Israel admits Hamas tunnels ‘still highly efficient’ throughout Gaza
Israel has acknowledged that the network of tunnels made by the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas are “still highly efficient” across the Gaza Strip.
Despite Israel’s intense bombing of the besieged Palestinian territory during the past nine months, a large part of the Hamas tunnel network still shows “high operational efficiency and poses a security threat to Israel”, said an Israeli military report.
According to the assessment, cited by Israeli online newspaper Times of Israel, the Hamas tunnels are in good shape in the refugee camps of central Gaza, most of Rafah in the south, and Shejaiya in the north, and that the resistance movement still has the capacity to organize attacks close to the border with the regime and possibly even across it.
The report further warned that even though the Israeli military has focused on combating with Hamas in Rafah in the past several weeks, “good functional state” of the tunnels in many parts of Gaza has enabled the resistance operatives to get close to the Israeli border.
It added that only a few routes have been destroyed on the Philadelphi Route, along the Gaza-Egypt border.
Quoted an unnamed Israeli military official as saying, The Times of Israel reported that it might take years to dismantle the tunnels, and that “the underground passages must be mapped and the presence of traps and hostages must be checked before the army can destroy them.”
Back in January, Israel’s ministry for military affairs said that the Hamas tunnel network in Gaza ranges in length from 563 to 724 kilometers.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians. Israel has killed over 38,000 Palestinians so far, including around 17,000 children.
The regime has been enforcing a near-total siege on the coastal territory, which has reduced the flow of foodstuffs, medicine, electricity, and water into the Palestinian territory into a trickle.
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