“This is one of the longest cross-border tunnels Hamas has built,” said a uniformed Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) officer, opening the iron door of a concrete structure in the middle of barren lands on the Israeli-Gaza border. The door opens to concrete steps that disappear underground. The officer asked journalists to turn on the flash lights.
The IDF has built the steps for easy access to the opening of the tunnel, which is roughly 50m underground. The steps were muddy and slippery. The northwestern Negev region gets rains only a few days a year. It was one of them. “Rains lash the mud in the tunnel on to the steps, which makes the going tough,” said the officer, stepping into darkness.
The 2.5-km long tunnel, of which 900m is inside Israeli territory, is roughly a 10-minute drive from Tel Gama, the mound in southern Israel that saw Australian and New Zealand troops, under the British command, mount a successful cavalry charge against the Ottomans in the First World War. The IDF detected and destroyed the tunnel in 2016.
Tunnel networks
“Hamas has an elaborate network of tunnels, for various purposes. Narrow tunnels like these are mostly built for infiltration and to launch attacks inside Israel. On Gaza’s Egyptian border, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad have built wider, more sophisticated tunnels and they get everything they want smuggled through these tunnels. This includes weapons, contraband, cigarettes, fuel and clothes,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a former spokesperson of the IDF.
The IDF claims that they have destroyed dozens of tunnels from Gaza in recent years. “We have developed a technology to detect tunnels at the early stages of digging. And we wait for the right time to attack and destroy them,” the IDF officer said.
The Gaza-Israel border has always remained a flashpoint. In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew Israeli troops and Jewish settlers from Gaza as part of his “disengagement plan”. But that didn’t bring peace. From 2007 onwards, Israel has imposed an illegal blockade on this tiny Mediterranean strip of 2.5 million people. Israel controls Gaza’s maritime borders, air space and most of its land crossings. It justifies the blockade saying such measures are needed to fight terror from Gaza.
At Kerem Shalom, a key crossing between Israel and Gaza, Ami Shaked, its director, said that, for Israel, there’s no difference between Hamas and ISIS. “They don’t want any solution but the Islamic solution. They think we don’t have the right to live here,” Mr. Shaked said. Kerem Shalom has been hit several times by mortars and rockets from Gaza. “There are Israeli communities living in this region. They live under constant fear and trauma of rocket attacks from Gaza.”
Hila Fenlon, a farmer at Netiv HaAsara, an Israeli Moshav commune just 300m from the Gaza border, corroborated what Mr. Shaked said. “Once the alarm goes off, we get 15 seconds to move into the bomb shelter. I have been living under the threat of constant rocket attacks for more than 20 years.”
Several Gaza wars
Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules Gaza, says it possesses the right to fight Israel as long as its occupation of the Palestinian territories continues. Over the past years, Gaza has witnessed several conflicts, with rocket attacks by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and retaliatory airstrikes by Israel.
Read | Explained | Israel-Hamas ceasefire
And both sides suffer. In the past, both Hamas and the IDF were accused of war crimes by UN-commissioned inquiries. In the 2021 Gaza war, 14 Israeli civilians were killed, including two children, while on the Palestinian side, the civilian toll was 256, including 66 children.
Since then, the border region has remained largely calm, with occasional flare-ups, even though violence continued in the occupied West Bank. But Gaza has been like this since 2005. A spell of tense calm can be broken any time with a spark. And then a full-scale war will come. From Tel Gama and Kerem Shalom, one can see the border fence that separates Israel from Gaza. There are not many soldiers in the vicinity, but Israel’s observation posts are visible from a long distance. “The IDF has some very sophisticated surveillance tech so that we can keep monitoring Hamas through those posts,” Mr. Conricus said, pointing to the tall towers on the border.
The IDF has built barbed wires over land and a deep concrete fence underground. How deep is the fence? “That’s confidential information. But I can tell you that it is deeper than the deepest tunnel Hamas has built,” Mr. Conricus said. With tunnel-detecting technology, underground fences and the Iron Dome anti-missile defence system, the IDF hopes to put an end to Hamas’s tunnel and rocket threats. “Hamas and the Islamic Jihad are getting support from other countries. They have amassed thousands of rockets. But we have equipped ourselves better to deal with those threats,” Mr. Conricus said.
(The writer was in Israel on an invitation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
