How long can Hamas keep its tunnels ventilated?

We’re informed that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) has, literally, tons of fuel. NBC:

As U.N. officials say hospitals in Gaza are running dangerously low on fuel, Hamas is maintaining a stockpile of more than 200,000 gallons of fuel for the rockets it fires into Israel and the generators that provide clean air and electricity to its network of underground tunnels, according to U.S. officials, current and former Israeli officials and academics.

How long will this last?

“We don’t know how much they have, and we definitely don’t know how much they need, because no one is sure to what extent this underground city goes,” said Elai Rettig, an assistant professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv who studies regional energy cooperation. “If it’s just for ventilation and basic communication, it will last for months.”

I wonder if these estimates are wrong. Hamas’s western allies have been demanding fuel deliveries ever since the battle began. Here’s one from the UN Secretary General, just four days after the Gazans’ mostly peaceful attack on Israelis:

Note that fuel is listed first, so we can infer that it is more important than food and water. A week after the latest round of fighting began, state-sponsored PBS wrote that hospitals were “desperately low on fuel”:

Medics in Gaza warned Sunday that thousands could die as hospitals packed with wounded people ran desperately low on fuel and basic supplies. … Hospitals in Gaza are expected to run out of generator fuel within two days,

Every few days we are informed that hospitals in Gaza are 1-2 days from running out of fuel.

Hamas supposedly keeps its fuel reserves directly underneath hospitals so that (1) the fuel will be safe from Israeli bombs, and (2) any fuel delivered to the hospital can be easily transferred into the tunnel ventilation reserve.

If Hamas truly had “months” of fuel, why would their allies be so interested in supplementing this supply? And why did the calls to send in fuel begin just a few days after the October 7 attacks? Is it possible that the “months” of fuel that the Islamic Resistance Movement was estimated to have is actually more like “a month”? Also, what if the IDF is able to clear one or two hospitals of civilians and destroy the Hamas fuel supplies underneath? The useful lifetime of the tunnels could be radically shortened.

American and British bombing of Germany wasn’t very efficient in slowing down Germany’s war-fighting capability. As many as 635,000 civilians in Germany were killed, for example, more than 55,000 RAF Bomber Command crewmembers, and 75 percent of the pre-P-51 American bomber crews were shot down or killed. Yet the initial effects on German war production were minimal. Monday morning quarterbacks have concluded that the Allies should have concentrated on bombing energy production, energy transportation, and electricity production facilities. In other words… fuel. If Israel can prevent Hamas from being resupplied, either directly or via hospitals and UN facilities, perhaps Hamas will be forced to fight in the open (or just melt into the civilian population and wait for Israel to leave).

Readers: What’s your guess as to when Hamas runs out of fuel to keep its tunnels ventilated? (“Never, because the United Nations and other allies will keep the fuel restocked” is an acceptable answer.)

Update: A November 6, 2023 video posted from Gaza shows lights on, fully charged mobile phones, and doctors in clean scrubs that appear to be fresh from the washer/dryer.

Related:

• Will the Gaza tunnel network prove to be Hamas’s Maginot Line?
• Book review for Bostonians: Trapped Under the Sea (explains why tunnels need ventilation; “oxygen would be depleted by things like the growth of aerobic bacteria and the rusting of metals, such as bolts”)