Destroying Hamas’s Tunnel System in Gaza

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that are fighting the war in Gaza says Hamas’s tunnel system there is immense, between 350 and 450 miles of tunnels. Yet the Gaza Strip itself, which is located along the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, is only 25 miles long and 4 to 6 miles wide. Hamas’s military strength has been centered in its tunnel system in Gaza. The IDF therefore has announced that its goal is to destroy this entire tunnel system to prevent Hamas from ever being a threat to Israel anymore.

The New York Times reported yesterday that the IDF has taken U.S. journalists on several missions to visit a few of the estimated 5,700 shafts throughout the Gaza Strip that descend into Hamas’s subterranean tunnel network. Some of these shafts are located at schools, hospitals, and mosques. Some are even hosted inside the homes of Gazan residents. Some of these tunnels are 40 to 50 feet deep. One shaft has a spiral staircase that descends seven stories to reach its connected tunnel.

The IDF is in the process of destroying these tunnels. But Hamas militants often attached booby-trapped bombs inside them that can be exploded with remote devices. Due to this danger, the IDF soldiers did not permit journalists to descend into the tunnels, but merely look down into the shafts and photograph them.

How is the IDF destroying these tunnels? To do so, they must first make sure that Hamas does not have any of the now approximately 125 hostages inside them. The tried flooding the tunnels with seawater from the Mediterranean Sea, but it didn’t work. Plus, that would have further destroyed the Gaza Strip’s underground water resources, which are often already saline to some extent and thus not useable for irrigation farming and domestic use. Then IDF uses explosive devices to collapse the tunnels.

The IDF says it will take “years” for it to destroy all of these tunnels in the Gaza Strip. Will that inhibit, even delay, a political settlement after the war about what to do with the Gaza Strip and its residents? And will a Palestinian state ever be created, with the Gaza Strip as its nucleus as I predicted, based on my interpretations of some biblical prophecies, in my book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia (1990).

[For more information and updates about this book’s proposal for an alternative, two-state solution to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, visit kermitzarley.com.]