{"id":11069,"date":"2023-11-02T13:01:37","date_gmt":"2023-11-02T13:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/02\/300-miles-of-hamas-subterranean-terror-tunnels-the-next-big-challenge-for-idf-gaza-metro\/"},"modified":"2023-11-02T13:01:37","modified_gmt":"2023-11-02T13:01:37","slug":"300-miles-of-hamas-subterranean-terror-tunnels-the-next-big-challenge-for-idf-gaza-metro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/02\/300-miles-of-hamas-subterranean-terror-tunnels-the-next-big-challenge-for-idf-gaza-metro\/","title":{"rendered":"300 miles of Hamas subterranean terror tunnels the next big challenge for IDF: \u2018Gaza metro\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

JERUSALEM <\/strong>\u2014 In his daily briefings, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari regularly reminds Israelis that the war against Hamas in Gaza is being fought from \u2018the air, the sea and the land,\u2019 yet he misses out on one important arena that is likely to become the focus as Israel sends its troops deeper into the Palestinian enclave: The vast web of underground tunnels built by Hamas.<\/p>\n

According to those who closely track the Iranian-backed terror group, as well as admissions by its own leaders, Hamas has built an approximately 300-mile subterranean system that snakes beneath civilian homes, schools and hospitals in urban areas of the Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n

And for the past three weeks \u2013 since its forces carried out a massive and brutal terrorist attack inside Israel on Oct. 7 \u2013 Hamas\u2019 leadership, both political and military, has been safely holed up down there as Israeli fighter jets pound the territory from above.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday during a briefing with the foreign press, Hagari said the massive damage in the Jabalia refugee camp after an Israeli airstrike on Tuesday was worsened by the fact that there were tunnels underneath the densely packed urban area. Locals reported seeing sinkholes opening up under the bombed-out buildings.<\/p>\n

As Israeli ground forces expand further inside Gaza, the IDF will be forced to turn its attention to this underground battlefield, which is a challenge faced in other recent conflicts, particularly in the Middle East, but never on this scale, experts told Fox News Digital this week.<\/p>\n

\u2018Tunnels change everything about how the military is going to be able to advance and take control of the situation,\u2019 said\u00a0Daphn\u00e9 Richemond-Barak,\u00a0senior researcher and head of the International Law Desk at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in\u00a0Israel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018Tunnels turn the battlefield into a multidimensional battlefield, which is not the case in regular urban terrain, and that is something that must be considered as part of the operational challenges,\u2019 continued Richemond-Barak, also a\u00a0research fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point.<\/p>\n

\u2018As they (the IDF) advance into Gaza, they might be ambushed by tunnels behind them or below them in a most violent and unsettling fashion,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

Such a scenario actually happened to an elite force of Israeli soldiers during a previous round of fighting in Gaza. In the 2014 conflict that Israelis refer to as Operation Protective Edge, three Israeli soldiers were ambushed by Hamas terrorists who succeeded in dragging the dead body of one of the soldiers, Lt. Hadar Goldin, into a secret tunnel. Israelis were shocked by this action, which happened during a U.N.-mediated cease-fire, and have been fighting to return Goldin\u2019s body ever since.<\/p>\n

Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official and founder of \u2018Inside the Middle East,\u2019 an educational program, told Fox News Digital that Hamas has been building such tunnels for more than two decades. If initially they were used to smuggle goods and weaponry from Egypt into Gaza, the underground operation evolved into a system of attack tunnels that enable terrorists to move beneath the border fence with Israel and reach inside Israeli communities. Israel detected those tunnels both prior and during the 2014 conflict.<\/p>\n

Now, noted Melamed, Hamas\u2019 tunnel has developed even further into a vast labyrinth of passageways that connect bunkers, command centers and even munitions storage facilities, a system that is often referred to as \u2018the Gaza metro.\u2019<\/p>\n

Many officials in Israel believe that the majority of the 240 hostages, held captive by Hamas since the Oct. 7 assault, are hidden\u00a0somewhere inside this underground network. Yocheved Lifshitz, one of four hostages released so far, told the media that she\u2019walked for two or three kilometers on wet ground\u2019 after her abduction.<\/p>\n

\u2018There was a large network of underground tunnels that looked like spider webs,\u2019 the 85-year-old grandmother said.<\/p>\n

\u2018The soil in Gaza is soft, there is no need for massive drilling machinery to dig underground,\u2019 Melamed said, describing how tunnel-building has become a massive industry for Hamas, which even has a dedicated authority overseeing the labor-intensive work and local families who are hired as contractors.<\/p>\n

