THE LABYRINTH WAR
Israel targets the Hamas tunnel system under Gaza City
The Israeli leadership is continuing its all-out war against Hamas—a war being played out in the air above Gaza City; at street level, where tanks have entered the zone; and underground in a labyrinth of tunnels under Gaza—as the death toll from its constant bombing and shelling mounts. More than 8,000 residents of the Gaza Strip have been killed so far, forty percent of them children, according to the international aid group Defense for Children, in retaliation for Hamas’s terrorist attack on an all-night Israeli dance party, kibbutzim, and small farming villages in the south of Israel on October 7. Hamas still holds more than 230 Israeli hostages it seized on that murderous Saturday, when scarcely any Israeli forces appeared on the scene for as long as ten hours.
The Israeli death count for the Hamas attack of October 7 now stands at 1,400 and includes 317 members of the Israeli military—some of those victims may be military contractors—and 58 policemen. At least thirty Americans, according to the State Department, many of them working for NGOs, were also killed, and thirteen Americans are still unaccounted for. Dozens of those captured by Hamas—among them the very young and the very old—never made it to its tunnel system because they fell or, more likely, were flung off the bicycles or motorcycles that were carrying them and were immediately executed.
In the last few days, the Israeli Defense Force has escalated its ground operations against Hamas by sending tank columns directly into Gaza and firing from a distance at targets in Gaza City. I was told by a military expert, who has served in combat with the IDF, that the tank movements were the beginning of a second phase of its combat operations against Hamas. The goal, he said, is to break Hamas’s defensive perimeter around its main bunkers and tunnels in the center of Gaza City. The tank columns “are not rushing into the center. Rather, they stay put on the perimeters, firing in from a distance.”
Such tactics, the expert said, minimize Israeli casualties while also producing hundreds of enemy kills: “The soldiers don’t rush in and they don’t fight face to face with terrorists.” The downside to such tactics, he said, is that buildings and neighborhoods are “flattened . . . whether or not civilians are inside these buildings.” Israel has consistently told journalists that Gaza City residents are provided with warnings before their buildings are attacked.
There is a second downside, he added: “The slow approach takes time. How much time does Israel have to pursue this war?” He was referring to the growing worldwide protests calling for a ceasefire.
There are two more concerns facing the bitterly divided Israeli leadership, now led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: to negotiate the return from Hamas of its more than 230 hostages, who include at least sixteen and perhaps a dozen more active duty members of the IDF; and to destroy the extensive Hamas tunnel system that includes exits and entrances underneath the thousands of residential and office buildings in Gaza City that are the main targets of the Israeli Air Force. At this point, I have been told, close to 50 percent of the targeted buildings inside Gaza City have been destroyed, and the bombing is scheduled to continue until the Israeli Air Force reaches its goal of wiping out 65 percent of the possible citywide escape routes for the Hamas leadership and its fighters.
Israel’s insistence that all residents of the targeted buildings were given notice of the pending destruction has done little to lessen the international outrage at what is seen as a grossly disproportionate response by Israel to the Hamas terrorist attacks.
The Hamas tunnels “were dazzling in their ingenuity,” I was told by an official who helped Israel map the tunnels and come to grips with the threat posed by easy citywide access for Hamas fighters. “There were administrative tunnels, command-and-control tunnels, and storage tunnels throughout Gaza City.” he said, with hundreds of entry points. It was decided after the October 7 attack that “all buildings with terminal exits and entry points had to be bombed.”
The amount of dirt and debris removed for the underground construction in Gaza City, the official said, was estimated to amount to 75 million cubic feet—a total whose disposal would require 140,000 dumpsters. The official used an analogy to describe the project, which was closely monitored for years by outside experts working with Israeli intelligence: enough material was removed to build the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.
There is no sign, I have been told by well-informed Americans and Israelis, that the Israeli leadership will stop the nearly round-the-clock bombing campaign until 65 percent of the targets for destruction have been hit. The bombing has turned long-deprived Gaza City into a deadly wasteland.
In my recent reporting, I’ve been told that at the time of the October raid as many as 15,000 to 20,000 fighters were living and training in the vast system, which included heat, light, and ventilation, even air-conditioning. The citywide access made it possible for many to come and go to their families in Gaza City.
The many thousands of Gazan workers who held jobs inside Israel are now understood by Israeli intelligence to have provided the Hamas planners with a core of data and photographs, many sent on mobile phones via WhatsApp, about the Israeli kibbutzim and local villages that were attacked on October 7.
Meanwhile, serious talks are continuing between Israel and the Hamas leadership. Hamas is aware that the Israeli leadership, which failed to protect its citizens on October 7, is eager to rescue the hostages through a prisoner swap, as has occurred before. Public discussion of those talks has not come from Tel Aviv, but from Yahya Sinwar, the feared and hated leader of Hamas in Gaza, whose spokesman issued a statement Saturday to Hamas’s al-Aqsa television station declaring that his movement was ready for an “immediate” swap of the Israeli hostages for all of the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Sinwar himself was sentenced to life in prison in 1999 for the murder of four suspected Palestinian informers and two Israeli soldiers but was released, along with more than a thousand fellow inmates, in a prisoner exchange in 2011 for a single captured Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit.
I have been told—the details are complicated—that Sinwar, who reportedly learned Hebrew while in prison, has expressed willingness to discuss an exchange of prisoners that would include the release of thousands of Hamas prisoners now in Israeli jails. The freed prisoners would perhaps be relocated to Qatar. However, I was also told that there was an impasse: Sinwar refuses to include the captured Israeli soldiers in the deal and he insists that the male Israeli hostages between the age of 17 and 45—their numbers could total thirty or more—should be considered soldiers because of their automatic status as IDF reservists until the age of forty-five.
The talks, as described by an Israeli source, are underway even as Israeli special forces and regular army soldiers are in the Gaza Strip penetrating tunnels from known access points and destroying exits and ventilation ducts as they move. The main goal of the penetrations thus far has been to determine where the hostages are being held. There has been little resistance, I have been told, with only one significant casualty as of Sunday. At this point, no major Israeli army ground invasion of Gaza City is imminent, but the Israeli air and ground campaign is gaining traction. Many of the tunnels are believed to have collapsed as a result of the heavy bombing, and it is not clear how long the Hamas fighters can survive, despite its heavy stockpiling of food and water. I also have been told that there is no power throughout the underground tunnel system and all the fighters and hostages are living in the dark.
Given all the obstacles to their rescue, the fate of the hostages is uncertain. The Hamas leaders have refused to allow the International Red Cross to visit the hostages. And I was told by a well informed Israeli that two weeks ago Netanyahu instructed Israel’s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies “to hunt down and kill every single Hamas political and military leader” in the Middle East. “Israel, ruthlessly,” I was told, “is going after the families, wives, kids, brothers, sisters, parents of Hamas political and military leaders.” He said fourteen members of the family of Ismail Haniya, the political leader of Hamas based in Qatar, had already been killed. Within two days of the October 7 raid, he said, the widow of Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, a Hamas co-founder who was assassinated in 2004, was killed. Similarly, he said, eight members of the family of Muhammed Deif, the Hamas military leader, were killed in safe homes.
“From Israel’s perspective,” the Israeli told me, “It is now a no-holds-barred war.”
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