(RightWing.org) – Israeli troops fighting in Gaza have discovered the largest Hamas tunnel seen to date. The massive excavation is wide enough to drive a car down — and one end is just 400 yards from a border crossing point. It’s a sophisticated structure that helped Hamas carry out their murderous October 7 raid on Israel.
After Hamas launched its notorious attack on the Jewish state, killing over 1,200 people and kidnapping 239 more, the surviving terrorists fled back across the border into Gaza to escape the vengeance of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Israel thinks some of those survivors, and the hostages they took with them, evaded pursuit by disappearing down a tunnel. Now they’ve found that tunnel, which emerges from the ground less than a quarter mile from the Erez border crossing point.
IDF soldiers have already found many tunnels in Gaza, but this one is in a class of its own. Most have an arched shape and are barely wide enough for two crouching people to pass each other inside; this one is ten feet wide — big enough to drive a car along — and almost three miles long, from near the border to the Jabalya “refugee camp.”
In places it’s more than 150 feet underground, making it invulnerable to anything except heavy earth-penetrating “bunker buster” bombs. Israeli intelligence says Hamas smuggled heavy boring machinery into Gaza in pieces, then reassembled it to drill the enormous tunnel. It’s lined with reinforced concrete, and fitted with blast doors to protect its occupants against explosions.
The big worry for Israel is that a tunnel like this would allow large terrorist forces to form underground, undetected by Israeli surveillance systems, then move directly from the Hamas stronghold in Jabalya to the border crossing. The Erez crossing was overrun by Hamas on October 7, allowing the terrorists to swarm into Israel, and the tunnel could have played a key role in that attack. Now Israel is determined to make sure this can never happen again.
Copyright 2023, RightWing.org
