Fears are growing of fresh hostilities in Gaza

ON THE evening of February 2nd a tunnel beneath Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip collapsed, burying under it two members of Hamas, a Palestinian militant group. This followed a similar incident the previous week beneath Gaza City in which seven Hamas members died. And on February 3rd a third tunnel collapsed.

In a rare public recognition of the movement’s efforts to build a web of tunnels on Gaza’s border with Israel, Hamas’s prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, has paid tribute to the buried fighters. He said the tunnels were “to defend Gaza and become a jumping-off point to all Palestine” (by which he means: a way to attack Israel). He boasted that Hamas has dug twice the number of tunnels the North Vietnamese had in their long war with America.  Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, responded by saying “if we are attacked through tunnels by Hamas, we will react with great force”.

Underlying the war of words between Gaza and Jerusalem is a growing concern that the military wing of Hamas, which has invested a lot of the movement’s limited resources in the tunnels, might decide to use them to attack Israeli targets before a new Israeli underground defence system is fully operational and renders them obsolete. Israeli officials say they see no willingness on the part of Hamas’s political wing to escalate matters, but that its military leadership is less predictable. The recent collapse of tunnels is largely due to heavy rainfall; but it is also an indication of the rushed Hamas operation to extend and complete its underground network before the tunnels are detected (and destroyed) by new Israeli sensors being developed and installed.

Eighteen months after the last Gaza conflict in summer 2014, in which 2,300 Palestinians and 71 Israelis were killed, there is relative calm around the beleaguered coastal enclave. Aside from sporadic rocket-firing by small jihadist organisations not under Hamas control, and retaliatory air strikes by Israel, there has been a wary ceasefire. Neither side has an interest at this point in resuming warfare, especially as rebuilding the tens of thousands of homes destroyed or damaged in Gaza is proceeding excruciatingly slowly.

Israeli officers warn however that Hamas has been rebuilding its network of tunnels reaching across the border, 32 of which were destroyed by Israel during the fighting. Hamas’s military commander, Mohammed Deif, they say, plans to use them to launch a lightning strike on Israeli communities, probably to capture hostages, and try to force Israel to release Palestinian prisoners and open up the blockade on Gaza.

In the past, Hamas put most of its resources into its rocket arsenal, but over the past five years Israel has deployed its Iron Dome missile-defence system, which has succeeded in intercepting close to 90% of the rockets fired towards Israeli towns. “Time isn’t working in Hamas’s favour,” says retired Colonel Yossi Langotzky, a geologist and former intelligence officer, who served in the past as an adviser on tunnel warfare to the Israeli General Staff. “They have no other operational option to strike Israel hard besides the tunnels and they are worried that those may soon become obsolete. That’s why they are now using their best forces to complete the tunnels quickly.” In the past, Hamas subcontracted the digging to local families who ran the smuggling tunnels under Gaza’s border with Egypt. Nearly all those tunnels have now been destroyed by the Egyptian army.

Since Hamas took over Gaza in a coup against the Fatah faction in 2007, Israel and Egypt have imposed a blockade on the Strip’s 1.8m inhabitants. Foodstuffs and a limited quantity of goods are allowed through its crossings, but with the exception of a small number of businesspeople and serious medical cases which are treated in Israeli hospitals, few are allowed out. Over the past two years Egypt has also severely curbed the traffic through the Rafah crossing to its territory.

Talks on rebuilding Gaza and on new infrastructure have stalled. Israeli security officials have warned that any calm in Gaza will be temporary unless locals are given an incentive to keep the peace. The most obvious carrot would be to relax the blockade on Gaza, allowing traders, commuters and jobseekers to enter Israel, as Palestinians from the West Bank can.

Behind the scenes many officers accuse their own government of short-sightedness (a charge they also level at the Egyptian military regime, which sees Hamas as an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood, and therefore an enemy). They fear that Hamas is about to use the tunnels to attack Israel, unleashing another round of bloodshed.