The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has reportedly set up several large water pumps inside Gaza to flood Hamas’ underground terror tunnels with water from the Mediterranean Sea.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the pumps could move “thousands of cubic meters of water per hour into the tunnels” and would completely flood the hundreds of miles of tunnels under Gaza within a matter of weeks.
Israel has not made a final decision on whether to go forward with flooding the vast underground network, and the reaction from the Biden administration was mixed.
Using the pumps would force Hamas terrorists, and potentially some of the hostages that they kidnapped and are holding hostage, out of the tunnels.
“We are not sure how successful pumping will be since nobody knows the details of the tunnels and the ground around them,” a person familiar with the plan reportedly said. “It’s impossible to know if that will be effective because we don’t know how seawater will drain in tunnels no one has been in before.”
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Israel said that it was committed to completely dismantling the tunnel network through “various ways,” one of which has included using “sponge bombs.”
Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said it’s hard to predict how flooding the tunnels would impact things above ground, including the stability of buildings.
“It’s hard to tell what pumping seawater will do to the existing water and sewage infrastructure,” he said. “It is hard to tell what it will do to groundwater reserves. And it’s hard to tell the impact on the stability of nearby buildings.”
