The Swiss newspaper Le Tan said that the Israeli army presented to the international press a tunnel built by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), through which it appears that the movement has mastered a form of tunnel warfare that is difficult to confront, and that this trap, which took 20 years to build, is about to close today on the Israeli army.
The newspaper described – in a report written by Samuel Fourie – the condition of the Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing, whose ceiling still hangs over the offices, and the condition of the Kerem Shalom crossing, where traces of bullets are still visible on the walls of the shelters in which the Israeli soldiers stationed in the only crossing area between… Gaza and Israel, when they were surprised by the Al-Aqsa flood on October 7th.
If Israel considers the Kerem Shalom crossing, through which people, goods, and thousands of Gaza workers cross between Israel and the Gaza Strip, a “symbol of hope” – as the writer says – then the residents of Gaza see in its concrete walls, its gates that open and close according to Israeli desire, and its meticulous inspection that controls… It has guards stationed at the top behind dark windows, something akin to an open prison in which nearly two million people have been held for more than 15 years, and it is protected in a way that makes escape from it impossible.
The longest tunnel
These crossings were the place through which Hamas fighters passed last October 7, when they blew up the Beit Hanoun “Erez” crossing, one of the most fortified protective barriers in the world, with dynamite, passed between the high walls, blew up the thick fence, and stormed the barracks and “ kibbutzim” and killed soldiers and civilians, and took prisoners, who may have brought them back from this tunnel, which is less than 400 meters from the border center, according to the opinion of Olivier Rafovich, one of the Israeli army spokesman who organized the press visit to the place on Wednesday, December 27. .
This tunnel – according to the newspaper – was built under the eyes of the Israelis, and was not discovered until 3 or 4 weeks ago by members of the “Yahalom” unit, which is the special engineering forces of the Israeli army. It extends about 4 kilometers, and there is no exit that leads to Israel. In it, a Weapons and ammunition, and some entrances were closed with armored doors.
An unknown form of warfare
“It is very difficult to determine the entrance to these facilities, and once the location is determined, the first communications are made by non-human technical means. We explore them in depth only when there is an operational necessity,” says Olivier Ravovic. “Tunnel warfare is a form of warfare unknown to Western armies.”
Runkle: The “robots” lose their effectiveness due to the loss of communications at a distance of 100 meters in the tunnel, and the atmospheric pressure at this depth reduces the effectiveness of various explosives, which increases the complexity of the tunnel blasting process.
The writer pointed out that Hamas brought this type of war to its peak, as the first tunnels saw the light in the 1980s, on the border with Egypt for smuggling, and when Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip, it built channels leading to Israel, and one of them was the one through which the kidnapping of the French soldier was carried out. Israeli Gilad Shalit in 2006.
Israel fought tunnels systematically, and demolished 14 cross-border tunnels in the 2014 war in addition to 18 inside the Strip, but Israel finds this task difficult. Benjamin Runkle, a former American soldier, says, “Inside the tunnels, robots lose their effectiveness due to the loss of communications at a distance of 100 meters in The tunnel, and the atmospheric pressure at this depth reduces the effectiveness of various explosives, which further complicates the process of blasting tunnels.”
Israel’s dilemma
Research on tunnel warfare published by the College of Advanced Military Studies in 2019 explained that the tunnel can be a shelter, barracks, command center, and drop sites for carrying out ambushes or missile attacks, and it provides in-depth defense of the lands covered by the networks, and no army in the world has effective tools to detect these. Remote tunnels.
A US military report says that “to stop re-infiltration, the area must either be destroyed or occupied” or flooded, as the Israeli army appears to want to do by pumping out seawater, as the Wall Street Journal revealed two weeks ago, and Tel Aviv has claimed to It found 800 hatches, and destroyed 500 of them.