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'.
An Israeli soldier keeps guard next to an entrance to what the Israeli military say is a cross-border attack tunnel dug from Gaza to Israel, on the Israeli side of the Gaza Strip border near Kissufim January 18, 2018.
Even though Israel has invested heavily in tunnel detection - including a sensor-equipped underground barrier it called an "iron wall" - Hamas is still thought to have working tunnels to the outside world. Hamas believes that with Israel's overwhelming aerial and armoured military superiority, tunnels are a way to cut some of those advantages by forcing Israel's soldiers to move underground in cramped spaces the Hamas fighters know well.
"There is a whole city all over Gaza underneath with depths of 40-50 metres. There are bunkers and headquarters and storage and of course they are connected to more than a thousand rocket launching positions."One Western security source said: "They run for miles. They are made of concrete and very well made. Think of the Viet Cong times 10. They have had years and lots of money with which to work with.
Egyptian officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Wednesday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said while inspecting military units in Suez that the army's role was to secure Egyptian borders.Hamas was created in Gaza in 1987 and is thought to have begun digging tunnels in the mid-1990s, when Israel granted Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization some degree of self-rule in Gaza.
A year later Hamas launched a military strike against Arafat's forces in Gaza using tunnel-mounted attacks. Among the elite units tasked with going underground is Yahalom, specialist commandos from Israel's Combat Engineering Corps known as the "weasels", who specialise in finding, clearing and destroying the tunnels.
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