On June 10th it was announced that the IDF had destroyed a new kind of Hamas tunnel the previous week.
“Israeli Air Force fighter jets bombed a terror tunnel in northern Gaza in the early hours of last Sunday meant to be used by Hamas’s elite Nukhba naval commandos to secretly go underwater, it was cleared for publication on Sunday. […]
The entrance to the tunnel, which was similar in structure to a sewage tunnel, was in a building used as a Hamas military post in the northern Gaza Strip, three kilometers south of the border with Israel.
The tunnel then continued several dozens of meters underground until it reached the shoreline, and from there it continued into the water on until it reached a depth of 2-3 meters. At this depth, Hamas’s divers could go out to sea without being spotted by IDF observers.”
The existence of the tunnel had been known in advance.
“According to a senior naval officer, the navy knew about the tunnel for several months and it was decided it was the “right time” to destroy it.
“The bottom line is that it was a tunnel that would allow for the departure of Hamas naval commando forces,” the officer said, adding that Hamas invested a great deal of money in it and trained forces in the tunnel.
“We estimate that there may be more such naval tunnels,” the senior officer said, and that Hamas’ naval commando unit has dozens and dozens of fighters with “civilian diving equipment that allows undetected movement underwater without creating bubbles. Such measures are effective in the three kilometers between the tunnel and the border.”
According to the senior officer the navy estimates that Hamas also has civilian, underwater motorized scooters which can bring the frogmen out several kilometers to sea.”
Last month Israel began building an underwater barrier to prevent infiltration from the Gaza Strip by sea.
“The decision to build an upgraded naval barrier was decided upon after five Hamas frogmen tried to infiltrate Kibbutz Zikim during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Armed with automatic weapons, fragmentation grenades and several types of explosive devices, they were engaged and killed by the IDF in a combined attack from the sea, ground and air.
Hamas has significantly expanded its naval commando unit in the four years since the last conflict, maintaining a reported 1,500 frogmen. The new barrier, which has been designed to withstand severe sea conditions and serve the defense establishment for many years, is aimed at preventing similar incidents.”
As regular readers know, the BBC serially avoids reporting on the repeated attempts to smuggle dual-use goods – including wetsuits and scuba gear – into the Gaza Strip for the purpose of terrorism, even as it continues to portray the counter-terrorism measures made necessary by such attempts as the prime factor influencing the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip – and even as “collective punishment“.
The BBC’s coverage of Hamas’ cross-border land tunnels has been decidedly patchy, with the purpose of those that have been reported not clarified in the BBC’s own words.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the discovery of an undersea tunnel constructed by a terror group the BBC insists on calling “militants” did not get any BBC coverage whatsoever.