Hamas-Israel: the “Gaza metro”, this immense underground network which will complicate an IDF assault

The Israeli army calls it the “Gaza Metro”. For good reason, the network of underground passages and tunnels crisscrosses the Gaza Strip, spilling over into Israel and Egypt, used as veritable clandestine corridors. And if the kilometers of galleries were first dug to supply the territory with contraband, the network has become a real military tool for Palestinian armed groups.

The terrorist attack of Saturday, October 7, at dawn, on Israeli soil by thousands of Hamas fighters demonstrated this. Hamas fighters crossed the anti-tunnel barrier built in recent years by Israel with disconcerting ease, bypassing by sea, paragliding through the air, breaking down the fence with a bulldozer, but also using new tunnels believed to have been destroyed by the IDF.

While the Israeli army is preparing for a major assault on the Gaza Strip, the underground network will seriously handicap the IDF troops. Fighters, installed up to 30 or 40 meters underground, circulate there out of range of strikes. Rocket launcher batteries hidden a few meters deep can come out through a trapdoor system to fire and disappear again.

The Israeli army intensely bombed them in 2021. But if part of this network is undoubtedly known to it, others have remained secret and will complicate its operations. Hamas “knows its tunnels by heart,” Colin Clarke, research director of the Soufan Center in New York, told AFP. “Some are probably trapped. Preparing to fight in such terrain (...) would require extensive intelligence (...), which the Israelis may not have.

Varying in height, width and sophistication, the tunnels were originally dug to smuggle contraband materials such as cigarettes, milk, clothing, car parts etc. from Egypt. These underground passages were closely monitored by the security services of the Palestinian Authority who blocked access.

But in the early 2000s, Israel intensified the fight against these tunnels, which it suspected of allowing Palestinian fighters to obtain weapons. After the departure in 2005 of the Israelis who occupied the Gaza Strip and the takeover of the territory by Hamas in June 2007, arms smuggling intensified. “It ranges from spare parts for Iranian or Chinese rockets, to anti-aircraft missiles, including tons of TNT and other explosives, essential for detonating the missiles that Hamas fires at southern Israel,” reported Le Figaro in 2009. , during a report. The digging of the tunnels is carefully orchestrated and becomes a real business managed by Hamas.

During several land operations, notably in 2006, 2008 then 2014, as well as during intense bombing campaigns such as during the 2021 war, Israel did everything to destroy the underground network which, over time, became and over the years, a shelter for weapons depots and manufacturing workshops. But Hamas tirelessly continued to build this maze of galleries despite the espionage resources deployed by Israeli intelligence.

Since the last Gaza war in 2021, “the tunnels have been restored and the stock of missiles resupplied”, declared in April 2022 Abou Hamza, a spokesperson for the Al-Quds brigades, who welcomed on the occasion the “financial support unlimited access to Iran.

In December last year, the UN announced that it had discovered a tunnel under one of its schools in the Gaza Strip. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) had identified an “underground artificial cavity”. “The (recent) rain probably dug a hole in the ground which revealed the presence of a structure of a terrorist tunnel near an UNRWA school in Gaza,” told AFP an Israeli military source.

The expected assault by Israeli forces following the bloody Hamas attack on October 7 will therefore be very complex. “Everyone knows that it will be long and difficult with a lot of losses,” Alexandre Grinberg admitted to AFP, adding that there are “robots and other special means that allow you to enter tunnels.” For Hamas, he assures, “it is an advantage which can also prove to be a trap. When we locate tunnels, we can lock away those inside. And in this case the instruction will be 'no quarter'.