The IDF announced on Thursday that it had demolished a major Hamas tunnel network hidden under Gaza City’s Palestine Square.
According to the military, Hamas’s most senior officials hid underground in the tunnel network when the terror group launched its October 7 onslaught on southern Israel.
The underground network connected to the homes, offices and hideout apartments of senior Hamas officials, including Muhammad Deif, the elusive leader of the terror group’s military wing, and Yahya Sinwar, the top Hamas official in Gaza.
The IDF scanned inside the tunnels and obtained intelligence from them in recent days, it said. The military said the demolition was carried out by the elite Yahalom combat engineering unit and the 401st Armored Brigade.
On Tuesday, the IDF gave the media, including The Times of Israel, a tour of the square and the entrances to the tunnels.
Palestine Square is located in the upscale Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, an area that before the war was seen as the power center of the enclave’s elite, home to top officials from the terror group ruling the Strip. The humming center of Palestinian retail and commercial activity hid an extensive warren of Hamas tunnels used by the terror group’s top officials to hide from Israel, the IDF revealed to reporters joining the tour.
Military officials pointed to what it identified as a penthouse apartment where the daughter of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh lived, a community college, Hamas government offices and a lavish bridal store surrounding what once was a main traffic circle.
The army believes the shafts into the vast tunnel network were used by the senior Hamas officials to hide deep underground when the terror group launched its murderous terror attack on southern Israel on October 7.
According to the IDF, the tunnel network featured blast doors and living quarters, adding that in some cases troops operating inside the tunnels found stores of food and water left behind, indicating plans to stay hidden in the underground sites for long periods.
In a statement Wednesday, the army described the complex as an “underground terror city” with a “strategic tunnel route connected to other significant underground infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.”
The existence of Hamas’s vast tunnel network beneath Gaza has long been among the world’s worst-kept secrets, but Israel’s ground incursion has shined a light on just how enormous and durable it is. Earlier this month, the army unveiled a tunnel built dozens of meters below northern Gaza, stretching at least 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) toward the border with Israel at the Erez Crossing, and broad enough to fit a car. A video found by the army showed Sinwar’s brother, Mohammad, a senior Hamas official, cruising through the passageway.
Israel launched its vast military operation against Hamas following the terror group’s murderous invasion of southern Israel on October 7, in which it killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took another 240 hostages into Gaza. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims more than 20,000 people have been killed in the Strip during the war, an unverified figure, while Israel says that around 40 percent of them are Hamas terror operatives.
The IDF said Thursday that more than 2,000 Hamas operatives have been killed just since the end of the temporary ceasefire in Gaza on December 1. This brings the military’s estimates of Hamas fighters killed in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war to around 8,000. Another 1,000 Hamas terrorists were killed in Israel on October 7, during the terror group’s onslaught.