Israeli Military ‘Surprised’ by Hamas’s Tunnel-Building Prowess, Likens Network to ‘Spider’s Web’

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Ilya Tsukanov

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Prime Minister Netanyahu has threatened to kick off a major military operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, even as the Israel Defense Forces remain bogged down and unable to reach their stated strategic objective of “destroying” Hamas in Gaza. The latter militia’s vast tunnel network may have something to do with it, a new investigation reveals.

The investigation, citing anonymous Israeli security and defense officials with intimate knowledge of the tunnel network, credits the sophisticated Hamas infrastructure with enabling Hamas to “wage a systematic ‘defensive battle’ underground.”

“We realized this is a whole separate dimension in which battles must be fought, like air and space, and cyberspace and the ground space,” a security source said. “It’s like a spider’s web: if you cut off one tunnel, alternative tunnels automatically appear and [the network] can continue to exist.”

Channel 12 emphasized that even more than nine months into the war in Gaza, “the IDF knows that they do not know everything about the huge tunnel project.”

“Even now we do not know the full picture and we do not have a complete and hermetic grip on the entire tunnel system, because if we did, we would have eliminated Hamas’s supremacy in this area,” a source said.

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The report compared the Gaza tunnel network to a similar network dug by South Vietnamese partisans fighting the US military in the 1960s, suggesting that this “low-tech” strategy was “back in fashion,” this time in Gaza, and that the Israeli military has been “forced to adapt.”

The Hamas tunnel network is said to run the entirety of the Gaza Strip, allowing the militia and its allies to transport fighters and logistics under cover and away from the watchful eye of Israeli intelligence, and to maintain communications underground to aid in commanders’ planning

The militia has been able to set up entire weapons production facilities underground, according to the report, with Israeli officials estimating that basic tunnel cost at roughly $275,000 per kilometer, and more in the case of connecting tunnels, production sites and strategic points.

“I think we haven’t really met a challenge that was completely new to us at the systemic level,” a defense establishment source said. “Maybe there were specific things, like the fact that we were surprised by Hamas’s engineering capabilities – building elevators in tunnels, multiple levels, etc. This does not challenge us as a military force, but yes, Hamas’s engineering ability is very good” in terms of understanding soil behavior and connectivity, the source admitted.

“We encountered a lot of things we knew we would encounter, but in much larger quantities than we estimated: obstructions, top doors, chargers, the amount of shafts [to the outside world],” the defense source added.

When asked why the military had failed to address the Gaza tunnel network despite claiming to know about its extent ahead of time, an officer told Channel 12 that the military was in the midst of an internal investigation on the events of October 7 and the events proceeding them.

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One source said that while destroying the entirety of the Hamas tunnel network is technically possible, “it would take many more years.” Accordingly, they said, the military has sought to focus on the “centers of gravity” instead of each and every separate tunnel.

The war in Gaza is set to enter its tenth month in a week-and-a-half, with militants led by Hamas complemented by over half a dozen other Palestinian militias facing off against the Israeli military in the tunnels and above ground in the ruins of Gaza’s cities. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict to date, the vast majority of them civilians in Gaza, according to the local authorities.

Bombshell-reporting by Israeli media in April revealed that the Israeli military has been using an AI-generated “kill list” system known as Lavender to direct the bombardment of Gaza, with the program having little to no human oversight, and affording generous tolerances in which it is deemed acceptable to kill 15, 20 or even 100 civilians to eliminate a single suspected Hamas “terrorist operative.”