Israel engaged in tunnel warfare in search for Hamas leaders

 Telegraph:

Less than a mile away from where we are standing, the constant rattle of gunfire is broken only by the occasional bone-shaking explosion. Here in an outer neighbourhood of Khan Younis, the Gazan city that has been gripped by the bloodiest street battles of this bloodiest of conflicts, the devastation of war is obvious.

The ground has been flattened, except for huge piles of rubble where grand villas, owned by the Palestinian elite, have been demolished. A combination of Israeli bulldozers and explosives has laid waste to Khan Younis’s fanciest suburb.

This is the buffer zone that Israel is now creating to protect neighbouring communities from any future incursion.

But it’s under the ground that’s the problem for Israel’s troops. “It’s no longer 180-degree fighting,” says one of the soldiers with the 55th Paratroopers Brigade, part of the 98th airborne division.

The soldier motions in front of him, showing how a normal battle would be conducted with comrades behind and the enemy in front in a semi-circular arc. The war in Gaza, sparked by the Oct 7 massacre of civilians on Israeli kibbutzes and at a music festival, is different.

“It’s not even 360 degrees,” says the paratrooper, referring to what might be expected in close combat urban fighting. “This is 720 degrees.”

The soldier looks down into the dirt. The Hamas terrorists are beneath his feet. Catching and killing them is not proving easy. Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader and mastermind of the October 7 attacks, remains at large. “When we see him, we will kill him,” says a senior commander.

Beneath us are, according to the Israeli colonel accompanying us, 160 miles of tunnels radiating out from Khan Younis. The scale is staggering. Gaza itself is only 25 miles long and barely seven miles wide.

On Friday morning, a Telegraph reporter and photographer were escorted into a suburb of Gaza’s southernmost city by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) largely to give a better understanding of how the war is being waged.

The tunnels explain Israel’s slow progress. It’s been almost four months since the massacre in which 1,200 people were killed and more than 240 people taken hostage. By Israel’s standards, this is an already overlong war. Since the start of the conflict, more than 200 IDF soldiers have died, including 24 last week on the deadliest day of the campaign for the Israeli military.
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The tunnel system makes it more difficult to find and destroy the Hamas mass murderers.  It is similar to the situation US troops encountered in parts of Vietnam.