Israeli soldiers foiled “an elaborate Hamas ambush” that used dolls and children’s backpacks rigged with speakers to lure them into a terrorist tunnel in the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces said Friday.
Footage released by the IDF showed the alley where the would-be ambush would have been staged.
“Here in every corner were…explosives,” an IDF soldier explained in an official video.
The forces subsequently found children’s dolls and backpacks with speakers to imitate crying sounds and songs, the footage showed.
“The goal is to draw us in to look for, to see these things…they play voices in Hebrew so we’ll think there are hostages and missing persons here. In order to draw us into the area that’s rigged with explosives,” the soldier explained while gesturing at the pile of troubling objects.
“There’s ammunition and weapons here, explosives hidden in UNRWA bags,” he added, referring to the UN agency tasked with assisting Palestinian refugees.
The UNRWA did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for a comment on the allegation that Hamas used agency materials to hide weapons.
The rigged children’s objects and explosives were all placed intentionally near a tunnel that linked with Hamas’ infamous underground network, the IDF’s statement said.
“This network extends under other nearby civilian structures, including a school and a medical clinic. It also connects to a mosque containing a Hamas command center equipped with cameras that were monitoring IDF troops,” the military write-up claimed.
“Hamas anti-tank and intelligence positions were also located in the area, along with an extensive network of explosives aimed at targeting IDF troops,” the statement concluded.
The footage of the scuttled ambush was released on the same day that the IDF shared graphic footage of a Hamas terrorist being killed inside a tunnel in northern Gaza.
The war between Israel and Hamas has now been raging for over two months, since Hamas killed around 1,200 Israeli civilians and took hundreds of hostages on Oct. 7.