The Israeli army mentioned Tuesday that it had begun pumping water into the huge community of tunnels beneath Gaza, which Hamas has used to launch assaults, retailer weapons and imprison Israeli hostages.
The army “has applied new capabilities to neutralize underground terrorist infrastructure within the Gaza Strip by channeling massive volumes of water into the tunnels,” the Israeli army mentioned in a press release.
The assertion was the army’s first public acknowledgment that its engineers had been flooding tunnels, a contentious technique that some army officers have mentioned is ineffective and that the U.N. has warned might harm Gaza’s ingesting water and sewage programs.
Even earlier than the conflict began in October, Israeli army officers had warned that Hamas’s tunnels offered a serious risk. Within the months since Israel launched its floor offensive and began uncovering the underground community, army spokesmen have expressed shock on the size, depth and high quality of the tunnels. Some sections of the community are massive sufficient to drive a truck by.
Elsewhere, the army has found underground chambers through which, they are saying, a few of the 240 hostages taken to Gaza after the Hamas-led assault on Oct. 7 have been held.
Senior Israeli protection officers, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to debate intelligence issues, estimated this month that the underground community is between 350 and 450 miles — extraordinary figures for a territory that at its longest level is barely 25 miles. Two of the officers mentioned there are shut to five,700 separate shafts main all the way down to the tunnels.
In December, after studies that the army had begun experimenting with flooding some tunnels in northern Gaza, a U.N. official in Gaza warned towards it.
“It’s going to trigger extreme harm to the already fragile water and sewage infrastructure that’s in Gaza,” mentioned Lynn Hastings, then the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories.
In its assertion Tuesday the army mentioned it had chosen tunnels to flood after an “evaluation of the soil traits and the water programs within the space to make sure that harm just isn’t performed to the realm’s groundwater.”
The army started experimenting with flooding tunnels solely after the conflict started, based on three army officers with data of the hassle, which was code-named Atlantis. The aim was by no means to drown Hamas fighters taking refuge within the subterranean community, however relatively to flush them out, the officers mentioned.
On the entire, nonetheless, the challenge has had restricted success, the officers added. Regardless of massive volumes of water being pumped, lots of the tunnels are porous, leading to seepage into the encompassing soil relatively than a deluge by the passageways.
