Tunnel Vision

Ben Caspit attributes the Israeli public’s willingness to stomach a ground invasion of Gaza to the discovery of Hamas’ network of tunnels leading into southern Israel:

It should be remembered that had Hamas not rejected the Egyptian cease-fire initiative, Israel would not have discovered the scope of this threat, and Hamas would have continued digging and expanding its tunnel network, right until the moment it was deployed.

One senior Cabinet member I spoke with this week described that possibility to me: “Imagine,” he said, “that we are in the middle of a conflict with Hezbollah up north. Our top-notch infantry brigades are up there, in the north, when suddenly Hamas deploys its network of dozens of tunnels all at once. Some 2,000 Hamas commandos suddenly burst out of them and embark on a killing spree, slaughtering thousands of people in the cities and towns across Israel’s south, from Sderot through Ashkelon, Netivot and Ofakim, maybe even all the way to Beersheba.

Who would stop them? The police? The air force? It would take weeks to clean up the mess, and at the end of the entire process, we would find death and destruction across southern Israel. I know,” the minister continued, “that it sounds like a figment of the imagination, but based on what we are discovering these days, the scenario is far more realistic than it is imaginary. In this region, the reality easily exceeds anything we can imagine.”

But in a translation provided by J.J. Goldberg, Nahum Barnea debunks the Israeli government’s claim that the tunnels came as a surprise to them:

When the Cabinet agreed to the Egyptian cease-fire proposal in the middle of last week, was it aware that Gaza was teeming with tunnels, dozens of which reached into Israeli territory? The answer is, Yes. In an extended effort, over a period of years, Military Intelligence mapped out the underground world of Gaza. Not all the tunnels were identified, not all the openings and routes were located, but the magnitude of the threat was known. It was found not only in the secret material that reaches the prime minister’s desk, but even on YouTube: Military Intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi included the story of the tunnels in a lecture he gave at the Institute for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv. …

Netanyahu was not the first to war against the tunnels. He takes the name of the tunnels in vain. As prime minister he hadn’t seen the tunnels as a threat that justified a military operation — before and during Pillar of Defense in 2012, before and during Protective Edge in 2014. He chose to take a risk. When he said, in reply to a question from Udi Segal of Channel 2, that he hoped the problem of the tunnels would be solved through diplomatic means, he knew the sentence had no grounding in reality.