The nightmare of the Gaza tunnels awaits the Israeli army.
With the concentration of the forces and heavy military equipment of the Zionist army around the borders of Gaza, the possibility of starting the military operations promised by the leaders of Tel Aviv has increased in the coming hours. At the same time, in the last 24 hours, in parallel with the definite announcement of this attack by “Afikhai Adrei”, the spokesman of the Zionist regime’s army, the fighters of this regime once again targeted the Gaza Strip with their airstrikes.
In the meantime, according to the positions of the military and political leaders of Hamas, who say they are ready to face such a confrontation in every way, analysts believe that Gaza, despite its defensive fortifications, a very complex network of underground tunnels, and partisan techniques of urban warfare with trained militia groups Various resistance will turn into a bloody, exhausting and very long military operation for the Zionist military, which is not easy for Israel to get rid of like a big swamp.
Although the Gaza Strip has a total area of 363 square kilometers, it is an incredibly complex urban battlefield, including the 52 square kilometer Gaza City itself, which contains some sixty buildings of six stories or more.
Hamas spent fifteen years preparing an extensive “defense in depth” that, in addition to ground, underground and air fortifications, a wide range of communication tunnels, artillery platforms, minefields and explosive traps, anti-armor missiles, explosive buildings, etc. has embedded it in order to be able to advance on the opposite land and impose maximum human losses on the Zionists.
In this regard, two regional military experts told Reuters that the Ezzeddin Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas movement, are mobilizing forces to counter the invasion, deploying anti-tank mines and ambushing forces.
But in the meantime, the most important defense tool and Hamas’s card of superiority against the ground invasion of the Zionist army, which includes the main concern of Israel’s military and political leaders, is the network of underground resistance tunnels that has spread throughout Gaza and even beyond, and Hamas It hides the military forces, cannons, ammunition, missiles, and other war equipment in these tunnels.
The importance of these tunnels is so great that Washington Post columnist David Ignatius says that analysts working on the map of the “bloody” battle between Israel and the Palestinian resistance sometimes speak of “two Gazas”, one of which can be observation because it is above the ground and the other is an underground city of tunnels. According to the article, Hamas uses these tunnels — dug into the sandy soil in a honeycomb pattern, which Gazans call “metros” — as a multi-layered approach to defense in depth.
The tunnels of the Gaza Strip are one of the main elements of stability and empowerment of Palestinians against the siege and occupation. This secret underground network has expanded during the many years of Hamas rule over Gaza and is considered a vital means to deal with the full-scale and inhumane siege of the region through the transportation of goods, providing weapons, and carrying out military and resistance operations against Israeli forces.
In this regard, Shaul Shai, the former head of the Israeli occupation army’s history department, in his book titled “Underground War and Important Challenges for Our Forces” referred to the “tunnel problem” in Gaza and attributed it to the historical experience in the Vietnam War and the defeat of the American forces. It compares to the challenge of the tunnels of the Vietnamese soldiers in the south of this country known as the “Viet Cong”.
However, in 2016, the head of Hamas’s political office, Ismail Haniyeh, in the year that Israel began the massive destruction of the Gaza tunnels, at the funeral ceremony of a number of “logistical martyrs” who worked in the tunnel digging, gave a more frightening news of the experience of the Vietnam War. He exposed it to the Zionists and declared that the Gaza resistance “built tunnels bigger than the Vietnamese tunnels that are taught in military universities”.
According to the statement of the leader of Hamas, if the Vietnamese were able to dig tunnels with a length of about 270 km, does this mean that the tunnels of Hamas in Gaza have exceeded 500 km?
History of tunnels in Gaza
The history of tunnels in the Gaza Strip dates back to the 1990s when some families living along the Rafah border with Egypt started digging small tunnels to smuggle small arms and goods. With the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, Palestinian groups began to exploit these tunnels to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip and strengthen their military power.
Many ways were created through tunnels, which were used to get weapons from Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, etc. On September 26, 2001, through a 150-meter-long tunnel, al-Qassam battalions targeted the Israeli military base “Termid” in Rafah, in which explosives were planted under the base, resulting in the death of 5 Israeli soldiers. They were killed and some were injured. This operation is considered to be the beginning of the type of operation that was later called “tunnel weapon”.
The resistance has used the tunnels as a means to overcome the environmental isolation and the low strategic depth of Gaza in order to hide and carry out surprise attacks. These tunnels became a vital tool for supplying weapons and strengthening the resistance force in the Gaza Strip and were used in many successful operations against Israeli forces.
Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000, the Al-Qassam Brigades have relied on tunnels as their primary weapon in counter-occupation operations inside and outside the Gaza Strip. Some of these operations include the bombing of the Hardoun site in 2003, the piercing arrow, and the Rafah crossing in 2004.