In an interview, he recalled the ultimate days of the battle for the Iraqi metropolis of Mosul, the place Islamic State fighters hid in a collection of tunnels in 2017. “Our Iraqi soldiers were clearing out, using bulldozers, ISIS fighters who were literally dug into the rubble,” he mentioned. “It was very, very brutal.”
Tunnels have been part of life in Gaza for years, however they sharply multiplied after 2007, when Hamas took management of the enclave and Israel tightened its blockade. Palestinians responded by constructing tons of of tunnels to smuggle in meals, items, individuals and weapons.
The tunnels value Hamas about $3 million every, in accordance with the Israeli army. Some are made with prefabricated concrete and iron, and have medical rooms for offering assist to wounded fighters. Others have areas 130 ft beneath floor the place individuals can conceal for months.
In Israel, individuals usually discuss with the tunnel system as “lower Gaza” or the “metro.”
Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old lady who was held hostage by Hamas for 17 days this month, described being marched for miles by way of a “spider web” of tunnels. She informed reporters on Tuesday that Hamas militants led her by way of the moist and humid underground corridors to “a big hall where some 25 kidnapped were concentrated.”
After two or three hours, they put 5 individuals from her kibbutz in a separate room, she mentioned.
At a news convention on Friday, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli army spokesman, accused Hamas of constructing tunnels and different services beneath Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza, the territory’s largest medical heart. He performed an intercepted audio recording and displayed an illustration of the subterranean advanced.
General Votel, who visited a tunnel managed by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah close to Israel’s border, mentioned he was “taken aback at the level of effort that is involved in creating these things.”
“This wasn’t just holes in the ground, it was an architecture,” he mentioned. “They were linked to rooms and built in a way to withstand strikes to the surface.”
As Hamas expanded the underground system, it hid the entrances to the tunnels in homes and different small buildings on Egypt’s facet of the border, mentioned Joel Roskin, a geology professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who studied tunnels throughout his time within the Israeli army. Those tunnels allowed items to be smuggled in from Egypt.
The tunnel system stretches all the best way to the Israeli border within the north.
A decade in the past, Egypt undertook an effort to destroy the tunnels alongside its border, dumping sewage into some and leveling homes that hid entrances, Mr. Roskin mentioned.
Israel has restricted visibility into tunnel exercise on the Egyptian facet of the border, he added. Many of the networks finish in Northern Sinai, however the Egyptian authorities has hardly ever allowed Israeli researchers or authorities officers to go to the world, so it isn’t clear what number of cross-border tunnels stay.
Source: www.nytimes.com