In 2021, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) completed its defensive “smart wall” between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Equipped with cutting-edge technology, the wall was designed to detect any security breach.
What the wall didn't do, analysts say, is prevent Hamas from building an elaborate system of tunnels in Gaza that served to deploy and protect the terror group's fighters.
Yehuda Kfir, a civil engineer and researcher of subterranean warfare, told David Isaac in a report for JNS that Oct. 7 wouldn’t have happened if not for Hamas’s extensive tunnel system: “(Yahya) Sinwar would not have dared invade as he did without this underground system from which he could continue to survive and function.”
Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis, eluded Israeli forces for more than a year by using the tunnel system.
“I still don’t see the necessary change in the IDF’s worldview that would allow us to better deal with this phenomenon of underground warfare,” Kfir told JNS.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman told interviewer Dave Rubin on Oct. 9 of this year that if he had one criticism of Israel’s Gaza war it was that it was taking too long, a fact he attributed to Hamas’s tunnel system.
“They [Hamas] got 350 miles’ worth of terror tunnels,” he said, adding that the Israelis didn’t understand what they were dealing with. “Hamas, I say, had the greatest home court advantage in the history of ground warfare.”
Israel is now using Hamas’s own tunnels to advance against the terror organization. But Kfir said that Israel is still leaving the initiative to the enemy. The modern battlefield has become multi-level, but Israel is neglecting an entire level, he said. He likens it to a Navy without submarines, one that operates only on the surface.
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Professor Joel Roskin, a geomorphologist at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, said: “If you don’t dig yourself and experience the construction process, the routine of life within a tunnel, you don’t really understand what it’s all about.”
As it advances through the extensive Hamas tunnel network in Gaza, Israel is also learning the extent of Hizbullah’s tunnels in southern Lebanon, Isaac noted.
"Early last week, Israel uncovered an 800-meter (~0.5 mile) tunnel designed as a launching pad for an attack on northern Israel," Isaac noted.
According to reports, Hizbullah had planned its own Oct. 7-style massacre on Israel’s northern communities.
After visiting the tunnel, Channel 14’s military reporter Noam Amir said it was larger than the IDF’s 800-meter estimate, because there were turn-offs to rooms, one containing a giant generator, another a huge hangar, and others leading to sleeping quarters, kitchens and weapons stores. “I walked for 45 minutes, which felt like several kilometers,” he said.
“They [Hizbuollah] have food there for many months. With a long shelf life, you could divide it up for years. It’s not the dates and nuts that were given to the terrorists in the tunnels in Gaza. And you see mopeds. And you see a room for terrorists with plasma TVs … And you say to yourself, what have they built under our noses for more than two decades?” said Amir.
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