The Meaning of Gaza’s Tunnels
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/opinion/tunnels-gaza-hamas.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
A thorough opinion piece, but unfortunately behind the NY Times paywall.
Bret Stephens is usually excellent.
Key points:
Gaza shares a border with Egypt. Gazans were often treated in Israeli hospitals for cancer and other life-threatening conditions. Israel provided Gaza with much of its electricity and other critical goods even after Hamas came to power in 2007.
Israeli defense officials now estimate that Hamas’s tunnels measure between 350 and 450 miles in a territory that’s just 25 miles long. (By comparison, the London Underground is only 249 miles long.) Some of Gaza’s tunnels are wide enough for cars; some are more than 150 feet deep; some serve as munitions depots; others are comfortably kitted out as command bunkers.
there are 5,700 separate entrances to the tunnels — many of them with access from civilian houses and some directly beneath Gaza City’s main hospital, which U.S. intelligence agencies say was also used as a Hamas command center. Within that maze, scores of Israeli hostages, including a year-old infant, are being held without fresh air, sunlight, adequate medicine or food, or visits from the Red Cross.
All this should radically reconfigure the world’s understanding of what Hamas has done in, and to, Gaza. It has turned the territory into a gigantic military fortress purpose-built to attack Israel, endure Israeli retaliation and interpose civilian lives and infrastructure as part of its means of defense. Imagine any other government doing something similar to its people — say, putting the NORAD command center directly below Times Square — for a sense of the outrage Hamas is perpetrating against its own people.
That’s not the only outrage. How much did it cost to build these tunnels? How much concrete, steel and electricity did it divert from civilian needs? How many millions of hours of labor were given to the effort? What was the cost of building up its stockpile of thousands of rockets, which continue to be fired at Israel? How many ordinary Gazans had to be conscripted into the effort of miserably shoveling dirt deep underground — and how many perished in the effort?
“Some tunnel-building materials also came from aid earmarked for development projects by international aid agencies in Gaza or were purchased on the open market when Israel allowed some imports into Gaza starting in 2010,” The Journal added.
In other words, Hamas stole from foreign donors, subtracted what probably amounted to billions of dollars over several years from Gaza’s gross domestic product, and diverted labor from productive to destructive ends, all to feed its war machine. Western progressives are usually against this sort of thing, at least when it comes to the guns-to-butter ratio in their own democracies. Why are they virtually silent about it now?
The tunnels also help explain the level of destruction that Israel has wreaked on Gaza since the war began. If Hamas hides the bulk of its fighters and munitions in the tunnels, Israel somehow has to find, search and destroy those tunnels. If Hamas builds the entrances to those tunnels inside private homes, schools or hospitals, those places all become military targets.
Hamas could have averted this tragedy if it had turned Gaza into an enclave for peace rather than terror. It could have averted it if it had not started four previous rounds of war against Israel. It could have averted it if it had honored the cease-fire that held on Oct. 6. It could have lessened the blow against Gazans by fighting in the open, not behind civilians. It could have eased it by releasing all of its hostages. It could end it now by surrendering its leaders and sending its fighters into exile.
Till then, Hamas bears the blame for every death in this war.
