What the ‘Gaza Metro’ looks like, the extensive network of secret tunnels built by Hamas and why it is so important in its military strategy

According to Hamas, it is almost 500 kilometers long and has become a real underground city over the years.

Gaza’s small territory is pierced by a veritable labyrinth of secret tunnels that the militant group has been digging for decades, serving as a refuge and communications network for its fighters, as a warehouse for its arsenal and as a conduit for smuggling goods. to the Gaza Strip and even to infiltrate Israeli territory without being noticed.

The network of galleries that Israel mentions “the Gaza metro” Due to its size and density, it has become a key part of Hamas’s military strategy and a potential nightmare for Israeli forces in a ground offensive as expected after the attack on Israeli territory on October 7.

The tunnels “They have been crucial for Hamas, a very important part of its survival.”which gave it economic activity and military capacity,” Yossi Mekelberg, analyst for the Chatham House Middle East and North Africa Program, explained to BBC Mundo.

As in previous operations, one of the objectives of Israeli aviation in the current offensive on Gaza is the destruction of Hamas tunnels.

“Think of the Gaza Strip as one layer of citizens and another layer for Hamas. “We are trying to reach that second layer that Hamas has built,” a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) recently said in a video intervention.

About 1,800 people, the vast majority of them civilians, have been killed in Israeli bombings in Gaza so far. The operation, which Israel considers a “war,” was launched in retaliation for Hamas’ attack on several towns in southern Israel last weekend, killing at least 1,300, mostly civilians. Hamas has also captured about 150 hostages and transferred them to Gaza.

When were the tunnels built?

The tunnels first appeared in the early 2000s on the Gaza-Egypt border. They primarily focused on smuggling, allowing Palestinians to bring all types of goods into the Strip and thus evade Israeli control.

Gaza, an area 41 km long and 10 km wide, is a Palestinian enclave bordered to the north and east by Israel, which strictly controls access, and to the south by Egypt, which also keeps the border closed with few exceptions. and in the south westward with the Mediterranean Sea, where Israel maintains an insurmountable naval blockade.

When Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, and especially after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Tunnel construction skyrocketed.

Israel and Egypt tightened controls on Gaza for security reasons and the tunnels, many privately owned and some large enough to allow vehicles through, became a spillway for Gazans and a business for their owners.

Basic products, cement, animals, seeds, medicines or diapers, but also weapons enter through the tunnels.

“You could say the network of tunnels has been a lifeline for Hamas for many yearsespecially since the blockade in 2007. Without the tunnels, it would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Hamas to survive and manage living conditions in Gaza for more than 2 million people,” Professor Khaled el Haroub explained to the BBC. Mundo, who specialized in Middle Eastern studies at Northwest University in Qatar and authored several books on Hamas.

According to some statistics, El Haroub explains, there were almost a thousand tunnels until 2013-2014, when the Egyptian government decided to destroy them. “a secret with votes”.

“Egypt, Israel, the US… everyone knew them because they were somehow part of a tacit agreement. “If there was a blockade in Gaza by any means necessary – air, sea and land – there had to be some kind of vital exit for the people of Gaza, and that source was the tunnels, which were closely watched by Egypt,” says the Palestinian leader. analyst..

The tunnels, Haroub claims, have also been a source of funding for Hamas, which has created a government office to collect taxes on all smuggled goods.

The geology of the strip also facilitated the construction of the galleries.

“Terrain and geography have a major impact on tunnel construction, so Gaza mainly consists of sandy soil It’s quite easy to dig. Moreover, they have the manpower and the time. They have had all the time in the world,” Eitan Shamir, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, based at Bar Ilan University in Israel, told BBC Mundo.

3 types of tunnels

But in addition to the smuggling tunnels with Egypt, Hamas also began building other types of galleries to attack Israel.

The offensive tunnels, as they are known, cross the Gaza perimeter underground and enter Israeli territory. They have been used to attack the Israeli army and the population.

In 2006, a Hamas commando managed to enter Israel through one of these two tunnels to attack a military post, killing two soldiers and They kidnapped a third, Gilad Shalitwho was held in Gaza for five years.

In another case in 2013, after residents of a kibbutz reported strange noises, the Israeli army discovered a 1.6 kilometer long and 18 meter deep tunnel leading from the Strip to the city.

A year later, Israel invaded Gaza with the aim of finding and destroying these tunnels. According to the IDF, 30 galleries were destroyed in this operation.

Israel also developed sensor technology to detect the excavation of tunnels, and in 2021 completed construction of an underground concrete barrier, which penetrates several meters into the ground to prevent tunnels from crossing the border.

These types of tunnels have a profound psychological impact on the population of southern Israel, which, as Shamir notes, was prepared to deal with the launch of rockets from the Gaza Strip “but not because of the threat that suddenly, inside Israel, people would come out on motorcycles and attack cities, as they have done this time”.

Last Saturday, October 7, Hamas used these offensive tunnels to attack Israel, but did so in a new way.

They built tunnels that approached the fence but did not go through it. ‘These tunnels They allowed them to move their troops closer to the fence and then quickly get to the surfaceblow up the gate and move on,” says Eitan Shamir.

These types of attack tunnels “are usually rudimentary, that is, they hardly have any form of reinforcement. They are being dug up for one purpose only: to invade Israeli territory,” Daphné Richemond-Barak, an expert in underground warfare and professor at Reichman University in Israel, told BBC News.

Very different is the third type of tunnels that Hamas has built within the Gaza Strip, in which its leaders are hiding They perform a defensive function.

“The tunnels in Gaza are different because Hamas uses them regularly. They are probably more comfortable spending longer periods of time in them,” the expert said.

These galleries, which are excavated to a depth of up to 30 meters, are reinforced by concrete walls and ceilingsare equipped with electricity and rails to move goods, have command and control centers and are used as underground communications channels to avoid detection by Israel.

The analysts consulted agree that this is very likely Hamas hides Israeli hostages in these tunnels.

According to the Israeli army spokesman, the tunnels built by Hamas over the past two decades extend from Gaza City to the towns of Khan Younis or Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip. According to Israel, Hamas camouflages its entrances into residential areas, schools or mosques.

This produces, according to Khaled el Haroun, mixed feelings among part of the Gaza population: “On the one hand, people are very proud of what the resistance has managed to achieve despite the blockade, the Israeli, American, Egyptian and sometimes even Jordanian intelligence services and the Palestinian National Authority. But there is also fear about what is happening beneath their homes.”

Israel, however, believes so Hamas uses civilians as human shields“These are not bunkers that Gazans can access if Israel attacks,” an IDF spokesman said this week.

Israeli aviation is currently using so-called bunker-buster bombs, which penetrate several meters into the ground before exploding, to try to destroy as many tunnels as possible.

But if Israel finally begins a ground offensive on Gaza, experts warn: They can become a mousetrap for Israeli troops.

“Gaza is a trap that no army wants to enter,” says the director of the Begin-Sadat Center. The very high population density makes it almost impossible not to cause additional victims, “to which is added this network of tunnels, which are very difficult to find and form a trap,” says Shamir. (JO)