According to a report by CNN, a US official said that Israel has begun flooding some of Gaza’s tunnels with seawater and that this activity is a test conducted on a limited basis.
- CNN notes that the act risks killing hostages who may be underground, and in addition it risks contaminating freshwater supplies and damaging any infrastructure which remains on the surface.
The US official stated to CNNthat Israel is being careful to only test the flooding in tunnels where they do not believe hostages are being held.
- Hamas spokesperson Osama Hamdan related to the reports and said: “The tunnels were built by well-trained and educated engineers who considered all possible attacks from the occupation, including pumping water.”
- The report emphasized that experts say that some of the tunnels are reinforced with thick cement walls or are separated by metal doors, and not all of them are connected, and that in order to succeed, the water must be pumped with pressure high enough to destroy the cement walls and the thick metal doors.
- Danny Orbach, a military historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said to CNN that the seawater can leak down and destroy the aquifers and that if the entire network of tunnels is flooded, buildings on top of them could also collapse.
- Matthew Levitt, director of the Reinhard program on counterterrorism and intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy,told CNN: “I imagine there is a consideration of how much seawater is necessary to make a tunnel unusable, as opposed to putting people’s lives at risk. I think people have a vision of flooding the tunnels as pumping so much water in that the entire tunnel is without oxygen and just filled with water, and I imagine that is not the case.”
Source: Arutz Sheva