2023-12-16 14:18:00
The Israeli army has, according to Israeli and American media, begun to inject seawater into the sprawling labyrinth of galleries dug by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. A true strategic network for the Islamist movement which has equipment and units there, the tunnels allow Hamas to hide Israeli hostages kidnapped during its bloody attack on October 7.
The Wall Street Journal reported as early as December 4 that the Israeli army had installed five large water pumps near the Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza, capable of flooding the tunnels within weeks by pumping thousands of cubic meters of water . This Friday, December 15, an American official, interviewed by CNN, admitted that the Israeli authorities confirmed having started to flood certain tunnels in Gaza – only those “where they do not believe that hostages are being held”, specifies the channel. Tests which proved conclusive, detailed the public TV channel Kan 11.
Risky strategy
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The head of the army, Herzi Halevi, simply said that it was “a good idea”. However, this option poses a problem. “There is no good way to destroy a tunnel without affecting the surface infrastructure,” Raphael Cohen, a military expert for the American research center Rand Corporation, told AFP. If the entire tunnel network is flooded, buildings above it could collapse, insists military history specialist Danny Orbach of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to CNN. The damage could be significant because many of them are under civilian infrastructure.
Hamas, for its part, says it doubts Israel’s ability to achieve its goals. “These tunnels were built by well-trained and qualified engineers, and they took into account all kinds of potential attacks, including bombing and water,” Osama Hamdan, a leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement, said on Thursday. in Liban.
Ecological consequences
Some scientists and humanitarian officials also fear a risk to the environment. In particular that of contamination of groundwater by salt water. The consequences could be catastrophic in terms of Gazans’ already very limited access to drinking water. The Gaza Strip is between six and 12 kilometers wide, and the salinization of groundwater is already a scourge there, made worse by rising ocean levels.
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To which must be added a chronically faulty wastewater evacuation network and an “uncontrolled use of pesticides and herbicides in areas of intensive agriculture” in Gaza, warns Professor Eilon Adar of the Zuckenberg Institute for water research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The territory’s only freshwater resource, the coastal aquifer, is already increasingly depleted by overexploitation and contaminated by sewage and seawater infiltration, according to Amnesty International. These three factors “have very serious consequences on the quality of water in Gaza”.
In 2015, Egypt had already carried out this type of rapid flooding operation on hundreds of tunnels linking its territory to the south of the Gaza Strip. She wanted to fight against the illegal passage of goods, weapons, ammunition and the infiltration of Islamist terrorists in the Sinai desert. The used water then rose to the surface: it destroyed crops, contaminated fresh water supplies and increased the risk of spreading disease, Gaza’s ruling authorities later said.
“Gaza Metro”
The maze of galleries, nicknamed “the Gaza metro” by the Israeli military, was first used to circumvent the blockade imposed by Israel after Hamas took power in this territory in 2007. Hundreds of galleries were dug under the border with Egyptian Sinai to circulate people, goods, weapons and ammunition between Gaza and the outside world.
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“Such a network of tunnels required a lot of human and financial investment. Hamas built it for strategic reasons, because the tunnels reduce the original asymmetry between a sophisticated army, with significant technological means, and a terrorist group which, a priori, has lesser military capabilities. Under the earth, everything is invisible – and therefore unpredictable and uncontrollable”, Daphné Richemond-Barak, professor at Reichman University and author of Underground Warfare, recently explained to L’Express ( “The Underground War”, Oxford University Press, untranslated).
After the war between Israel and Hamas in 2014, Hamas expanded the network, to fire their rockets towards Israeli soil, throughout Gazan territory. In a study published on October 17, the Institute of Modern Warfare at the American Military Academy West Point mentions 1,300 galleries over 500 kilometers. Since entering the Gaza Strip on October 27, the Israeli military has realized that “the network of tunnels is even more extensive and deeper than they thought,” analyzes Raphael Cohen. The Israeli army indicated in early December that it had discovered more than 800 tunnels, 500 of which were destroyed.
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