Free Republic

Russia said that reports of proposals to flood the tunnels were shocking and warned that "if done, this will be a war crime." "Such flooding could be considered analogous to 'do not spare them' order, but it is not only about that and not only about civilians who may be in those tunnels," the statement read. "Of course, there most likely will be civilians, for where else would they go from the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza." Over the last two months, Russia has repeatedly condemned Israel's actions in Gaza, with Vladimir Putin initially blaming the Hamas attacks in Israel as...

Arab man asks why Hamas has built hundreds of kilometers of Hamas tunnels under Gaza but not a single air raid shelter for civilians.

The biggest problem confronting Israel in its war on Hamas is how to destroy the Gaza tunnel networks and the terrorist operations therein. Bombing works—mostly—but there’s a better way. Not only would it dramatically reduce Israeli military and Gazan civilian casualties, but it would effectively destroy the tunnel systems for the long term. That solution is to flood the tunnels with seawater from the adjacent Mediterranean. I worked on the Gaza Strip back in the 1990s. The U.S. government was pouring tens of millions of tax dollars into development assistance there on engineering infrastructure, housing, and related projects. Part of...

Israel may use a new weapon called “sponge bombs” to seal and block off Hamas tunnels. The Israel Defense Force could deploy the new handheld devices to negotiate Hamas’ labyrinthine tunnel system –and trap any hidden fighters in them once they launch their long-awaited ground invasion into Gaza, according to reports. The sponge bombs consist of chemical compounds based around a liquid emulsion. It can be thrown into a tunnel where it swiftly expands and hardens.

Official says without power, the ventilation systems in Hamas' tunnels won't work and leaders will be forced to leave tunnels or suffocate. Hamas fears that in the coming days, the Gaza Strip will run out of fuel and there will be no electricity, which will cause the ventilation systems in the tunnels dug under the enclave to shut down, a security official told Walla today (Tuesday). When the electricity runs out, the Hamas terrorists will be forced out of the tunnels into the open air, he claimed. "According to a calculation made by the security establishment, and an analysis of...

Israeli officials say that they executed an aerial strike on a mosque inside Gaza that was being used as a command center for terrorists who were preparing to carry out “a significant and imminent terror attack.” The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it launched the attack on the command center located under the Al-Ansar Mosque early Sunday local time in conjunction with Shin Bet, an Israeli intelligence agency. “In a joint IDF and ISA activity, the IAF conducted an aerial strike on an underground terror compound in the Al-Ansar mosque in Jenin,” the IDF said in a statement. “The mosque...

TEL AVIV – As the debate over Donald Trump’s proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border continues to dominate the presidential race, Israel is reportedly planning to move ahead with a massive above and underground concrete barrier along the entire border with the Gaza Strip. The barrier was revealed on Thursday in a story splashed across the cover of Yedioth Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper. The story was published with the approval of the country’s defense ministry. Yedioth’s affiliated website, Ynetnews, has the details:

Cairo has been pumping water into Gaza's underground network of tunnels to stop the flow of weapons from the coastal envoy to militants in Sinai. GAZA - Mahmoud Bakeer speaks with despair about the night of the flash flood, when he screamed at his wife and five children to flee their home on Gaza's border with Egypt as the water rushed in. They made it to safety during the flooding last week, but a network of Palestinian tunnels running under the frontier town of Rafah is now water-logged, destroyed by Cairo to sever what it says is a weapons smuggling...

Egypt's pumping of salt water from the nearby Mediterranean into the tunnels is not only creating a mess as it rises to the surface. Palestinian officials say it is also contaminating water supplies as well as threatening to wreck farmland and spread disease. Local residents say that at the peak of the tunnel business, after Hamas Islamists seized the Gaza Strip in 2007 and Israel tightened a closure of its crossings into the enclave, nearly 2,500 underground passages snaked under the border with Egypt. The direction of traffic was mainly into Gaza. Commercial goods - and weapons smuggled in separate...

Iran has sent Hamas’s military wing tens of millions of dollars to help it rebuild the network of tunnels in Gaza destroyed by Israel’s invasion last summer, intelligence sources have told The Sunday Telegraph. It is also funding new missile supplies to replenish stocks used to bombard residential neighbourhoods in Israel during the war, code-named Operation Protective Edge by Israel. The renewed funding is a sign that the two old allies are putting behind them a rift caused by the conflict in Syria, where Shia Iran is backing President Bashar al-Assad against Hamas’s mainly Sunni allies. Iran has sponsored Hamas’s...

