The Tunnel War Begins as Israeli “Weasels” Take on Hamas’ “Rats” in the Notorious Gaza Metro
According to both Hamas and Israel, the much dreaded, or anticipated depending on your perspective, battle for the extensive defensive tunnel network beneath Gaza known locally as the “Gaza Metro” has begun. Israel announced on October 29th that the I.D.F. (Israeli Defense Forces) attacked Hamas gunmen in a tunnel and destroyed Hamas fighters who emerged from a tunnel to attack their position in northwest Gaza. Remarkably, Hamas has posted a video of what appears to be the same attack from the vantage point of fighters moving across a sandy beach towards the Israelis.
While not spectacular, the Israelis have also posted a video on You Tube titled “IDF Fighting Fierce Battle in Hamas Tunnels” featuring images of its Merkava tank-backed troops assaulting Hamas’ underground labyrinth with earth excavation hoes, drills, remote cameras, and tantalizing brief footage of IDF forces operating in a concrete reinforced tunnels. And on November 1st, even as the IDF announced that its forces were now “at the gates of Gaza city,” Hamas posted a video shot from a helmet cam of a fighter emerging from a tunnel to fire an R.P.G. (Rocket Propelled Grenade) which exploded on an Israeli tank.
Prior to this, Israel’s attacks on the tunnel system seem to have been carried out from the air via laser guided bunker buster bombs with deep penetrating warheads and delayed fuses to enable them to blow up underground. These most likely include U.S. supplied 5,000 pound deep penetration GBU 28s which have been dropped on suspected Hamas barracks, command and control centers, tunnels and ammo depots, often leading to the spectacular collapse of buildings on top of them. But it was inevitable that the Israelis’ “standoff” aerial approach would be replaced by close quarter fighting in the deadly underground passages if the IDF wanted to achieve its goal which Netanyahu has stated is that “All [Hamas] operatives must die, above ground, underground, inside Gaza and outside.” With little fanfare, the most difficult and dangerous phase of Israel’s Operation Swords of Iron, the subterranean war, thus appears to have commenced as the Israelis move from the beaches and fields of the northern Gaza strip into Gaza city itself. This article will assess what this impending underground battle for a city beneath a city holds in store for both Hamas and Israel.
History’s Lessons for Fighting Underground “Rat Wars”
Not surprisingly, history shows that tunnel warfare is hellacious and often offers an equalizer for lesser armed defending forces as it mitigates many of the advantages larger or better armed attackers possess. In the largest urban battle in history, the invading Nazi Wehrmacht met its greatest defeat of the war in the 1942-43 Battle for Stalingrad in part because the Soviet defenders made skilled use of a vast network of underground tunnels and sewers. To prevent the Red Army from popping up in their rear to attack their positions or reinforce their own besieged positions via underground passages, the advancing Germans were forced to go underground. They had to fight an attritional subterranean war against Russian “rats” that deprived them of their advantages in military technology, including air support, and cost thousands of deaths. The unprepared Germans dubbed this terrifying warfare beneath the ground that crushed troops’ morale Rattenkrieg (Rat War).
U.S backed elite Iraqi Special Forces confronted a similar underground defensive system that stymied their advances when they tried taking the massive ISIS-held city of Mosul in a bloody battle fought from 2016-17 that cost the lives of approximately 10,000 Iraqi troops. One Iraqi commander told The Washington Post;
It’s like we are fighting two wars in two cities. There’s the war on the streets and there is a whole city underground where they are hiding. Now it’s hard to consider an area liberated, because though we control the surface, ISIS will appear from under the ground, like rats.
All of these examples, and many more including the American experience of fighting the Viet Cong “rats” in the Cu Chi tunnel system north of Saigon and the tenacious Ukrainian tunnel defense of the massive Azovstal steel factory against a much larger Russian force for 80 days in 2022 offer a cautionary tale for the Israeli Defense forces. For all their vaunted technology, Israel faces the risk of an underground war of attrition that gives the enemy many advantages it lacks above ground.
Hamas Plans for a Jihadi Trap Underground
By all measures, Hamas has patiently built up a formidable defensive system beneath Gaza in terms of its scale and technology. Yehia Sinwar, Hamas’ political leader, has claimed that the militant group had 500 kilometers (310 miles) of tunnels dug under a Gaza Strip that is only some 360 square kilometers (140 square miles), making it roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. If accurate, this makes this defense more than half the length of the New York metro system and far more extensive than ISIS’s lethal underground network which stymied the Iraqi Security Forces’ advance for nine months. This more advanced network stems from the fact that unlike ISIS, which only had two years to build up its tunnel network, Hamas has been patiently constructing its network for more than a decade and half. As its irregular forces faced intensive Israeli aerial and artillery bombardments and two major IDF land incursions in 2009 and 2014, its military leader Mohammad Deif, increasingly took his force underground. This was done so his command structure, foot soldiers and ammo depots (especially Hamas’ extensive arsenal rockets and mortars used to strike Israel from concealed fire holes) could survive Israeli incursions, artillery, and airstrikes.
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