Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – Israel seems to be relentlessly attacking Gaza. One of their main targets is the underground tunnels created by the Hamas armed group over the years to build its core operating system.
Experts argue that eradicating the Hamas tunnel network could pose a major challenge to the Israeli army.
“It will be a slow, arduous task and take months to reduce the number (of tunnels) completely, and perhaps digging will continue as efforts are made by [tentara Israel],” said Richard Outzen, non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Turkey.
The tunnel is believed to traverse the entire region for hundreds of kilometers, and experts estimate its depth to be between 15 and 60 meters.
Quote Al Jazeerain 2021, the Israeli army said that there was a 300 km long tunnel running under the Gaza strip.
Some of them are equipped with oxygen tanks, water pipes and electric lights. An exclusive video from Al Jazeera Arabic in 2021 shows a reinforced concrete corridor leading to an underground office with a working telephone line and a weapons storage room.
The system is believed to have a periphery, with shallow tunnels that are easier to destroy from the surface, and a core that houses command centers, weapons storage, missiles.
The tunnels allow Hamas to carry out surprise attacks and move quickly across the route without being tracked by Israel.
So what kind of method does Israel use to track all Hamas tunnels?
Tens of thousands of doors
To get to the tunnel’s position, Israel had to identify as many existing entrances as possible. For systems believed to be up to 500 km long, the number could reach tens of thousands.
Most of them are hidden inside residential buildings, garages, industrial facilities, warehouses, under landfills.
But Israel has been preparing to tackle the tunnels since its attack on Gaza in 2014. Relentless surveillance is carried out by drones, using sophisticated software that analyzes movement patterns and can recognize individual faces and match them against a database of known Hamas members to reveal hundreds or thousands of entrances.
If one of the known tunnels were attacked, that would not necessarily make the underground labyrinth unusable by Hamas. Most tunnels have several entrances at each end so some tunnels will always be open.
The tunnel builders, Hamas, have a huge advantage because they know the network. Israeli software may offer clues that link movement patterns to reveal each connected point, but does not reveal underground routes, directions or intersections.
 Photo: AP/Jack Guez |
To map the tunnels with any degree of accuracy, commandos had to go inside, facing great danger and hardship.
Down there, as Al Jazeera reported, GPS positioning devices are useless because satellite signals cannot penetrate the ground.
The solution is likely to use a device that combines magnetic sensors, unaffected by underground movement, and movement sensors such as those used in step counters.
Once inside, Israeli troops will likely operate with infrared goggles because the light beams actually tell the enemy their position.
They won’t be able to use radios to communicate with units on the ground, so they’ll have to use field phones, a wired telephone technology that has been around for 100 years.
Soldiers would unroll cables, connecting them as they moved, further slowing the advance. Even if they don’t encounter Hamas resistance, they should stop at every intersection and assess where the branches lead.
Small troops were prepared to stay on each side of the tunnel to resist any counterattack. Whenever they encountered a vertical shaft that was almost always used as an entrance, they had to pause, map out its position, and pass it back to the unit above.
Meanwhile units on the surface must find the opening and secure it. If the tunnel is in territory not controlled by the Israeli army, they must seize it or order the tunnel builder to stop or go around it. This will be repeated hundreds of times.
Full of traps
Most tunnels are booby-trapped with pre-placed improvised explosive devices (IEDs). These detonators can be connected to remote detonators, but can also be triggered by special detonators that react to light, vibration, sound, movement, and even increases in carbon dioxide concentrations in the presence of humans.
 Photo: AP/Hatem Moussa |
The tunnels are filled with wires and cables that carry electricity, internet, telephone and military lines. Hamas may have observation and detection tools that allow them to know the location of Israeli forces, so that they can remotely detonate bombs right there.
Israeli forces couldn’t simply cut all the wires because, as in the movies, some of the detonators might trigger when the power supply was cut.
Explosions in confined tunnels are much more deadly than on the surface. They spread further and suck up oxygen so that even those who survive often end up dying of suffocation.
Hamas can also ignite incendiary compounds that deprive occupants of oxygen and spread as high-speed flames or produce thick, often toxic smoke.
This will keep most of the tunnels from being damaged, allowing the Palestinian fighters to use them after they force the enemy out.
[Gambas:Video CNBC]
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