underground arms race between Israel and the Palestinians for more than two decades, as the tunnels became deeper and longer.
Israel tried to develop new methods to locate and destroy them. Initially, it used civilian drilling equipment and conventional explosives, then more advanced sensors, and also established the first military teams specialized in underground tunnels.
But the Palestinians were usually one step ahead, according to the Haaretz report; This is according to what was proven in the early 2000s when they began using tunnels to blow up Israeli army positions and vehicles.
Pfeiffer explained that, after its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the Israeli army turned to launching air strikes against cross-border tunnels, and stressed that all evidence proves – beyond a doubt – that it failed to deal with those tunnels.
The Haaretz report concluded that instead of destroying all the tunnels, the Israeli army is now talking about “depriving” Hamas of future military use, but no one has a clear idea how to do this.
According to the same newspaper, the Israeli security establishment will one day be forced to admit that destroying tunnel networks was never a realistic goal.