the secrets of underground medicine purchase

With spades or, increasingly, pneumatic drills, teams of diggers working round the clock in twelve-hour shifts can excavate and reinforce fifteen metres of tunnel a day. Gaza’s subsoil is mostly dry sandstone, relatively easy to dig through. Geology is on the side of the tunnellers. Under the command of Muhammad Deif, Hamas’s most effective military leader in recent years, the underground system has been further expanded into a dense web of tunnels running thirty metres below Gaza City and the border areas. It is this subterranean infrastructure that has enabled the armed resistance to continue firing rockets into Israel. They are presumed dead, and negotiations are under way for the return of their bodies. After Israel invaded Gaza that same year, the IDF reported that it had ‘neutralised’ more than thirty tunnels, but it suffered heavy casualties and two more soldiers were taken underground. One raided a military base on the Israeli side of the fence.

In 2014, two separate groups of Palestinian fighters crossed the border. Tunnelling was therefore redirected towards the border zone with Israel. Under the deal for his release in 2011 Israel freed more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners.Īfter the 2013 coup, the Egyptian military, under the self-proclaimed president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, started demolishing the tunnels that led to Egypt, effectively joining Israel’s blockade. In 2006, Palestinian fighters spirited away the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit through a tunnel and took him to Gaza. In 20o4, a tunnel dug under a military base enabled Palestinians to place explosives and blow up the base. The tunnel system enabled the flow of essential supplies – food, medicine and other goods – into the strip, as well as weapons from Egypt. This continued during the years of the Second Intifada, between 20, and Gaza was blockaded completely in 2007 after Hamas took power. A decade later, with the launch of the Oslo process, Israel started isolating the strip. Gaza’s first tunnels were dug in 1982, to connect one part of Rafah to the other after the city was divided as part of Israel’s retreat from Sinai after its peace accord with Egypt. The deaths of more than five thousand Palestinians and the damage or destruction of nearly a quarter of the buildings in the strip have come mainly from the air, but it is through their control of what lies underground that Palestinians have managed to continue their resistance. Each new Israeli bombing campaign – in 2008-9, 2012, 2014 and May 2021 – has pushed Palestinian resistance deeper underground, to extend and fortify its elaborate system of tunnels. N ow that Gaza’s perimeter is completely sealed – by fences on land and the Israeli navy at sea – the axis of conflict has turned 90 degrees.

The secrets of underground medicine purchase