Can Israel find all of Hamas’s tunnels with ground-penetrating radar? And then what?
Prior to this latest over-the-fence attack, Hamas’s (“officially the Islamic Resistance Movement”) main military strategy was tunneling under the fence with Israel and emerging to fight on the unprotected side or tunneling under the border with Egypt and bringing weapons in. (see “Palestinian tunnel warfare in the Gaza Strip” from Wikipedia).
I’m wondering what stops the Israelis from finding all of the tunnels via ground-penetrating radar. Before we decided to open our border, we attempted to find tunnels connecting the U.S. and Mexico (DHS 2009). This 2014 article from The Times of Israel discusses the technology’s limitations:
Ground-penetrating radar, known as GPR, is among the most promising technological responses to the tunnels, Israeli and American experts say. The radar – which can “see” into the ground – has been used from the surface to search for smuggling tunnels under the US-Mexico border. Radar installations are also installed in deep holes in the ground to search for attack tunnels under the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
The experts say the Korean type of of cross-borehole ground-penetrating radar could be installed along the border to create a permanent detection barrier – deep enough to spot any tunnel Palestinians militants could dig. The barrier could be monitored for changes from a remote center, and in combination with other technologies could provide the best method of securing the border.
A limitation of ground-penetrating radar is that even in ideal conditions, it only provides an accurate image from the surface up to a depth of about 15 meters. The known tunnels in Mexico are as much as 27 meters below ground.
In the DMZ between North and South Korea, four tunnels have been found from the north running as deep as 160 meters below ground. The South Korean army – previously with guidance from the US Army Corps of Engineers – has on an ad hoc basis used cross-borehole ground-penetrating radar to look for tunnels as deep as 600 meters, …
In cross-borehole ground-penetrating radar, pairs of narrow holes are drilled deep into the ground and antennae are lowered into them — one for sending and the other for receiving the signals. From the boreholes, the radar can provide an image all the way down to the water table. However, there have been no reports of tunnels being found this way in the DMZ.
Maybe the water table is an issue? The Coastal Aquifer from which Gaza gets most of its water (pumping it out via wells) is only 20-50 meters below the surface and perhaps some of Hamas’s tunnels are deeper?
If Israel (or “the Zionist entity” as Hamas officials refer to the enemy) is on the surface inside Gaza, can they drill underground to place radar gear and come up with a complete subsurface map?
It looks like some USGS folks tried to do this in the mid-1990s to find old mine tunnels:
If the answer to the above is “yes”, then what? Suppose that someone with control of the surface wanted to destroy the tunnels. How can they do it? (I’m assuming that there won’t be any people inside the tunnels at this point. Presumably the Hamas fighters will migrate south and mix seamlessly into the civilian population, live off U.S. and E.U. taxpayers, then come back in 2024 or 2025 with a renewed vengeance.)
There are “bunker buster” bombs designed to destroy stuff underground, but wouldn’t it be simpler and cheaper to drill a shaft down into a previously-mapped tunnel and drop a modest-sized explosive into the shaft? If so, will Gaza be transformed for a few months into what looks like an oil-drilling field?
Related (very loosely):
- “Address by President Nelson Mandela at International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People, Pretoria” (1997): “… our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”