海角大神

A daily roundup of terrorism and security issues.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel will not accept a truce with Hamas until it destroys all of the tunnels giving militants access to Israeli territory. His proclamation lays the groundwork for continuing or even expanding Israel's military operation, even as the international community calls almost unanimously for a lasting cease-fire.

The announcement followed the call-up of another 16,000 Israeli reservists, CBS News reports. Israel has called up a total of 86,000 reservists since the conflict began.

Although the Israeli effort, dubbed Operation Protective Edge, began as an effort to destroy Hamas's rocket-launching capability, the warren of tunnels appears to have been designated a much greater threat, prompting a ground invasion on July 17 that Israel avoided in the 2012 conflict with Hamas.

Most of Hamas's rockets have landed in unpopulated areas or been destroyed by Iron Dome, Israel's missile defense system, but the tunnels have allowed Hamas to stage several attacks in the last couple of weeks and kill several Israeli soldiers, rattling Israelis in a way that rocket attacks have not.

As the BBC notes, "the reality that infiltrators have used them to kill Israelis inside their own country 鈥� has shocked many Israelis and bolstered support for the operation."

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz writes of kibbutzim聽near the Gaza border that remained populated throughout the rocket barrages but have emptied out since the discovery of the tunnels, some of which open up just outside the communities.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Southern Command said that it had not given the order to evacuate the kibbutzim in order "not to give Hamas a victory," noting that no militants had come into contact with civilians in the seven attacks so far, according to Haaretz.

The tunnels are a major challenge for the IDF. 鈥淏ecause the land is so porous it鈥檚 hard to distinguish,鈥� Miri Eisin, a former military intelligence officer who served as a government spokesman during the 2008-2009 war,聽told 海角大神. 鈥淐oncrete doesn鈥檛 show up on most of the different kinds of sensors that you have. And that鈥檚 part of challenge. You actually have to go to find openings and go in.鈥�

The tunnel network is a key reason that Hamas is a "more formidable" foe for Israel than it was in 2009 or 2012, according to another report from the Monitor. Much of that know-how has been garnered from the Lebanese Shiite militant organization Hezbollah, which has its own extensive tunnel network.

Some Israelis tell the Monitor that Hamas's tunnel network may actually be more extensive than that of Hezbollah, which never managed to infiltrate Israel during a war. Part of the motivation for wiping out the tunnels coming from Gaza is to send a message to Hezbollah.聽