BY TYLER DURDEN, ZERO HEDGE WEDNESDAY, JAN 24, 2024 – 12:00 PM
Several sources within the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) say it will be unable to destroy most of Hamas’s tunnel network under Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged the Israeli military will eliminate Hamas and rescue the Israeli captives in Gaza. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that Tel Aviv will be unable to achieve either goal.
IDF officials at all levels, including generals, say destroying the tunnel network is impossible. “The Israel Defense Forces will not destroy all the Hamas and Islamic Jihad tunnels under Gaza. Probably not even most of them,” Haaretz reports. “The IDF is scaling down its forces in Gaza City with full knowledge that many tunnels have been overlooked. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The tunnels under the Gaza Strip were there even before Hamas’ founding in 1987 and it seems they’ll be here after this war too.”
The Israeli outlet explains that the Israeli military command was surprised by the extent of the tunnel network beneath Gaza. “Only gradually did the IDF realize that the tunnel network was much more extensive than it had previously understood and that their main use by Hamas was not for launching arsenals, but for preserving its forces.” The Haaretz article continues, “Another assumption that was proven wrong was that it would be enough to control the ground above for a few weeks for Hamas fighters, starved of food, water and oxygen to be forced to emerge.”
The incorrect assessment of the tunnels is just one of many Israeli intelligence failures highlighted since October 7. Israeli officials had the Hamas plans for what ultimately became the October 7 operation over a year before the attack. During the months leading up to the attack, several different sources attempted to alert Tel Aviv to a growing threat in Gaza.
The New York Times reported that Tel Aviv initially believed Hamas controlled 250 miles of tunnels. That number is now assessed to be close to 450 miles. Haaretz reported that one IDF commander discarded the maps he was given and dismissed the intelligence as useless.
The US estimates that Israel has killed 5,000 to 7,500 Hamas fighters. The Wall Street Journal reports the group has begun to reestablish its presence in areas of northern Gaza ostensibly cleared by the IDF.
Entire apartments and large living areas have been found in the tunnels…
Haaretz provides details on how the tunnel network allows Hamas to move assets around Gaza. “Not only were the tunnels stocked with provisions for a prolonged siege, they provided safe passage between different parts of the city and the Strip,” the outlet states. “The IDF claimed to have destroyed Hamas’ regional battalions only to find fighters from those battalions turning up in other areas. And when signs of the presence of hostages were discovered in the tunnels, they had by then been moved to other tunnels.”
The acknowledgment of the IDF’s inability to take out Hamas’s infrastructure comes as several reports have documented that Israel will be unable to achieve its military objectives in Gaza: rescue the hostages and eliminate Hamas.
“A day will come when the Israeli security establishment will have to admit that destroying the tunnel networks was never a realistic objective. The IDF can perhaps deal with the prospect of a threat from underground, but the tunnels will remain beneath Gaza,” Haaretz notes.
Now, there’s posh. And they said it couldn’t be done.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/381425
MADELINE and PELONI-
I thank you for your supportive posts. If, as some say G-D has given them (Hamas and tunnels) into our hands. we are enjoined to make the best use of them.
I consider my suggestion as being “The best use”..
But, as usual Israeli officialdom doesn’t listen. If they read ISRAPUNDIT, they’d find many useful items in the comments, not the articles.
Our members are a gigantic “Think Box”
Although, perhaps my many times repeated suggestion of cutting of Lebanon from the Litani down to the Israeli border, finally seeped through the Iron Dome of Israeli bureaucratic officialdom since they have been talking about doing just that.
Doubtful. Must be their own idea.
@AdamDalgliesh
I am disappointed in your answer and apologise to Ted this was not worth waiting for. I’ll.know for again.
I have put a lot of effort into my.posts but people must not sound off in generalities which mean nothing and exclude.living.reality.then it doesn’t interest me.
Do you wish me to repeat my main points
No that evades the issue.you do.not want to discuss the issues
Plus whoever you refer toTHEY ARE NOT TROTSKYIST
Just as Norman Finkelstein is not a Jew
Ted I urgently need to see this missing post by Adam.
He includes the phrase Trotskyism versus Israel.
I have to answer that very urgently.
There is not a collision, to coin a phrase, between Trotsky and Israel.
I speculate … Adam may be minimising the huge dangers we are facing
Please release so I can see. Every minute now counts.
It is not too late to do what I said in my comment. Explain one thing to all…the population and guerillas with various equipment (the tunnels as just one example) are all component parts of this matrix.