Gunmen armed with rocket-propelled grenades attacked several military checkpoints in Egypt’s Sinai region, killing 15 soldiers and two civilians, security sources said. The attacks defied one of the toughest security crackdowns in the country’s history. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks but militants who support Islamic State have previously carried out similar operations in the Sinai Peninsula.

In a weekend interview with Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, IDF Southern Command head General Sami Turgeman said that Hamas is back at it—attempting to dig tunnels into Israel. While the IDF destroyed most, if not all, of the tunnels Hamas had dug into Israel in previous years during Operation Protective Edge, it appeared that the terror group was using the resources that are now pouring into Gaza to rebuild homes and businesses to instead rebuild its terror network, said Turgeman. “We are keeping a close eye on Hamas,” Turgeman said. “It is clear that they have gone back to digging...

IDF soldier guards weapons confiscated from inside a tunnel near Kibbutz Sufa, July 17, 2014. Photo Credit: IDF Spokesperson The IDF has destroyed “the remains” of a terrorist tunnel that led from Gaza into southern Israel, apparently discovered during last summer’s Operation Protective Edge. The tunnel “penetrated into Israel from the Gaza Strip,” the IDF Spokesperson revealed this morning, Feb. 9 in a statement sent by SMS to media. “During the activity, forces discovered a cache of weapons and explosives,” the statement continued. This indicates — at least to this writer — that either the tunnel was not completely destroyed...

January 29, 2015: Israel believes Iran is now helping Hezbollah to build tunnels under the Lebanese border. The evidence is piling up and an effort is underway to find and breach one and examine it. Since the 50 Day War with Hamas ended last August in Gaza Israel has been examining the massive amounts of evidence it collected in the 32 Hamas tunnels into Israel that were discovered and destroyed. Comparing notes with the CIA and other Western intel agencies it was determined that these tunnels were of a new design probably supplied by Iran. Apparently nearly $100 million of...

Critics who think Israel is taking a heavy-handed approach in destroying Hamas terror tunnels should see what Egypt has in mind. Facing the same type of underground routes out of Gaza that allowed terrorists to mount attacks on Israel, Egypt is considering creating a huge, 1,000-meter buffer zone in the Sinai Peninsula – they have already evicted 10,000 people in the process of clearing the first 500 meters -- and digging a deep-water trench that would flood any future efforts to carve subterranean routes for smuggling weapons and terrorists in and out of Gaza. And unlike the fierce resistance and...

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visits southern Israel, Gaza Strip • Ban: The build-destroy, build-destroy cycle in Gaza must be broken • Ban tours terror tunnel near Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha, calls threats posed by rockets and tunnels "not acceptable." The U.N. Human Rights Council's investigation of Operation Protective Edge will go ahead as planned, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the two met in Jerusalem earlier this week. Israel tried to convince Ban that an internal Israeli probe of the recent Gaza operation would be sufficient, but Ban made clear he would await the results of the...

A recent Al-Jazeera TV report took the viewers down into new tunnels dug by the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, after the Gaza cease-fire. "We are getting these tunnels ready for the next battle, in order to launch attacks and fire mortars and artillery. These tunnels will also have other uses, which we will not disclose," said a masked militant. The report aired on September 4.

A third of the houses on the main street of this Bedouin town near Egypt's border with Gaza look derelict, but inside they buzz with the activity of tunnel smugglers scrambling to survive a security crackdown by the Egyptian army. Smugglers and tunnel owners, who once publicly advertised their services, have taken over the nearly two dozen single-storey concrete structures and boarded up their doors and windows to avoid the attention of the authorities. While tunnels used by Gaza's dominant Hamas militants to infiltrate Israel were a priority target of an Israeli offensive in the Palestinian enclave this summer, many...

Hamas executed dozens of diggers responsible for its extensive tunnel system in past weeks, fearing the workers would reveal the site locations to Israel, a report on the Mako website’s army blog said. There was no independent confirmation of the report The tunnelers, many of whom constructed the tunnels over the course of months, would dig for 8-12 hours a day, and received a monthly wage of $150-$300, according to the blog. Sources in Gaza told the website that Hamas took a series of precautions to prevent information from reaching Israel. The terror organization would reportedly blindfold the excavators en...

New anti-tunnel technology to be field-tested soon. Two solutions were picked out of 700 suggested. According to a senior IDF officer, the military is about to carry out comprehensive field tests of technological means for locating tunnels. The technology has already been successfully tested in laboratory conditions. If the experiment is successful, the systems will be deployed around Gaza at a cost of a billion to 1.5 billion shekels. The senior officer said that the IDF had received about 700 offers for anti-tunnel systems, and chose two. The senior officer also spoke about the Iron Dome system and confirmed that...