The tunnels: How Hamas buried Gaza's future

SHLOMO MAITAL

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Consider the New York City subway system. Launched in 1904, it carried 1.8 billion passengers last year, over 248 route miles beneath the sprawling city, covering Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Amazing. It is hard to imagine life in the city without its metro.

There is another “metro.” It is the web of tunnels beneath Gaza. Its goal is not to facilitate life but to bring death. And it is at long last seen by Israel as an existential strategic threat that must be destroyed. To do so will take creative thinking and a massive ground invasion, facing huge difficulties.

How large is the Gaza ‘metro’?

Truly staggering. The tunnels stretch for miles beneath the length and breadth of Gaza. An IDF website notes that since January 2014, some 4,680 trucks carrying 181,000 tons of gravel, iron, cement, wood, and other materials passed through the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza – from Israel. Yes, we Israelis were fully complicit in this.