Monday, March 14, 2016

U.S. And Israel Are Collaborating To Develop A Weapon That Will Thwart Hamas' Tunnel Network

An Israeli army officer during an army-organized tour in a tunnel said to be used by Palestinian militants for cross-border attacks. Credit: Jack Guez/Reuters

Yardena Schwartz, Foreign Policy: Israel Is Building a Secret Tunnel-Destroying Weapon

As Hamas expands its tunnel network in Gaza, Israel, and the United States are collaborating on a clandestine project to thwart the Islamist group’s subterranean advantage.

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza — Bassem al-Najar has been homeless since August 2014, when Israeli warplanes demolished his house during the 50-day conflict that killed more than 2,000 Gazans and 72 Israelis. Najar lost his brother in the war, and for the next four months, he lived in a U.N. school with his wife and four children, along with 80 other families. They moved into a prefabricated hut, resembling a tool shed, in December 2014, where they expected to live for just a few months until their home was rebuilt. Today, he is still one of an estimated 100,000 Gazans who remain homeless.

Yet while much of Gaza still lies in ruins, what has taken less time to rebuild is Hamas’s subterranean tunnel network, the very thing Israel entered Gaza to destroy.

During Operation Protective Edge, the name used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for the 2014 war, the military uncovered and destroyed 32 cross-border tunnels that snaked for miles beneath Gaza and reached into Israeli territory. Many of them, according to the IDF, began inside homes and mosques in Gaza and ended inside or on the edge of Israeli border towns.

Read more ....

WNU Editor: I am speculating .... but I suspect the deployment of sensitive acoustic/seismic equipment that will detect and locate where Hamas is digging, and in return Israel will either build a tunnel that will meet them, or drill explosives where they believe the tunnel will be located at a certain time.

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