What lies in wait for Israeli ground troops in Gaza, security sources say, is a Hamas tunnel network hundreds of kilometres long and up to 80 metres deep, described by one freed hostage as “a spider’s web” and by one expert as the “Viet Cong times 10”.
The Palestinian Islamist group has different kinds of tunnels running beneath the sandy 360-sq-km coastal strip and its borders - including attack, smuggling, storage and operational burrows, Western and Middle East sources familiar with the matter said.
The United States believes Israel’s special forces will face an unprecedented challenge having to battle Hamas militants while trying to avoid killing hostages held below ground, a U.S. official said.
Unlike in Vietnam, can’t we use aerial surveillance to detect these tunnels? If you know where they’re going you have a big advantage in sealing them off and it’s much more difficult to unseal tunnels from the inside.
IDF can probably find entrances that are in use, but probably can’t easily detect how those entrances connect to each other, or what is actually in the tunnels (a weapons cache? Communications bunker? Hostages? Nothing?) Not to mention emergency exits or booby traps. If IDF seals an entrance, how do they know there isn’t a back door that nobody uses regularly? How do they know they aren’t sealing hostages inside too?
Yes the United States has had flying gpdr since like the 80s iirc so I’m going to bet so does Israel.