What lies in wait for Israeli ground troops in Gaza, security sources say, is a Hamas tunnel network hundreds of kilometres long and up to 80 metres deep, described by one freed hostage as “a spider’s web” and by one expert as the “Viet Cong times 10”.
The Palestinian Islamist group has different kinds of tunnels running beneath the sandy 360-sq-km coastal strip and its borders - including attack, smuggling, storage and operational burrows, Western and Middle East sources familiar with the matter said.
The United States believes Israel’s special forces will face an unprecedented challenge having to battle Hamas militants while trying to avoid killing hostages held below ground, a U.S. official said.
Unlike in Vietnam, can’t we use aerial surveillance to detect these tunnels? If you know where they’re going you have a big advantage in sealing them off and it’s much more difficult to unseal tunnels from the inside.
IDF can probably find entrances that are in use, but probably can’t easily detect how those entrances connect to each other, or what is actually in the tunnels (a weapons cache? Communications bunker? Hostages? Nothing?) Not to mention emergency exits or booby traps. If IDF seals an entrance, how do they know there isn’t a back door that nobody uses regularly? How do they know they aren’t sealing hostages inside too?
Can someone ELI5 why IDF bombs those tunnels and actively try to destroy them when they know that a lot of their hostages are held there.
It just sounds counterintuitive to me
But are Hamas going to be blamed for those deaths?
When in reality the hostages were killed due to an aerial bombardment coming from Israel?
What’s disturbing is that the Israelian government seems to care very little about those hostages.
But are Hamas going to be blamed for those deaths?>
Yes, probably. Just as when a bank robber’s partner - or a civilian in the bank, etc - is shot and killed by responding police, the robber is charged with murder. The idea is that the dead person would not have been in that situation had it not been for the robber, making them the responsible party.
What’s disturbing is that the Israelian government seems to care very little about those hostages.
They don’t care at all, Netanyahu and his right wing cohorts are so concerned with holding on too their seats that they don’t even realise that taking responsibility for this mess and focusing on freeing the hostages would get a lot of the population to back them again (they shouldn’t, but they would), to them conflict = distraction = more time to fund more illegal settlements to make sure another conflict is always coming up, all so they can keep living like kings at the expense of the whole region.
And of course not at the same level, but Hamas leadership aren’t acting in the best interest of their people either, yes, they are reacting to oppression which is understandable, but they’re doing it a way that won’t ever lead to that oppression ending, but only to their population to be decimated (if they had attacked only military targets and power/water supply and transportation routs like destroying roads and railways, they could have shut Israel down, add maybe banks or other financial institutions, and they would have put the Israeli government in a much harder position)
Look at what Hamas could extort from the Israeli government with one hostage (see: Gilad Shalit).
At a certain point, the Netanyahu administration needs to sit down with its military apparatus and get answers to hard questions like:
- how many are captured?
- where are they?
- any VIPs?
- what will it cost us to get them?
- In the short term, tactically?
- in the medium term, with respect to our ability to disincentive future attempts to kill the people we are ostensibly accountable to protect?
- in the long term, with respect to our strategic geopolitical position projecting our power in the region?
- what’s the accuracy of our intelligence feeding all of the above in our decision-making nexus?
It’s not hard to imagine a calculated decision around a table where the outcome favors eradicating Hamas over recovering hostages.
And with respect to
But are Hamas going to be blamed for those deaths? When in reality the hostages were killed due to an aerial bombardment coming from Israel?
It seems like academic distinction at this point. There is casus belli for Israel to attack Hamas. Now there’s a war. War sucks for many, many, many reasons, among which is collateral civilian damage. Made even worse when the Israeli military fights against irregular forces who have deliberately embedded themselves into and under high-density vulnerable targets amongst their own population. Do you blame the missile striking its target? The institution with justification to launch them? The deliberate design decision for the Hamas government to bunker up their terrorist leaders underneath civilian hospitals?
What are you trying to sort out for yourself by deciding how to mete out the blame?
War is war. Innocent people will die. So it goes. “Poo-tee-weet,” as Vonnegut wrote about the whole disgusting affair.
Oh yes. They should first just knock on the door and say “Excuse me Mr. Hamas, do you have any hostages in there?”
What a stupid-ass question.
Careful the terrorist apologiests will be here any second to tell you how all Israelies should give up their country, tear down the borders,live under Hamas rule and just accept being murdered and burnt alive.
I can’t wait to hear about how the terrorist child murders and hostage takers are innocent and Israel needs to chillax.
Where are you hanging around where you see people actually calling for this?
What’s wrong with you people? Seriously! No one here defends Hamas. But the majority of people think that what Israel is doing isn’t any better if not worse.
At the end of the day both sides are committing atrocities and that’s not okay and as a result the civilian population is suffering immensely.
Innocent people are being killed. Babies are being killed. People are losing the roof over their heads.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
JERUSALEM/LONDON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - What lies in wait for Israeli ground troops in Gaza, security sources say, is a Hamas tunnel network hundreds of kilometres long and up to 80 metres deep, described by one freed hostage as “a spider’s web” and by one expert as the “Viet Cong times 10”.
The Palestinian Islamist group has different kinds of tunnels running beneath the sandy 360-sq-km coastal strip and its borders - including attack, smuggling, storage and operational burrows, Western and Middle East sources familiar with the matter said.
Israeli security sources say Israel’s heavy aerial bombardments have caused little damage to the tunnel infrastructure with Hamas naval commandos able to launch a seaborne attack targeting coastal communities near Gaza this week.
A small number of narrower, deep, smuggling tunnels were still operating until recently between Egypt and Gaza, according to two security sources and a trader in the Egyptian city of El Arish, but they had slowed to a near-halt since the Israel-Hamas war started.
Shortly afterwards Hamas’s military wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, captured Gilad Shalit and killed two other Israeli soldiers after burrowing 600 metres to raid the Kerem Shalom base on the Gaza border.
And I believe they acquired a lot of anti-tank weapon systems that are going to try to hit our APCs (armoured personnel carriers), tanks," said Amnon Sofrin, a former brigadier general and former commander of the Combat Intelligence Corps.
The original article contains 1,344 words, the summary contains 238 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
“Avoid”
