Particularly dangerous, particularly cruel: the terrifying war of the tunnel rats Hundreds dead after hospital attack in Gaza + rocket alarm in Tel Aviv during Scholz’s visit

When Israeli forces invade northern Gaza, one of their main tasks will be to destroy the tunnel systems built by Hamas. Israeli Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi confirmed this on Sunday during a visit to the troops.

According to Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), Hamas terrorists have relied on a roughly 500-kilometer-long, dense network of underground passageways since at least 2012, some as deep as 30 meters underground or even deeper. The fifty-day Gaza war in 2014 had already shown that the tunnels in the Gaza Strip were “Hamas’ only strategic asset,” said Colonel Gabi Siboni in an analysis of the conflict at the time.

Hamas could not only emerge from these tunnels again and again – as has happened regularly in recent days – and continue firing rockets into Israeli territory, but also wage a partisan battle on the ground that would cost the attacker dearly. The Qatari news channel Al-Jazeera reported on the astonishing level of expansion of the tunnel system in the Gaza Strip in 2014.

Booby traps and scorpions awaited the tunnel hunters

The Americans had already learned during the Vietnam War that underground wars are a particularly dangerous and psychologically stressful affair. It is probably not unreasonable to assume that Hamas was inspired at the time by the North Vietnamese and their much larger tunnel networks; just as the brutal terrorist attack a week ago exhibits certain strategic features of the surprise communist Tet offensive in January and February 1968.

In their time of need, the Americans and their allies in the Vietnamese tunnel war soon turned to a group of specialists, the so-called ‘tunnel rats’. These were extremely daring, usually small infantrymen or pioneers who often entered the earth tunnels armed only with a pistol and flashlight and with bare torsos to fight the enemy. German director Uwe Boll created a cinematic monument to them in 2008 with ‘Descent into Hell’.

What awaited them underground was terrible: some passages simply collapsed, burying the tunnel rats alive. The Vietnamese defended themselves against the hated invaders with underground booby traps or even flooded tunnel sections to drown the enemies. There is also a tradition of using poisonous snakes and poisonous scorpions to scare away tunnel rats.

A bitter irony of these missions was that many American veterans suffered serious poisonings and long-lasting health effects from digging through the soil soaked with Agent Orange and breathing the polluted air underground. By spraying tons of the highly toxic defoliant, the Americans wanted to make the North Vietnamese ‘visible’ in the jungle war, which turned out to be a catastrophic failure for people and nature.

At least this danger will no longer be faced by Israeli soldiers when they search those parts of the Hamas tunnels that cannot be destroyed by their own air force’s “bunker buster” bombs. Like the Americans in Vietnam, the Israelis have had many experiences with tunnel warfare over the past decade.

The specially equipped and trained ‘Weasel’ elite soldiers of the ‘Yahalom’ combat pioneers see themselves entirely in the tradition of the American tunnel rats from Vietnam. (aargauerzeitung.ch)