Tom O'Connor
An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) engineer officer has expressed to Newsweek surprise at the vast scope of tunnels said to be used by the Palestinian Hamas movement in Gaza amid the ongoing war.
Such tunnels have been central to Hamas' military strategy and a leading target of Israeli forces throughout a conflict laden with uncertainties for both sides.
"We knew this is what we expected to see, but I didn't expect these tunnels to be so strong, meaning there's a lot of concrete, stairs, a lot of intersections in these tunnels," the IDF engineer officer told Newsweek. "Of course, we don't usually go in, but we explore them, and we see it, so this is really surprising."
"I thought it would be a little more primitive, but this is really sophisticated," the officer added.
The Gaza Strip has long been known to host sprawling underground networks, even dating to the near four-decade period of Israeli occupation. When Hamas took over the territory in 2007 following the IDF's withdrawal and a bloody rift with the West Bank-based Palestinian National Authority's leading Fatah faction amid elections, this network expanded significantly.
"That's the lifeline," the IDF officer said. "When Israel used to control the Gaza Strip, we had operations against these smuggling tunnels, and it was not just military goods, also civilian goods, but mostly military. And after Israel left, it just became more and more their lifeline."
Now, the IDF officer said, tunnels constitute Hamas' "main assets" and continue to serve as a challenge to Israel's efforts to deliver a decisive defeat to the group in the deadliest war yet to beset the 75-year Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Members of the Israeli military's elite Shaldag Unit conduct underground operations in the Gaza Strip in this photo shared Monday.
The IDF officer explained that these tunnels, of which Israeli troops have uncovered "hundreds of shafts," often serve a multitude of purposes, with some routes used for defensive and offensive means, and others for smuggling weapons and other goods. Some, the IDF officer said, are connected to "civilian centers, to hospitals, to clinics, to mosques."
Hospitals have been a particular focus of IDF operations since Israeli forces stormed Gaza earlier this month amid the largest-ever campaign against the territory that followed an unprecedented Hamas-led surprise attack from Gaza into Israel October 7.
Since the beginning of the war, the IDF has identified what it said were tunnels below various medical facilities in Gaza, including Shifa Hospital, Rantisi Hospital, Sheikh Hamad Hospital and Indonesia Hospital. The IDF has released footage of its troops touring some of the alleged tunnels near or directly under these sites.
Hamas has repeatedly denied that it built or utilized tunnels underneath hospitals or other civilian sites protected under international law.
During a press conference held on November 19, the group accused Israeli officials of spreading "deceit and misinformation practiced by the fascist occupation government on the world stage, still ongoing during its ferocious war on hospitals and civilian facilities like the Shifa medical complex, under false justifications and fabricated narratives."
Hamas has, however, readily advertised its use of tunnels to conduct ambushes and set traps for Israeli troops.
One week before a temporary truce was reached Thursday to allow for prisoner exchanges and humanitarian assistance to Gaza, Hamas' military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, released footage purporting to show operatives planting explosives at a tunnel entrance near Beit Hanoun before the arrival of Israeli engineering corps units, who were then caught in the blast when the bomb was detonated. The IDF announced the deaths of four soldiers in the attack, which was said to have taken place near a mosque.
Newsweek has reached out to Hamas for comment.
Given the danger associated with delving too deeply into these tunnels, the IDF engineer officer with whom Newsweek spoke said that Israeli forces prefer to destroy the shafts without entering them, instead utilizing airstrikes or explosives.
"We know if we saw an enemy, if we saw somebody shoot at us from this tunnel and then he runs back, their goal is to draw us into the tunnel, to chase them inside, and we don't want to play their game. We want to play our game," the IDF officer said. "So, we usually first try to kill the enemy with explosives that don't destroy the tunnel, they destroy the enemy, and then we get the heavier explosives that will destroy the tunnel itself."
It's possible, according to the IDF officer, that some may be alive within the tunnel when its entrances are destroyed.
"We don't really know how many we kill," the IDF officer added, "but we know that if we don't do that, then the next day we'll get hit again."
A screenshot of footage published November 16 by Al-Qassam Brigades purports to show an operative planting hidden explosives at a tunnel entrance in the Beit Hanoun region of the Gaza Strip. Soldiers of Israel Defense Forces are later seen entering the area before disabling the security camera. Israeli defense reported that four troops were killed by a blast at a tunnel near a mosque in the region.
Other Palestinian factions in Gaza, such as Islamic Jihad and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, have also utilized tunnel warfare in operations against Israeli forces. While ideologically divergent at times, Gaza's many armed groups have openly coordinated in terms of operations and even the taking of hostages, some of whom have recounted being held captive in tunnels before their release.
With more tunnels suspected to still be in operation, the IDF officer said that destroying the entirety of Gaza's underground routes or at least the shafts that lead to them, was a leading goal of the current military campaign. At the moment, the IDF officer said, Israeli units have "dealt with them pretty good" in northern Gaza, though "there is still a lot of work to do."
Next, the IDF officer explained, the focus will turn to southern Gaza, to which more than a million Palestinians were called to evacuate by the IDF as ground operations began earlier this month in the north.
"Once the ground forces go in," the IDF officer said, "we'll see significant damage to the tunnels down there."
While the IDF officer touted a historic level of cooperation between Israeli's military branches and their units amid the ongoing war, the IDF officer also noted that it was incumbent on them to avoid the kind of setbacks witnessed in the first stage of the conflict.
"I know that we failed as an army in protecting our citizens on October 7, and we will have to learn from that and, of course, correct, because obviously, it's not something that just happened to us, it didn't just slip, we'll have to correct this," the IDF officer said. "But once we moved to war mode, the war machine is working pretty good."
And though the IDF officer stated that Hamas does not know "what's waiting for them in the future," maintaining an edge would also mean taking into account what the IDF itself did not know in terms of coming operations.
"We can never assume that we know everything, and I think this is something that we learned the hard way, that we need to be prepared, that sometimes there will be no notice," the IDF officer said. "We don't get the heads up every time, even if we have the best technology and the best intelligence."
"It's like a goalkeeper in soccer. You can't always stop the other team from getting a goal," the IDF officer added. "And we have to be prepared for that."
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