NEW YORK (VINnews) — Israeli and US officials estimate that as much as 80% of Hamas’s vast tunnel infrastructure under Gaza remains intact despite months of Israeli efforts to destroy them, according to a Wall Street journal report.
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Israel has targeted the tunnels for demolition as they are the command centers for Hamas terrorists still hiding armed and capable of attacking Israelis, and are also believed to be the location of the remaining captives as well as Hamas leaders.
Disabling the tunnels, which allegedly run for more than 300 miles under the Gaza strip, would deny Hamas relatively safe storage for weapons and ammunition, a hiding place for fighters, command-and-control centers for its leadership, and the ability to maneuver around the territory unexposed to Israeli fire, Israel has said.
Israeli efforts to clear tunnels have so far involved installing pumps to flood them with water from the Mediterranean, destroying them with airstrikes and liquid explosives, searching them with dogs and robots, destroying their entrances and raiding them with highly trained soldiers.
U.S. and Israeli officials have difficulty assessing the level of destruction of the tunnels, in part because they can’t say for certain how many miles of tunnels exist. The officials from both countries estimate that between 20% to 40% of the tunnels have been damaged or rendered inoperable, U.S. officials said, much of that in northern Gaza.
Israel is “thoroughly and gradually dismantling the tunnel network,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement. The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
Late last year, in an operation called “Sea of Atlantis,” Israel installed a series of pumps in northern Gaza, despite concerns about the potential impact of pumping seawater on the territory’s freshwater supply and above ground infrastructure. Israel’s bombing of the tunnels has inflicted widespread destruction to buildings on the surface.
Earlier this month, Israel installed at least one pump in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis to disrupt the tunnel network there, a U.S. official familiar with the effort said. The first pumps installed within Gaza used water from the Mediterranean Sea, while the latest pump draws water from Israel, the official said.
In some places, walls and other unexpected barriers and defenses slowed or stopped the water flow, U.S. officials said. Seawater has corroded some of the tunnels, but the overall effort wasn’t as effective as Israeli officials had hoped, U.S. officials said.
“Hamas’s strategy revolves around the tunnels—it is their center of gravity. They needed the tunnels to level the battlefield with the IDF,” said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and officer in the Marine Corps and Central Intelligence Agency. “The tunnels are where Hamas planned [before Oct. 7] to wait out Israel’s political will as Israel faced pressure for a cease-fire.”
Israel has units that specialize in clearing tunnels but many of those troops are engineers trained to destroy them, not search for hostages and top Hamas leaders, U.S. officials said. In particular, more troops are needed to clear the tunnels, the officials said. Additionally, it is not always possible to clear them effectively from above as Israel needs to ascertain that the tunnels don’t hold hostages and/or Hamas leaders hiding there.
Some of the hostages are allegedly being held in a command center in a tunnel under Khan Younis, Israeli officials said. Hamas’s top leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar is hiding in the same location, according to the senior Israeli military official.
A raid on that command center could endanger the hostages, according to former Israeli officials and military analysts, a dilemma that amounts to a choice between killing Sinwar and negotiating the release of some or all of the remaining hostages.
The official said the military’s approach was focused on clearing “nodes” within the tunnels where Hamas leaders and fighters are hiding, rather than checking or destroying the entire system.
Some of the tunnels have been bombed, while others have been flooded. However, progress is slow as underground passages must be mapped and checked for booby traps and hostages before Israeli forces can destroy them.
Only solution is to carpet bomb them back to the first century of אדם הראשון .
WSJ knows exactly as I do, I believe much less than 80% is still intact.
Israeli subway system
Isn’t it remarkable how poorly the IDF has dealt with this situation? Months into the war and they still do not seem to know where the tunnels are. They do not even seem to know how to destroy them.