Israel-Gaza latest: Israel tells 1.1m Palestinians to get out of north Gaza now as offensive looms; ‘very likely’ Britons held hostage | World News

By Nicole Johnston, Sky News reporter and former Gaza-based correspondent

Israel says “underground Hamas terror tunnels” where militants are hiding are among 750 targets it hit overnight.

Over the years, Gaza has developed two types of tunnel networks.

Militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad have built a labyrinth of tunnels to move weapons and fighters, and stage potential attacks against Israel. It used to be said that beneath Gaza was another “Gaza of tunnels”.

A second tunnel network exists beneath the Egyptian border. 

During the hardest years of Israel’s continuing siege on Gaza, commercial tunnels were dug to bring food, clothes, toys and even cars into the territory. These haven’t been used for years. 

If Israel imposes a total blockade of the borders, they could come back.

Background

In the years leading up to Hamas’s takeover of Gaza it became virtually impossible for Palestinians to receive Israeli permits to leave Gaza and visit the other Palestinian territory, the West Bank.

After Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel’s blockade on the strip became total. 

Gazans didn’t starve. Israel allowed the minimum supplies necessary for survival, but nothing more.

All commercial activity was cut off and Gaza’s export trade with Israel and the West Bank blocked. An economist called it the “de-development” of the territory. People were reduced to destitution. 

That’s when the tunnel trade and smuggling business with Egypt took off.

Hundreds of tunnels were dug under the Egyptian border. Everything from lollies, cans of soft drink and crates of fish in ice were smuggled across the border. People were also smuggled in and out of the strip. 

It spawned a new commercial class of tunnel barons. They became rich on the profits. So did the Egyptian Bedouin smugglers in the Sinai Peninsula. It was boom time.

But for Palestinians, basic supplies were still hard to get and expensive from the added costs of the smuggling. 

End of the tunnels 

The heady days of the tunnel business did not last. Egypt wanted to crack down on it and built a metal wall hammered into the ground to block the tunnels. Gazans cut the steel and kept doing business.

After the Mavi Marmara attack in 2010, when a Turkish aid flotilla was attacked by Israeli forces en route to Gaza, Israel gradually started allowing more food into Gaza and businesses to export again. 

From boom to bust, the tunnel barons went out of business. 

What now? 

Israel has made it clear it plans to destroy Hamas and punish all of Gaza.

Under humanitarian law it is illegal to collectively punish civilians. But Israel has wide international support for its current “retaliatory” action against Gaza. 

The Palestinians will suffer now.

The strip will need to be rebuilt, tons of concrete carted away, tent camps for the homeless and this tiny slither of land will be bombed back to square one. Isolated, besieged and poverty-stricken. 

Gazans are simply trying to survive the aerial onslaught but many fear another long dark period with a total blockade of goods is in sight. 

If that happens, they may be left with no other option than to dig deep into the sandy soil beneath the border with Egypt and eke out an existence through the tunnel trade.