\u2018At some point, some of the contractors were killed while digging those tunnels and Hamas was forced to pay out compensation to their families,\u2019 he noted. \u2018Most of the tunnels have been fortified with cement to stop them from collapsing and burying people alive.\u2019<\/p>\n

But the tunnels may also be an \u2018Achilles heel\u2019 for the terror group as Israel continues to build up its forces in the Gaza Strip, Melamed\u00a0said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2018The weakness is with the flow of air and oxygen,\u2019 he said. \u2018You need big ventilation systems to blow air inside, and that means if those are located, the flow of air can be completely shut off in a second.\u2019<\/p>\n

After three weeks of fighting, Israel has been trying to smoke the terrorists from their hiding places below ground by preventing additional fuel from entering Gaza, Fox News Digital reported last week. Israeli officials have repeatedly refused to allow fuel to enter Gaza for civilian purposes despite international pressure, arguing that it will likely end up being confiscated by Hamas and used to power the tunnel\u2019s ventilation system.<\/p>\n

Richemond-Barak, who authored a 2017 book \u2018Underground Warfare,\u2019 said tunnel warfare has been a part of war for as long as wars have existed but that in recent years there has been a surge in use by \u2018violent,\u00a0non-state actors \u2013 terrorist groups\u2019 such as ISIS, al Qaeda and Hamas.<\/p>\n

\u2018Tunnels are an appealing strategy for terrorist groups because\u00a0they\u00a0serve as a great equalizer with the sophisticated technologies of\u00a0armies like those in Israel or the U.S.,\u2019 she said before adding \u2018that the challenges were vast for both sides fighting in such an arena.\u2019<\/p>\n

For those hiding within the tunnels \u2013 in this case, Hamas \u2013 the pressure comes from spending a great deal of time in hot and humid conditions underground. For a traditional army, such as the IDF, it is not only a drain on resources as it slows down the fight, it also demands special equipment and training, she said.<\/p>\n

\u2018Soldiers need to be vetted specifically for this kind of claustrophobic, confined environment, which not every soldier can handle,\u2019 said Richemond-Barak. \u2018Even the best-trained soldiers will find it difficult to operate in endless passageways in which you lose a sense of time and direction.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018When you\u2019re facing subterranean threats, you really need to think about which soldiers you\u2019re going to send into the tunnels, and most military doctrines recommend against doing that,\u2019 she added, describing how they are likely to be highly booby-trapped because Hamas has been anticipating Israel\u2019s ground operation.<\/p>\n

States that face or have faced such threats have been forced to develop new tools \u2013 robots and other equipment \u2013 that might be used to detect and neutralize tunnels, said Richemond-Barak, pointing out that the IDF has invested heavily in this over the past nine years.<\/p>\n

\u2018Although we knew tunnels were a serious threat before 2014, we did not build the right operational ideas back then,\u2019 Amir Avivi,\u00a0founder and CEO of the Israel Defense and Security Forum and an IDF brigadier general (res.) from the engineering corps previously responsible for the Gaza area, said of Israel\u2019s previous battle against Hamas inside Gaza.<\/p>\n

Avivi said that 10 years ago, the theory was that Hamas\u2019 tunnel system was for offensive, not strategic, purposes. Tunnels detected by Israel previous to 2014 had been used for smuggling goods and weapons from Egypt into Gaza and for infiltrations into Israel from the Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n

\u2018When you don\u2019t build the right operational ideas then you do not train right and do not develop the right equipment and technologies for such a threat,\u2019 Avivi said, adding, \u2018When we went in to destroy the offensive tunnels in 2014, we lacked the right equipment, and we lacked the right technologies.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018The army was so shocked, and that is why it took 51 days to defeat Hamas then,\u2019 said Avivi. \u2018That is when started the whole process of building our capabilities, and today we are completely able to both detect, destroy and fight tunnel warfare.\u2019<\/p>\n

While he admitted that the army faces a huge challenge in detecting the tunnels and fighting those inside them, the best \u2018solution is not going down but simply burying the people who are in there.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Creating a reality where they are going to die inside and that is it,\u2019 Avivi said.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Ruth Marks Eglash is a\u00a0veteran journalist based in Jerusalem, Israel. She reports and covers the Middle East and Europe. Originally from the U.K, she\u00a0has also freelanced for numerous\u00a0news outlets. Ruth can be followed on Twitter @reglash<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

This post appeared first on FOX NEWS<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JERUSALEM \u2014 In his daily briefings, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari regularly reminds Israelis that the war against Hamas in Gaza is being fought from \u2018the air, the sea and the land,\u2019 yet he misses out on one important arena that is likely to become the focus as Israel sends its <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11070,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11069","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}