19 thoughts on “The Gaza Tunnels”

  2. Flooding with water might be a good long term solution but in the near term, it requires a lot of infrastructure and people exposed to danger. Much better to use those foam bombs we’ve heard about in conjunction with simple fuel-air munitions. The tunnels themselves do the hard part of helping to keep the mixture rich enough to ignite so something as simple as a few gallons of LP gas with bursting and timed ignition charges would not only cause over -pressure and heat damage but it would drive volumes of carbon monoxide and oxygen depleted air far beyond the area of physical damage. Anyone traversing the tunnels for weeks afterward would be liable to enter an area of lethal atmosphere without warning.

    The down side is that the tunnels are where the hostages are.

    1. Flood the tunnels with what?
      If it is water there are two things to consider first:
      (1) Israel is a semi-arid region with limited fresh water sources; and
      (2) If you use seawater the salt water could render the surface aquifer unusable because of salt contamination.

      Sometimes a short term solution can have major long term consequences.

    2. Flooding with water might be a good long term solution but in the near term, it requires a lot of infrastructure and people exposed to danger.

      I disagree on that. A single large firefighting pump can generate enough gallons per minute for the alleged rates of flooding that is desired here (filling tunnels in around three weeks or shorter at around ~1000 gpm). Large numbers of these pumps should flood these systems in a matter of a few days.

      magpie brings up a more relevant point. If you’re pumping in Mediterranean water (which the author presented as the most likely scenario), it will raise the salinity of the ground water table. The author alleges that the groundwater is already unusable and thus, adding a bunch of extremely salty water won’t hurt much.

      1. Now start figuring how to move that water several miles from the Med to where the individual tunnels entrances are. Then assume that there are many NON interconnected tunnels and imagine dragging 12″ hoses to those entrances under fire and then relaying the word down the line to all the pumps in line that now they should start up. Also, those tunnels wont stay flooded for very long, the tunnels are just dirt and the water will soak in.

        Much easier to drop two small packages down every hole you can find and walk away to the next one.

        1. Now start figuring how to move that water several miles from the Med to where the individual tunnels entrances are.

          Hoses and pumps.

          and imagine dragging 12″ hoses to those entrances under fire and then relaying the word down the line to all the pumps in line that now they should start up.

          Radios.

          Also, those tunnels wont stay flooded for very long, the tunnels are just dirt and the water will soak in.

          Dirt+water = endless mud, meaning they’ll stay unusable for some time even after the water drains off. Tunnels don’t need to stay flooded forever in order to encourage soldiers/terrorists therein to go somewhere else, allowing those tunnels to be collapsed.

          You have any hard problems for the internet to solve?

          1. Like I said, long term flooding might be a good idea. I’d expect most of the tunnels to collapse where they were flooded but I’d also expect stretches that didn’t flood, and it would take more water and likely faster than you can haul. Just not under combat conditions.

            We know from hundreds of years mining coal that bad air can stay in isolated passages for years and kill the unsuspecting without warning.

            Then there’s dragging pipes or hoses that probably don’t exist in the quantities needed through narrow streets and alleys. Not something I’d want to do while someone could appear from anywhere to punch holes in them and me.

  3. I don’t think Israel can really use gas on the tunnels due to very bad experiences in the Holocaust.

    But this morning I wondered what would happen if Israel dropped one of those giant nuclear-air-raid warning sirens down tunnel entrances. How far would the sound carry through the tunnel system, and how close could suicidal idiots get to the source once it was blasting out sound waves?

    Would it be possible to temporarily render most of the system uninhabitable, forcing Hamas to the surface where they’d be directly engaged, and thus clearing the system for the Israelis to go in an destroy it?

    1. I had a friend who was a former OSS officer, basically a one-man army. In the Vietnam War, he once tied a branch to the tail of a skunk, lit it on fire, tossed it into a tunnel, and just plinked guys coming out the exits.

  4. –Some modern fireboats are capable of pumping tens of thousands of gallons of water per minute. An example is Fire Boat #2 of the Los Angeles Fire Department, the Warner Lawrence, with the capability to pump up to 38,000 US gallons per minute (2.4 m3/s; 32,000 imp gal/min) and up to 400 feet (122 m) in the air.

    Fireboats are most usually seen by the public when welcoming a fleet or historical ships with a display of their water moving capabilities, throwing large arcs of water in every direction. —
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireboat

  5. I’m not worried about Israel winning the war as I am about Israel losing the peace.

    Israelis need to face the tough truth that they will have to annex Gaza and settle it for good. Whatever the UN blathers on about and our idiotic administration and media screams must be ignored.

    There really is no other alternative. Hamas developed in the vacuum Israel left behind in 2005. If they leave Gaza to its own devices again there will most assuredly be another Oct 7 that will sacrifice another generation of Israelis yet to be born.

    1. Quite likely right.

      The question then becomes ‘will doing this trigger WW3?”

      Also very telling that none of the ‘Palestine-friendly’ countries wants to take refugees from Gaza.

      1. As Jordan discovered in the late 60s, to its cost, any nation that takes in “Palestinians” will quickly regret doing so. I say dump them into the Hobbesian nightmare that is Syria and let nature take its course.

        WW3? Really? Who do you imagine cares enough to launch major hostilities against Israel for the sake of the so-called Palestinians? Their Arab neighbors? They’d all be delighted if the “Palestinians” simply disappeared – and all talk of “Palestine” with them. Russia? It’s a bit preoccupied far closer to home. Iran? Iran wants Arabs to die for it, not the other way around. The PRC? Don’t make me laugh.

    2. The people in Gaza haven’t an election recently, I would hold an election within 2 years. Meanwhile Gaza will be militarily governed, war crimes be investigated and those guilty will be executed as war criminals. Also all these tunnels are illegal and anyone involved with making them, should investigated and tried for their criminal acts.

      Also investigate Iran’s involvement and if that government could found to have some responsibly for what could be regarded as high crimes- but mostly it’s about fact finding.

    3. Yes. There are places for mercy and civilized forbearance. The Middle East is not one of those places. The Gaza population must be harrowed of Hamas members and those members must be killed – especially those charming “agricultural workers” who did advance work for the butcher boys. The remaining population of Gaza should be forcibly expelled into Syria to root, hog or die. Gaza can be annexed, in toto, by Israel. Given the non-existent mercy of their Arab “brothers,” I suspect the fate of the Gazan “regular civilians” would be such as to make them wish for the quick and clean dispatches the IDF should accord their – one hopes – soon-to-be-late Hamas “fellows.”

  6. There’s a reason why Israel is using foam bombs to seal the entrances and not using any number of obvious strategies to make the tunnels deadly. It would be far too simple for Hamas to place the hostages in the lowest parts of the tunnels. As Israel floods the tunnels, they would be greeted with videos of hostage after hostage drowning to death while the terrorists are safe on higher tunnels, behind doors. How would that play out with the Israeli public? Hamas strategically took a large number of hostages specifically for the reason to protect their tunnels from all types of attacks. But plug the entrances and you neutralize their effectiveness while you fight on the surface.

  7. There was an interesting video today of fighting from inside the tunnels. It didn’t look like a human was doing the shooting but I could be wrong.

    Has anyone seen Hamas use earpro?

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