Tunnels and civilian casualties: the complex underground war being fought in the Gaza Strip

When the war broke out between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, it did not take long to announce that the Hebrew country would add to the intense bombings a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip. Despite the urgency, the soldiers’ incursion into the field, inevitable to put an end to the terrorists, began slowly and with extreme care. The obstacle was known: the network of underground tunnels that Hamas has built for years under the Palestinian enclave. It is so large and intricate that many call it the “Gaza metro” and it is a danger to any enemy of the city.

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More than a month after the terrorist massacre that sparked the conflict, in addition to imposing a “total siege” on the enclave, interrupting supplies of water, food and fuel, Israeli ground forces carry out a deep incursion into the strip and focus on Locate and blow up the maze of tunnels. The focus is on Gaza City, where the Hebrew country believes that Hamas has its command center and a large network of tunnels.

“The fighting continues on the surface and underground, where there are vehicles entering with military equipment to deal with the tunnels,” Richard Hecht, international spokesman for the Israeli Army, said this week.

The Israeli Army claims that Hamas has built its tunnels under sensitive places such as medical centers, schools and mosques, and believes that its largest military hideout would be under and around Al Shifa hospital, the largest in Gaza.

No one outside the Islamist group has an exact map of this labyrinth. However, testimonies and information collected by Israel in 2014, when the last land incursion was carried out in the enclave, allow us to understand its complexity.

Hamas’s hideout

If military experts warn that weeks of bloody ground fighting are coming in Gaza, it is largely because of the role played by hundreds of kilometers of Hamas tunnels. These are underground fortifications built as a shelter and warehouse for weapons and basic products.

“They are not simple tunnels. Entrenched beneath dense residential areas, the corridors allow fighters to move free of enemy eyes. There are also bunkers to store weapons, food and water, and even command centers and tunnels wide enough for vehicles, researchers believe,” reports The New York Times.

To access them, ordinary-looking doors that are on the surface are used. Israel found an entrance near a daycare center in recent days.

International analyst Francisco Belaunde points out that the tunnels are a refuge for Hamas and allow it to move calmly through much of the enclave. “It is a small city underground, from where they run their operations. “Israel needs to put an end to that to prevent new attacks in the future, which is why it is so important for them to destroy them,” he tells El Comercio.

In the military sphere, they house command centers and serve as hideouts from which surprise attacks are launched. The Israeli military has stated that the readiness of Hamas fighters for a prolonged stay underground can be verified based on the water and oxygen reserves found in the tunnels.

Hamas knows well that it has the advantage in the underground war. The senior leader of the militiamen, Ali Baraka, said that “the fighters are underground, waiting for battle.”

Civilian casualties

Israeli forces have destroyed vast parts of the tunnels in recent years. They claim that since the start of the ongoing war, some 130 tunnel shafts have suffered the same fate.

Destroying the tunnels is quite complicated. Israel uses bunker buster bombs that are used to destroy targets that are underground, but these do not explode directly, but rather penetrate the ground and explode below, which makes it very difficult to avoid the death of civilians on the surface, explains Belaunde.

“They recently launched these bombs to kill a Hamas leader and dozens of people who were upstairs died. That’s the problem. The other option would be to send soldiers into the tunnels and confront Hamas fighters below, but that is very risky. The possibility of completely sealing them has also been raised, and in some cases flooding them because it seems that some of the tunnels have a connection with the sea,” he adds.

“We are increasing the pressure on Hamas every hour, every day. So far, we have killed thousands of terrorists, on the surface and underground.”

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One of the biggest problems for the Hebrew country is that all analyzes assume that the more than 200 hostages captured by Hamas at the beginning of the conflict are in the tunnels. “The question now is to what extent the Israelis can carry out these types of operations without putting the hostages at risk,” says Belaunde.

The current conditions and characteristics of the underground war make it even clearer to experts that the conflict will not end soon. “From a military point of view, Israel can eliminate the tunnels, but it will take a long time and will undoubtedly involve much more destruction and death of civilians in Gaza. That is a problem for Israel because the pressure against the Jewish country and its ally the United States is going to increase,” concludes Belaunde.