After the Israeli army took control of the northern part of the Gaza Strip starting with the October 27 ground incursion, Hamas continues to dominate its underground tunnels.
According to the American Wall Street Journal, the war is “entering a new phase”, as the Israeli army is moving its battle to the underground tunnel network of the Gaza Strip.
The paper said it was “the beginning of a two-decade battle, after Hamas militants spent years expanding and fortifying the tunnels, turning them into a vast labyrinth, and Israel trained to fight inside them, and had created specialized units and developed new weapons” to destroy those tunnels.
With the aim of “eliminating the enthusiasm” that Israel declared at the beginning of the war, the Israeli army is working “using renewable tools, such as robots equipped with cameras to map tunnels, and container trucks filled with explosive liquids that they are pumped through water cannons,” said an Israeli military officer directing the battle in the tunnel in northern Gaza, according to the newspaper.
“The danger does not end with its discovery.” How does the labyrinth of tunnels under the Gaza Strip work?
After Israel began the war in Gaza, much attention has focused on Hamas’ tunnel network in the besieged Strip and how it poses a challenge to the ground forces there. As the Israeli army forces its way into the city, a New York Times report indicates that “the greatest danger may be lurking beneath our feet.”
Israel “gathers new intelligence on the tunnel network every day, discovers new tunnels and interrogates militants, assembling pieces that give its army a better picture of the underground city.”
Israel said on November 14 that “its forces have already discovered at least 500 access points to these sprawling tunnels.”
On Tuesday, Israel said soldiers “found the entrance to one of the tunnels in a mosque, and the other outside Al-Rantisi hospital in northern Gaza, where they used a robot to find a proof gate of explosion which covered an area of 20 metres”. long column.
On Thursday, Israel released footage it said was “of a tunnel opening from inside the Shifa hospital compound in Gaza”, despite coming under international pressure to justify its decision to storm it.
Liquid gel
The spark of war was sparked on October 7, when Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, including women and children. The movement also kidnapped around 240 hostages, including foreigners, and transferred them to the Gaza Strip.
On the other hand, since that date Israel has responded with continuous bombings and ground incursions, which have resulted in the deaths of over 12,000 people, most of them civilians, including women and children, according to the health authorities of the Palestinian Strip, who have controlled by Hamas since 2007.
“It’s the most sophisticated tunnel network ever seen in a war,” said Daphne Richmond Barak, a professor at Reichman University in Israel and author of a book on underground fighting.
The network includes “narrow tunnels large enough for one person, as well as larger sections that include rooms, offices and medical facilities designed for underground shelter during bombing,” according to the newspaper.
Some tunnels are ventilated, reinforced with concrete walls, powered by solar energy and fuel, and include primitive means of communication. Israel accused Hamas of using limited supplies of fuel in Gaza to operate the tunnel’s ventilation system.
The Israeli military officer directing the battle in the tunnel said: “Israeli robots carrying cameras help give Israel at least a partial look at who is in the tunnels and where they are.”
The officer, whose identity was not revealed by the Wall Street Journal, added: “This actually gives us a good image without hurting our soldiers and without going into the tunnels.”
“Bloomberg”: Israel targets Hamas tunnels with attack dogs and “sponge” bombs.
The Israeli army is seeking to reduce the risk of infiltration into Hamas’s vast network of secret tunnels in the Gaza Strip and limit casualties among its soldiers, as a complex range of technologies have been deployed to investigate and attempt to destroy the underground complexes, according to a Bloomberg report.
He said: “One of the main methods used by Israeli forces to blow up tunnels is to fill them with a gel-like explosive liquid, as the liquid is pumped into the tunnels through pipes connected to container trucks.”
“The problem is that it takes tons of liquid to destroy several hundred meters of tunnels,” he said, adding that the military is “developing other methods to destroy them.”
To destroy the entire tunnel network, military analysts say Israel “will likely need to use bunker-busting munitions or thermobaric weapons, which contain a mixture that volatilizes and ignites, creating an explosion designed to bypass barriers and flow into the structures”.
In this regard, humanitarian and human rights groups have warned of the danger of using thermal weapons in areas of high population density, such as Gaza.