Israel is testing out flooding the Hamas tunnels. Right here’s what it might seem like scaled up

Seven weeks into Israel’s floor operation in Gaza, one of many key challenges going through the Israeli navy is the labyrinth of Hamas tunnels that it says spans everything of the Strip.

In an effort to destroy the underground community, Israel has begun flooding a few of Gaza’s tunnels with seawater, a US official instructed CNN on Tuesday, including that the Israelis are “rigorously testing out” the strategy “on a restricted foundation.”

If profitable, flooding could possibly be ramped as much as degrade the tunnel community on a bigger scale.

The tactic, nevertheless, is troublesome and controversial. Even when carried out with enough quantities of water at excessive sufficient strain, it could show solely partially profitable. It additionally dangers contaminating freshwater provides and damaging no matter infrastructure stays on the floor.

For the Israeli authorities, it additionally dangers killing hostages nonetheless held by Hamas in Gaza, lots of whom are believed to be underground.

The Israelis are uncertain whether or not the strategy will work, the American official said, however they assured the US that they’re being cautious to solely take a look at it in tunnels the place they don’t consider hostages are being held.

CNN has reached out to the Israeli navy for remark.

A spokesperson for Hamas on Thursday stated the group had constructed its tunnels to resist potential makes an attempt to pump water into them.

“The tunnels have been constructed by well-trained and educated engineers who thought of all potential assaults from the occupation, together with pumping water,” Hamas spokesperson Osama Hamdan instructed a information convention within the Lebanese capital Beirut.

The tunnels nevertheless have additionally acted as an financial lifeline for Gaza’s residents, transporting individuals, items and generally even American quick meals amid a 17-year blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt.

A device of warfare

Tunnels have traditionally been used as a device of warfare. They have been utilized by the French within the interwar interval, by al Qaeda within the mountains of Afghanistan and by the Viet Cong within the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Hamas’ tunnels are distinctive, nevertheless. They’re “very progressive of their depth, of their sophistication, of their mining, of their trapping,” stated Danny Orbach, a navy historian on the Hebrew College of Jerusalem.

The subterranean construction is allegedly constructed underneath a lot of the Gaza Strip – a densely populated territory that’s residence to greater than 2 million individuals – and by some accounts reaches a few hundred toes underground.

Hamas’ tunnels can be large enough to suit grownup fighters, weaponry, items and even automobiles, based on consultants and pictures launched by the group. Some are bolstered with thick cement partitions or are separated by steel doorways, and never all of them are linked, consultants say.

The size of the Israeli navy’s checks is unclear: how a lot water and the way a lot strain it’s utilizing to flood the tunnels it and even which tunnels it’s focusing on.

For the operation to succeed, the strain with which the water is pumped into the tunnels must be excessive sufficient to destroy not solely the cement partitions, but additionally the thick, steel doorways separating a few of them.

On the very least, Orbach says, the flooding operation might drive Hamas militants to maneuver inside the tunnels, which might assist Israeli intelligence in figuring out militants and probably hostages.

There’ll doubtless be problems

The tactic of shutting down tunnels by flooding them isn’t new for Israel or Gaza.

In an effort to close among the tunnels allegedly constructed by Hezbollah on the Israel-Lebanon border, the IDF in 2018 flooded them with cement, which ended up spilling out onto the floor within the southern Lebanese village above the construction.

Equally, Egypt in 2013 started flooding tunnels working beneath its shared border with Gaza, using seawater, sewage water and cement to halt what it stated was the smuggling of weapons by Islamist insurgents from the Strip into its Sinai Peninsula.

The water that flooded the tunnels rose to the surface, destroying crops, contaminating recent water provides and risking the unfold of illness, Palestinian factions in Gaza later stated.

In 2021, Hamas claimed to have built 500 kilometers (311 miles) of tunnels underneath Gaza. To place that in perspective, the Gaza Strip is simply 41 kilometers lengthy and as much as 12 kilometers extensive. CNN is unable to confirm Hamas’ claims.

The Israeli navy stated this month that it destroyed at least 500 tunnel shafts in Gaza and positioned greater than 800 across the Palestinian enclave. The IDF stated final week that most of the tunnel shafts “have been positioned in civilian areas” and inside civilian constructions.

However the flooding course of might have a devastating influence on the territory, relying on the way it’s accomplished.

Flooding tunnels beneath populated areas dangers damaging the infrastructure that continues to be intact within the territory. It additionally dangers contaminating the supply of its freshwater, consultants stated.

“I see one drawback with seawater (flooding) for instance,” Orbach stated. “Gaza is a really sandy topography. That implies that seawater can leak down and destroy the aquifers, the consuming water.”

The territory’s solely freshwater useful resource, the Coastal Aquifer, is already being more and more depleted by over-extraction and contaminated by sewage and seawater infiltration, based on Amnesty International.

The battle has considerably curtailed entry to consuming water, with assist companies warning that Palestinians are being forced to drink dirty or salty water to quench their thirst, growing dangers of waterborne ailments.

If all the community of tunnels is flooded, buildings on high of them might additionally collapse, Orbach stated, including that the injury could possibly be in depth as a result of so lots of them are underneath civilian infrastructure.

The objective of the flooding, nevertheless, might not be to utterly destroy the tunnels presently, some consultants stated.

“As a result of the tunnels are so in depth and since so lots of them are dug underneath infrastructure, buildings and faculties and what not, there’s a need to incapacitate them within the second, even when it doesn’t totally destroy them,” stated Matthew Levitt, director of the Reinhard program on counterterrorism and intelligence at The Washington Institute for Close to East Coverage. The Israelis might work with a post-war governing physique in Gaza about utterly dismantling the tunnel community, he added.

“I think about there’s a consideration of how a lot seawater is important to make a tunnel unusable, versus placing individuals’s lives in danger,” Levitt stated, referring to the hostages believed to nonetheless be underground in Gaza.

“I believe individuals have a imaginative and prescient of flooding the tunnels as pumping a lot water in that all the tunnel is with out oxygen and simply stuffed with water,” he stated, “and I think about that isn’t the case.”

Hostages could also be within the tunnels

Probably the most urgent concern for many Israelis in the present day is the handfuls of hostages nonetheless in Gaza, with many believed to be held underground.

The Israeli authorities is underneath intense public strain to retrieve the hostages alive.

Leaked audio recordings of a gathering between freed hostages and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this month revealed anger on the prospect of flooding the tunnels.

A freed feminine abductee whose husband stays in captivity is heard on one recording as saying: “And you’re speaking about washing the tunnels with sea water? You’re shelling the route of tunnels within the precise space the place they’re,” referring to heavy bombardment above of the tunnels.

“You set politics above the return of the kidnapped,” the girl provides. Israel believes there are 132 hostages nonetheless in Gaza – of whom 112 are regarded as alive, whereas 20 are believed to be lifeless, the prime minister’s workplace instructed CNN Friday.

Among the hostages launched by Hamas in October spoke concerning the tunnel system, describing the construction as a spiderweb.

Adina Moshe, who was dragged from her protected room in Israel and brought to Gaza on October seventh, was pressured into tunnels 5 tales underground, based on her nephew Eyal Nouri.

“The underside line is that Hamas invested large money and time on this infrastructure, which isn’t for the good thing about the individuals within the Gaza Strip,” Levitt stated, including that from Israel’s perspective, it stays one of the vital military-critical infrastructure targets. “So, by one means or one other, one can definitely count on that Israelis are going to be trying to disable the Hamas tunnel system.”

CNN’s Hamdi Alkhshali, Joshua Berlinger, Natasha Bertrand and Donald Judd contributed to this report.

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