Israel Army Struggles to Destroy Tunnels

As much as 80 per cent of Hamas’s vast warren of tunnels under Gaza remains intact after weeks of ­Israeli efforts to destroy them, US and Israeli officials said, hampering ­Israel’s war aims.

Thwarting Hamas’s ability to use tunnels is central to Israel’s ­effort to capture the group’s top leaders and rescue the remaining Israeli hostages.

Israel has conducted strikes on hospitals and other key infrastructure in its pursuit of the tunnels.

Disabling the tunnels, which run for almost 500km under the narrow strip, would deny Hamas relatively safe storage for weapons and ammunition, a hiding place for fighters, command-and-­control centres for its leadership, and the ability to manoeuvre around the territory unexposed to Israeli fire.

Israel has sought various methods to clear the tunnels, including installing pumps to flood them with water from the Mediterranean, destroying them with airstrikes and liquid explosives, searching them with dogs and ­robots, destroying their entrances and raiding them with highly trained soldiers.

More than 26,000 people, the majority women and children, have been killed in Gaza since the start of hostilities, according to Palestinian authorities. Those figures don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

US and Israeli officials have had difficulty precisely assessing the level of destruction of the tunnels, in part because they can’t say for certain how many kilometres of tunnels exist. Officials from both countries estimate 20 per cent to 40 per cent of the tunnels have been damaged or rendered inoperable, US officials said, much of that in northern Gaza.

Israel is “thoroughly and gradually dismantling the tunnel network”, the Israel Defence Forces said.

Late last year, in an operation called Sea of Atlantis, Israel installed a series of pumps in northern Gaza, despite concerns about the potential impact of pumping seawater on the territory’s freshwater supply and above-ground infrastructure. Israel’s bombing of the tunnels has inflicted widespread destruction to buildings on the surface.

Earlier this month, Israel installed at least one pump in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis to disrupt the tunnel network there, a US official familiar with the effort said.

The first pumps installed within Gaza used water from the Mediterranean, while the latest pump draws water from ­Israel.

In some places, walls and other unexpected barriers and defences slowed or stopped the water flow. Seawater has corroded some of the tunnels, but the overall effort wasn’t as effective as Israeli officials had hoped.

“Hamas’s strategy revolves around the tunnels – it is their centre of gravity. They needed the tunnels to level the battlefield with the IDF,” said Mick Mulroy, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence and officer in the Marine Corps and CIA.

“The tunnels are where Hamas planned (before October 7) to wait out Israel’s political will as Israel faced pressure for a ceasefire.”

Israel has units that specialise in clearing tunnels but many of those troops are engineers trained to destroy them, not search for hostages and top Hamas leaders, US officials said.

In particular, more troops are needed to clear the tunnels.

In addition, Israel’s primary war aims – killing or capturing top Hamas leaders and rescuing the roughly 100 remaining hostages – are, at times, at odds, officials said.

“The question is: Is there a real way to get the hostages out alive?” said a senior Israeli military official. “Otherwise we would have been much more forceful in our approach.”

Some of the hostages are being held in a command centre in a tunnel under Khan Younis.

Hamas’s top leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is hiding in the same location, according to the senior Israeli military official.

A raid on that command centre could endanger the hostages, a ­dilemma that amounts to a choice between killing Sinwar and negotiating the release of some or all of the remaining hostages.