Gaza's most recent work accident: Hamas tunnel engineer used his own family as a human shield - by William A. Jacobson

...As with most of these work accidents, the most significant part is not the accident itself. It’s how and where it took place. In this case, the Hamas tunnel engineer was working underneath his own home, turning the civilian structure into a military purpose. That is something we see throughout Gaza, where Hamas hides among and underneath civilian structures, using civilians as human shields.

William A. Jacobson..
Legal Insurrection..
23 December '18..

A “work accident” is a commonly used term to refer to Palestinian terrorists who die by their own hand when explosives or explosive devices they are handling detonate prematurely, or when a tunnel they are constructing collapses.

We have covered many such incidents:

- Senior Hamas terrorist Imad al-Alami *accidentally* shoots himself in the head
- Hamas explosives chief accidentally blows himself up
- Palestinian rocket commander ‘accidentally’ blows himself up
- Hamas terrorist killed when attack tunnel collapses on him
- Gaza: Two PFLP terrorists killed when rocket they were firing exploded prematurely
- Hamas Bomb Expert Blows Himself Up
- Hamas Commander killed at Gaza border when ‘hand grenade’ exploded prematurely
- Hamas member killed in “accidental explosion during preparation and training”

Joe Truzman at his valuable weekly Ground Brief newsletter (to which you should subscribe) reports on the latest Hamas work accident:

The military wing of Hamas, Al-Qassam Brigades, acknowledged Friday [note – link goes to Hamas website] that one of their tunnel engineers, Ayman Zidan, had died. They were not specific about the cause of his death, only stating it was an “accident.” However, Qassam activists claimed Zidan was working on a tunnel underneath his home when it collapsed and killed him.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Keep this tunnel in mind when the "hopelessness of life" in Gaza gets cycled back into the news again

...Naturally, the people from OCHA maintain a long-standing UN tradition of seeing no evil, hearing no evil and reporting no evil even as massive attack-tunnel construction - and cement pilfering by Hamas officials - goes on month after month right under their noses.

Truckloads of cement shipped to Gaza via
Israel, 25 Nov. 2014 [Image Source: Getty]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
18 April '16..

Why are so many Gazan Palestinian Arabs still homeless? Because that's what Hamas wants, and what Hamas wants, Hamas - with its total, iron-fisted control of resources inside the Gaza Strip - gets.

This morning (Monday), Israeli officials revealed that, about ten days ago, the IDF

had found a concrete-lined tunnel stretching hundreds of meters from Gaza into Israel, reminiscent of dozens of tunnels destroyed by the army during a 50-day war with Hamas-led fighters in 2014 launched in part to thwart the underground passages. Speaking to reporters in his Jerusalem office, Netanyahu warned Hamas against trying to harm Israeli citizens and vowed that Jerusalem will continue to invest heavily in mechanisms to detect tunnels dug from Gaza into Israel. “The government is investing a fortune in thwarting the threat of tunnels. This is an ongoing effort; it does not end overnight; we are investing in it and will continue to invest steadily and firmly,” he said. [Times of Israel, April 18, 2016]

(And a second tunnel discovery may be on the way.)

For Israelis, this is a major story: concrete proof of where the Islamists of Hamas are focusing efforts; validation for the restrictions imposed lately on cement shipments into Gaza; a taste of what might be around the corner this summer; and a sign that the exceptionally thorny matter of how you detect an enemy's attack-tunnels might have a technological solution.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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(Video) Question. What would you do with 3 million dollars?

Charity, traveling the world, teaching the next generation, and sports cars - these are just a few ways that people in Tel Aviv would spend 3 million dollars.

Israel Defense Forces..
13 March '16..





If you asked Hamas, you would get a very different answer.



Hamas spends 3 million dollars on each tunnel that they build - and they keep building. There are better uses than terror.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk-1WQXdjKY

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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The Terror Tunnels Have Returned, But the World Is Silent - by Stephen M. Flatow

...Hamas terrorists are dying in the collapse of tunnels that supposedly do not exist. And the Times of Israel reports: “It is estimated that since the end of [Operation] Protective Edge, Hamas has dug dozens of tunnels of varying lengths.” Dennis Ross summed it up: “They were right.” The Israelis were right, after all. The Israelis were right that cement would be used for terror tunnels. Now it’s time for all the Obama administration officials, past and present, who had a hand in this fiasco to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, and to endorse Israel’s right to intervene.

Stephen M. Flatow..
Algemeiner..
03 February '16..

JNS.org – Last week’s deaths of seven Hamas terrorists in the collapse of a tunnel they were digging coincided with complaints by residents of an Israeli town near Gaza that underground digging has come so close to their homes that they have felt their floors shake.

