Wall Street Journal: 80% of Hamas’ tunnels are still intact after weeks of Israeli attempts to destroy them
The Wall Street Journal, citing US and Israeli officials, said that about 80% of the tunnels of Hamas Movement in the Gaza Strip remain intact after weeks of attempts to destroy them by Israel.
The Wall Street Journal pointed out that officials in Washington and Tel Aviv are facing difficulty in accurately assessing the level of destruction of the tunnel network, partly due to their inability to accurately determine the area and extent of these underground tunnels.
Officials from the United States and Israel estimate that between 20% and 40% of Hamas’ tunnels have been damaged or rendered inoperable, most of them in northern Gaza.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel sought to disinfect the tunnels through various methods, including installing massive pumps to flood them with seawater, destroying them with airstrikes and liquid explosives, searching them with dogs and robots, destroying their entrances and raiding them by trained soldiers.
According to US and Israeli officials, seawater eroded some of these tunnels, but the overall effort wasn’t as effective as hoped, as walls, barriers, and other unexpected defenses slowed or stopped the flow of water.
The Wall Street Journal pointed out that Israel has specialized engineering units that include engineers trained to destroy tunnels, and not to search for what it called hostages and senior commanders of Hamas, noting that Israel needs more forces to destroy these tunnels.
The Israeli Haaretz newspaper report had indicated – earlier – that an assessment concluded that the Israeli army wouldn’t be able to destroy all the tunnels of Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements in Gaza, and perhaps it wouldn’t be able to destroy most of them.
According to the Israeli newspaper, the security establishment will one day be forced to admit that destroying tunnel networks was never a realistic goal.
Another Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth also said that the army was surprised by the size of the tunnel network built by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, which exceeded Israeli estimates before the war hundreds of times.
