Wall Street Journal: Israel began pumping seawater into the tunnels to flood them
The Israeli army began implementing a dramatic step, as they began pumping sea water into the large tunnels of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, according to US sources close to the Israeli military operations.
This comes as part of an intense effort to destroy the secret infrastructure supporting the group’s activities, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
According to the report, the process of flooding the tunnels with water from the Mediterranean Sea, which is at an early stage of implementation, constitutes just one part of a set of techniques used by Israel to eliminate and disable these tunnels.
Last week, the Daily Mail reported that Israel had completed the installation of five pumps about a mile north of the Beach refugee camp.
Those pumps are used to move hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of water per hour, meaning they can flood a 300-mile tunnel network in a matter of weeks.
The goal of this step, according to the report, is to push the fighters inside the tunnels out of them, or to make them unusable by flooding them with seawater.
However, according to US official, who is familiar with the Israeli plans expressed doubts about the success of this idea, indicating that he didn’t know the details of the tunnels and the surrounding terrain.
The US official stressed that it’s difficult to determine whether this method will be effective, as access to these tunnels is considered difficult, and their details aren’t known.
The potential risks related to the current infrastructure of the sewage and groundwater network in Gaza, the impact of this process on that structure, and concerns about the stability of buildings adjacent to water pumping points in the ground.
