The latest Wile E. Coyote—Road Runner cartoon is now ready for viewing. Wile E. has just dug the deepest tunnel he’s ever dug, from Gaza into Israel, hoping to sneak up on the Road Runner, but the Road Runner yet again has managed to foil him. Beep-beep. The story is here: “Cross border attack tunnel discovered last month was deepest ever found,” by Anna Ahronheim, Jerusalem Post, November 19, 2020:
This means the tunnel must have gone at least 80 meters (the depth of the previously deepest tunnel dug under the Israeli border – not by Hamas but by Hezbollah), or approximately 260 feet under the surface. It is 1.25 miles long. It took an extraordinary effort by Hamas – like Wile E. Coyote’s complicated contraptions involving Acme Missile’s sticks of dynamite – and if it was built to test if Israel could manage to detect it, the Israelis have now let Hamas and the world know: Yes!
While the military is not certain as to what its purpose was, it believes that it was intended to test the underground barrier or to be used for a cross-border raid by the terror group though not necessarily to abduct Israeli troops or civilians.
It was only dug recently and was not one of 20 terror tunnels used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad and destroyed by the IDF since the end of the last war between Israel and Gaza in 2014.
The tunnel which began in the Gazan city of Khan Younis was found after being notified by the new underground barrier system and by the noise of excavations which were heard by female soldiers in the Gaza Division who are tasked which identifying such sounds.
The detection of this deepest of all Hamas tunnels by sensors that are part of Israel’s underground anti-tunnel barrier, aided by the apparently superior hearing of female Israeli soldiers (I did not know until now that women have keener hearing than men), allowed Israel to hear the faint noises from at least 240 feet underground. The underground anti-tunnel barrier stretches across 40 miles of the Gaza-Israel border. It will be complete in a matter of a few months, but it has already passed an extraordinary test, by detecting a tunnel dug to such a depth.
Such an elaborate tunnel cost many millions of dollars – possibly as much as $5-$10 million. Imagine what such sums could do for the impoverished people of Gaza. At what point will Hamas recognize how much money and effort it is wasting, only to be foiled at every turn by those astoundingly clever Israelis? I suspect after this fiasco, they will call a halt to this wasteful tunnel building.
It was about two kilometers long (1.25 miles) and though the military sealed part of the tunnel, they intend to use the remaining route to carry out a number of experiments against terror tunnels.
The discovery of the tunnel has encouraged the military regarding the success of its 60 km long underground barrier which has a system of advanced sensor and monitoring devices to detect tunnels and is combined with a 6 m. (20 feet) high above-ground fence.
Construction on the barrier began in 2017 and is expected to be finished by March 2021.
Infiltration attempts are common along the border, with many Gazans looking to get arrested by IDF troops rather than remain in the Strip which is verging on a humanitarian catastrophe, with serious economic, social, and infrastructure crises only getting worse.
Just think what that means: many Gazans try to enter Israel, above ground, not to attack Israelis, but because they want to be arrested. Given the miserable condition of life under Hamas rule in Gaza, with the grand theft by its leaders (two of them, Khaled Meshaal and Moussa abu Marzouk, have each managed to amass a fortune of at least $2.5 billion), and the impossibility of protesting the mismanagement and corruption they must endure, it’s not surprising that some would prefer to be detained in Israeli jails than to be “free” in Gaza.
In 2018 some 702 Palestinians from the Strip infiltrated into Israel and were arrested, the next year saw 397 infiltration and only 56 in the past year. The marked decrease in infiltration is associated with the ending of the Great March of Return demonstrations as well as the coronavirus pandemic.
In addition to the underground barrier meant to stop cross-border attack tunnels, the IDF is also implementing a “Smart Border” concept.
It will be implemented first along a 6 km section along the northern part of the coastal enclave, with a combination of artificial intelligence, sensors, and drones able to detect changes on the ground or suspicious movements as well as remotely piloted trucks with machine guns that can neutralize threats.
The concept of a smart, multidimensional smart border which is based on technology and intelligence alongside combat forces, would allow the IDF to reorganize troop configuration therefore increasing force protection and raising operational lethality….
Early on Sunday morning, a year after al-Ata’s [a PIJ leader] killing, two rockets were fired from the Strip towards central Israel. While the timing was suspicious, the IDF believes that the two rockets, belonging to Hamas, were fired after a lightning bolt hit an electrical panel that was connected to an underground launcher in a field near the neighborhood of Sajaiya.
In the days leading up to the launch, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad worked to restrain operatives from launching rockets to mark the anniversary, carrying out preventative arrests and patrolled launch areas.
Hamas understands that Israel has no intention to occupy Gaza and acts to refrain operatives from terror groups and lone actors from carrying out attacks that would break the tense understanding with Israel….
Hamas wants for now to keep violence from the Palestinian side in check. It has been restraining, not encouraging, those Palestinians, including its own operatives, and those of PIJ, who are eager to attack Israel. They’ve been patrolling places where rockets are known to have been launched, and even gone so far as to arrest the hotheads who might disobey the order from the Hamas leaders to refrain from attacking Israel. They know that Israel, too, does not want attacks to get out of hand; Israel right now wants calm on its Gazan border; it has enough on its plate with the Iranian threat, a new administration in Washington to figure out, and above all, the coronavirus pandemic. Israel does not want to have to reenter Gaza, crushing Hamas and likely ending up having to be responsible for ruling the Strip, a task the Israelis wish to avoid.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian tunneling may have experienced its last hurrah. In the north, under the border with Lebanon, all six of the very long tunnels Hezbollah built at great expense have been discovered and destroyed. In the south, the Israelis have detected and destroyed 20 massive tunnels dug by Hamas since 2014, before any of them could be used. Now they have detected and largely destroyed (they deliberately kept part of the tunnel intact to use for testing purposes) the deepest tunnel yet dug by the Palestinians. Though that tunnel is at least 240 feet underground, the sound-and-movement sensors attached to Israel’s underground barrier, aided by the keen hearing of Israeli female soldiers, managed to detect it.
With its 60 km (37 miles) long underground barrier, which has a system of advanced sensor and monitoring devices to detect tunnels, and is combined with a 6 m. (20 feet) high above-ground fence, Israel has yet again foiled the latest tunneling feat by Hamas from Gaza to Israel. If Hamas does a cost-benefit analysis of its latest fiasco, it will find that the cost has been terrific (a tunnel 1.25 miles long! 240 feet deep!) while the benefit has been non-existent (no one from Hamas has managed to infiltrate by tunnel into Israel in the last six years). Hamas and Hezbollah posed a challenge to Israel with their exceedingly deep tunnels; Israel met the challenge by coming up with extremely powerful sensors that have been able to detect all of those tunnels, despite how deeply — 240 feet underground — some of them had been dug.
Hamas, the Wile E. Coyote of the Arab-Israeli conflict, has been foiled yet again by those clever Israelis. It’s back to the drawing board for Hamas to figure out what else it can possibly try. And for Israel, our endlessly creative Road-Runner, it’s time for a victory lap: Beep-beep.