Speaking on Israel Radio, the head of the Eshkol Regional Council, Gadi Yarkoni, said numerous residents of Moshav Pri Gan, adjacent to the Gaza border, have reported hearing the sounds of underground digging and felt the floors of their homes shaking.

What’s going on here? We thought the Hamas terror tunnels were a thing of the past. They were supposed to have been destroyed in the 2014 Gaza war. The Obama administration promised that safeguards would be in place to ensure that cement entering Gaza would be used for houses that were damaged in the fighting.

Thanks to former State Department official Dennis Ross, we now know what happened to all those US promises. From 2009 to 2011, Ross served as a senior aide to then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton and as Middle East director on the National Security Council. During the 2014 Gaza war, Ross, writing on the op-ed page of the Washington Post in August, revealed some of what went on behind the scenes in the preceding years.

“I argued with Israeli leaders and security officials, telling them they needed to allow more construction materials, including cement, into Gaza so that housing, schools, and basic infrastructure could be built,” Ross disclosed. “They countered that Hamas would misuse it, and they were right.”

Assured by the Obama administration’s insistence that the cement would not be used, Israel allowed it to be imported. The result? Hamas built “a labyrinth of underground tunnels, bunkers, command posts and shelters for its leaders, fighters and rockets,” Ross wrote. They built them with “an estimated 600,000 tons of cement,” some of which was “diverted from construction materials allowed into Gaza.”

Paying dearly for Hamas ‘resistance tunnels’

...The next time you read a report at the Guardian or elsewhere criticizing Israeli restrictions on imports into Gaza, consider how many homes, schools, medical facilities, water sewage treatment plants, and other vital infrastructure projects could have been built in Gaza with the construction materials Hamas continues to divert for military purposes.

Adam Levick..
CiF Watch..
14 October '13..

The IDF recently discovered an elaborate and costly tunnel from Gaza to Israel which was likely to be used by Hamas to launch future terror attacks.

The 1.7 km tunnel (leading from Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, into Israel) was complete with an electrical supply and phone lines, was reportedly the longest ever constructed, and extends a full 18 meters underground. It cost Hamas tens of millions of dollars, and used an estimated 24,000 concrete slabs and 500 tons of concrete (material which the IDF had recently permitted into Gaza in greater quantities to benefit the ‘civilian’ construction sector). If it had been utilized in a terror attack, or a kidnapping, it could have prompted a full-scale war.

However, whilst the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood has been focused on other ‘productive’ Gaza smuggling activities, and hasn’t yet reported on the tunnel, we’d recommend that – if she does cover it – she considers framing the story in a manner similar to her coverage of a World Bank report titled ’Israel’s West Bank control ‘costing Palestinian economy billions‘, and focus on the money lost by the tunnel’s construction and the likely loss in future imports and trade.

(Continue)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Check-it out! 
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Gaza glutted with smuggled goods - profitability of tunnels plummets

Avi Issacharoff
Haaretz
17 February '10

Owners of the smuggling tunnels bordering the Gaza Strip and Egypt have been suffering from financial problems due to their tunnels' inactivity, according to Palestinian sources.

The reason, it turns out, actually stems from the overall success of smuggling tunnels in Gaza. Hamas has recently set up 'legal' tunnels, which they use to smuggle various merchandise. As a result, existing, non-Hamas run tunnels are suffering financially.

The Hamas tunnels are used to bring in merchandise intended for sale in markets, such as food products and home appliances. Palestinians believe that the overflow of goods caused a complete smuggling standstill in dozens of underground channels. Moreover, work on digging additional tunnels has also stopped.

The tunnel owners explain that the increase in merchandise in Gaza made prices sharply decrease, which seriously reduced the earnings from the 'illegal' smuggling industry. One of the tunnel owners told a news agency that he is waiting for a reasonable business offer to come along, because at the moment it isn't profitable for him to open the channel to smuggling.

In 2008, the smuggling tunnel trade flourished due to the Israeli blockade on Gaza, and was also strong in 2009 in spite of growing Egyptian surveillance of the tunnels, which endangered diggers and smugglers. Since June of 2007, over 100 Palestinians lost their lives in tunnel collapses.

The Hamas-run tunnels, which are deemed legal by the government, are now experiencing continuous activity. Under Hamas rule, hundreds of underground channels have been dug between Gaza and Egypt.

The recent increase in smuggled goods in Gaza caused many factories to renew activity. Overall, if judging by the two most smuggled products - gasoline and cement - tunnel activity has actually caused Gaza to experience an economic reawakening.

Ultimately, the tunnel owners' crisis came from being overly successful. "The last two weeks were the worst in the smuggling tunnel trade since the blockade in June of 2007," said a tunnel owner.
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