Explain that in its most essential aspect this whole situation in which Jews have been forced into is a huge distraction.
Jews have a new mission connected to the Global Warming of our planet.
Since the Arabs hold Jews back from this history, distract them…have them removed very quickly indeed
Jews can then focus on the great task of saving the planet.
I place massive emphasis on the role of all youth, but fighting against the ageism and woke division creation of Greta Thunberg.
First we need a party based on Trotskyism. This is not simple but very doable nonetheless.
Experienced Jews should follow the logic in this and support these aims.
Ted, please retrive my latest post, about Trotskyism versus Israell, from electronic oblivion and post it in this space. It is a reply to FelixQuigley;s comment here.
FelixQuigley. at some point you will need to face the fact that in every country of the world, including Israel, the Trotskyist movement is 100% in support of the Palestinian terrorists and 100 percent hostile to Israel. All of the Trotskyist in the world besides yourself want to destroy Isral. Even within Israel, the Trotskyist movement actocates the dissolution of the Israeli state and its replacement by a Palestinian state governed by Arabs as the indigenous population of the country, and with Jews permitted to live there only with the permission of an Arab government.The Trotskyist position is indistinguishable from that of Hamas and the PLO. If any international socialist movement is formed that supports Israel (there is none at present) it will not be Trotskyist.
@stevenl
Ultimate purpose of Ha’aretz?
I finally figured it out: To sink the Altelina. Every day. Forever.
Intel failure on a massive scale!
IDF failure! Scale?
Yet the US and their IL acolytes (IDF & Haaretz) want, generals who failed, to take charge!!!
MESHUGA!
The war of the US against Bibi goes unabated!
What is the ultimate goal of Haaretz! I wonder! Back to the “kibbutz time”!
This failure and inadequacy of Jewish leadership affirms the nature of this Palestine Hamas regime and also the Fatah regime. There’s the closest relationship between hatred of Jews, Hamas guerillas, and the tunnel system below/Arab population above, matrix. The other component is a false perspective of a divided Jewish Israeli people and their need for a new Trotskyist perspective.
The solution to winning the war… BEFORE any other plan is achieved…is to stop everything coming into Gaza and the key part of that is an independent Israeli government to have the people of Gaza take up new lives elsewhere voluntarily. Only winning the war will end the hostage problem which is and must be number 1.
The Gaza as we have come to know it is standing affirmation that Jew Hatred is incompatible with the creation of a new human civilization which must be a socialist civilization – a new living which demands the end finally of earth destroying capitalism – especially so in that this capitalism is pushing the earth towards 500 ppm carbon in OUR EARTH SYSTEM ATMOSPHERE (now racing through the 400s under the profit motive and which spells doom not only for Gaza but for this whole planet life systems.
Gaza is the place-symbolic of where the human experience all went terribly wrong but under new Trotskyist party leadership (with access to sea, oceans and all living things) must be the signpost of human practical salvation. Jews will for humanity point the way forward.
Moshe Feiglin wants to turn Gaza into a Jewish city like Tel Aviv. How about a Jewish city with an extensive high speed subway system like Paris, Seoul, Moscow, or Tokyo.
Poetic justice to it, as well:
“1When the LORD your God has cut off the nations whose land He is giving you, and when you have driven them out and settled in their cities and houses, 2then you are to set apart for yourselves three cities within the land that the LORD your God is giving you to possess. 3You are to build roads for yourselves and divide into three regions the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, so that any manslayer can flee to these cities.”
Deuteronomy 19
https://biblehub.com/deuteronomy/19.htm
@Edgar
@Madeline
A very out of the box proposal. Keep the tunnels and banish the Gazan who built them. A very intelligent proposal.
Edgar G. is thinking creatively. Of course, the assumption is that the Gazans are gone and Israel rules, once again, as it should.
Tunnels plus Palis are a bad combination. Without them, life begins. L’Chaim.
My opinion, previously stated several times, it that it should NOT be destroyed, but completely deactivated and made permanently safe with plaques describing what actions occurred here, there, etc, where hostages were kept etc.
It will the the biggest Tourist Attraction In Israel from then on. It will bring in it’s original cost hundreds of times over, in the next generations.
Saba sarge is bang on!
I stopped reading at the end of the first paragraph when this asshole referenced Tel Aviv as the seat of government.
Pardon my Farsi, but fuck him and fuck the very anti-Israel Zero Hedge.