RT (rusia)
fuente: http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/07/31/extensive_hamas_tunnel_network_points_to_israeli_intelligence_failure_harris
Israel launched its bloody offensive in Gaza to stop Hamas from lobbing missiles at major cities like Tel Aviv. The biggest challenge to the vaunted Israeli army, though, is coming from the ground, not the air: a sophisticated network of Hamas tunnels that have surprised Israeli security officials, caused a huge number of military fatalities, and struck fear into the hearts of many ordinary Israelis.
Israeli military, intelligence, and political officials have known for years that Hamas fighters were burrowing into their country from Gaza through underground tunnels. An Israeli army spokesman said this month that the military had
discovered four tunnels just in the past 18 months, well before Israel's current ground offensive began. But in interviews, current and former Israeli officials said the military and intelligence services didn't realize the extent of Hamas's subterranean operations, nor did political leaders act to counter a threat that has become the central focus of Israel's Gaza campaign and stands as potentially the biggest Israeli intelligence failure in years.
A senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the military has so far discovered far more tunnels -- 40 and counting -- than Israel had previously thought existed. The number came as a surprise, as did the sophistication of the tunnel network. Current and former officials said that Israeli intelligence and political leaders knew that the tunnels were fortified with concrete and had space to store weapons and food. But Israeli intelligence analysts and political leaders didn't comprehend that the tunnels were wide enough to move several Hamas fighters into the country at a time, and they didn't realize how many of the tunnels ended up in Israel, particularly near civilians. (A Hamas
video that shows fighters emerging from a tunnel and attacking an Israeli military installation provides a vivid example of why Israelis have so come to fear the clandestine attacks.)
"Of course we didn't know all the details and how complex was the network below the ground. I don't think we had the full picture," said Giora Eiland, a retired major general in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who served as Israel's national security advisor from 2004 to 2006. "But I would emphasize that we did not fully understand the operational consequences of the use of tunnels by [Hamas]."
Eiland said that Israeli intelligence knew the locations of some tunnels, but that analysts didn't understand some key details such as the strength of the concrete used to build the tunnels. That's important for knowing what it would take to destroy the tunnels, understanding how they could be used to store rockets and explosives, and knowing whether the tunnels are wide enough to accommodate large numbers of fighters. All these technical details were crucial for predicting whether Hamas was likely to use the tunnels to launch aggressive strikes inside Israel, Eiland said -- which is just what Hamas has done.
While most public attention has focused on the large and growing casualties from the Israel Defense Force's military campaign in Gaza, a debate has been roiling in Israel in recent weeks over exactly what the military and intelligence services knew about the existence of those tunnels and how big a threat they posed to the country's security. It portends a political reckoning over intelligence failures once the ground assault eventually wraps up. That day may not come anytime soon: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a televised address Thursday, July 31, to
tell his country that the current offensive will continue until the tunnels are destroyed, despite the mounting international pressure to call off the assault. So far, Israel has lost at least 59 people, including 57 soldiers, while the Palestinian death toll has climbed to at least 1,370.
"Without a doubt, the full extent of the tunnels was not discovered until the ground operation began" in early July, said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The number, the complexity, and the sophistication of the tunnel network took Israeli forces by surprise, Schanzer said.
A U.S. intelligence official, speaking on background, acknowledged that the tunnels are more numerous than the Israelis originally thought. He wouldn't comment about the American assessment of the total number of tunnels or whether it differs from Israel's. But he said that American analysts had concluded that the use of tunnels to launch attacks inside Israel marked a new development in Hamas's military tactics. As to whether that could have been predicted, the official declined to speculate.
But Israeli officials knew as early as 2006 that Hamas could launch operations from the tunnels, operations that are strikingly similar to the ones Hamas conducts now. In June of that year, a group of fighters
emerged from a tunnel hundreds of meters long and came up behind an IDF position. There, they captured the young soldier Gilad Shalit and took him back into Gaza. Hamas held Shalit in captivity for more than five years; he was finally released in exchange for more than 1,000 mostly Palestinian and Arab-Israeli prisoners held in Israeli jails.
The year after Shalit was captured, Israel's comptroller issued a scathing report blaming top military officials for an "
ongoing failure" to close the tunnels. The report cited the military's "flawed handling of the threat" and recommended deploying technology that could give the government early warning and provide intelligence to troops in the field, according to the
Jerusalem Post. Such a system was never fully developed.
More recently, there have been ominous indications that the tunnels were more extensive and sophisticated than previously thought. Israel understood that tunnels from Gaza posed a "huge risk" as early as October 2013, when the IDF discovered a long tunnel underneath the kibbutz Ein Hashlosha, just east of the border with Gaza, Col. Grisha Yakubovich, the head of the civil department in the IDF's Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, said in an interview.
The tunnel was enormous: It ran 1.5 miles, 66 feet below the ground. Authorities estimated that some 350 tons of concrete were used to build it, enough to build a small hospital three floors high, Yakubovich said. "We were amazed by the size of it."
Hamas went to extraordinary lengths to hide construction of the tunnels from Israeli intelligence and military forces. In a scene straight out of the classic film The Great Escape, fighters emptied bags of flour -- humanitarian food aid from the United Nations -- and then used them to remove dirt from tunnel construction sites, Yakubovich said. Whenever Israeli air forces saw the bags on the surface, they assumed they were food deliveries, not evidence of Hamas secretly building an underground infrastructure. "This was a very clever way to make sure the IDF would not fire upon them," Yakubovich said. "Hamas exploited international goodwill to hide terror activities."
Five months after the discovery of the tunnel under Ein Hashlosha, in March 2014, the Israeli military unearthed yet another tunnel coming from Gaza. Photographs showed that it was fortified with concrete and wired for electricity. With every new discovery, Israel tried to close off the tunnels it found, but the military launched no comprehensive assault on the entire network. Nor did Israeli intelligence understand that the tunnels found so far were merely a fraction of the total number.
Schanzer said that the March discovery alerted Israeli security officials about "the beginning of a trend," in which Hamas fighters would come to rely on the tunnels to launch ground strikes on Israeli villages and military positions. Schanzer said that he spoke to senior Israeli officials in early July, before the ground assault began, and they were worried that there were more tunnels than had previously been counted. But again, the government launched no comprehensive plan to counter the tunnel threat.
