Update: 5/12/2023 8:13 PM
Issued by: 5/12/2023, 8:13 p.m
Tel Aviv – The Israeli army has a plan ready to flood the tunnels under the Gaza Strip with seawater in order to drive out militants of the Palestinian movement Hamas, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Monday, citing unnamed US officials. According to them, the army has not yet decided when it will proceed with this plan. The tunnels may also hold some of the hundreds of hostages still held by Hamas since October 7. The chief of the general staff of the Israeli army described the possible flooding of the tunnels as a “good idea”, writes the DPA agency.
According to the WSJ, the Israeli military installed five large water pumps last month near the Shati camp near Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip. These pumps can pump thousands of cubic meters of water into the tunnels per hour and flood the tunnels within weeks. The Hamas tunnel system under the Gaza Strip is about five hundred kilometers long, the BBC server wrote earlier.
Israeli Army Chief of Staff Herci Halevi told the WSJ article that Israel has “various ways to deal with the tunnels … including using explosives to destroy them and other ways to prevent Hamas fighters from using the tunnels for attacks on our soldiers”. About flooding the tunnels with seawater, he said that “it’s a good idea”, but did not want to comment on the details, writes The Times of Israel website. According to Halevi, the Israeli army is considering any options to deprive Hamas of the advantage that the tunnels represent for it.
WSJ sources said there is no consensus within the US government on the plan. Some fear that seawater in the tunnels, where Hamas also stores weapons and explosives, could contaminate groundwater and agricultural land in the Gaza Strip and damage the structure of buildings that are still standing and have not collapsed in Israeli bombardment.
“We don’t even know how successful such a plan would be, because no one knows the details of the placement of the tunnels,” a source told the American newspaper.
The Israeli army announced on Sunday that it had discovered more than 800 tunnel shafts and destroyed about 500 of them since the start of its ground operation in the Gaza Strip in late October. In addition to the shafts, the army also destroyed several hundred tunnels. “The shafts were located in civilian areas and many of them were near or inside schools, nurseries or mosques,” said the army, which said it had found weapons in some of the tunnels.
In the past, Hamas also used the tunnels to smuggle weapons and explosives into the Gaza Strip from neighboring Egypt. In 2015, according to the WSJ, he flooded tunnels near the Rafah crossing used by smugglers with seawater, drawing criticism from farmers whose crops he destroyed.
The current war was started by the Hamas movement with an unprecedented attack on the south of Israel, during which they killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted another 240 people to the Gaza Strip. In the only truce so far, which ended after a week last Friday, Hamas released 110 people in exchange for about 240 Palestinian prisoners. In response to the attack by the Palestinian movement, Israel launched a large-scale bombardment of the Gaza Strip and a ground operation at the end of October, according to Palestinian data, nearly 16,250 people died, of which more than two-thirds were women and children.
