Politics Israeli military: Three-meter-high tunnel under Gaza border with Egypt

According to the Israeli military, it has discovered a three-metre-high tunnel under the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. This was discovered in the border town of Rafah while searching for underground passages, according to the armed forces. A few days ago, soldiers came across this particularly well-developed tunnel.

The Islamist Hamas, which controlled the entire Gaza Strip until the start of the war on October 7, 2023, had even been able to send vehicles through this underground passage, it said. The military destroyed these facilities and took precautions to ensure that they could not be rebuilt, the army explained. The information could not initially be independently verified.

Underground passages leading from the coastal area to Egypt are said to have enabled Hamas to obtain sufficient supplies of weapons, ammunition and other goods. After almost ten months of war, Israel has so far only managed to destroy a fraction of the tunnels in the Gaza Strip.

Over the years, Hamas has criss-crossed the entire Gaza Strip with a network of tunnels with a total length of hundreds of kilometers. It is suspected that the head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Jihia al-Sinwar, is also hiding in these tunnels.

On October 7, terrorists from Hamas and other groups attacked southern Israel. In the unprecedented massacre, they killed around 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. It was the trigger for the Gaza War, which continues to this day.

SDA