Israelis use ‘exploding gel’ to take out Hamas tunnel under Gaza hospital
Israel has said it has blasted a tunnel under an evacuated hospital in northern Gaza with exploding gel.
The resulting blast engulfed the building and sent smoke billowing onto at least three points along a nearby road in a district of the city of Beit Hanoun, surveillance footage showed.
“The gel spread out and exploded whatever had been waiting for us in the tunnel,” an army officer told reporters at a briefing at Zeelim Ground Forces Base in southern Israel.
Clearing Hamas’s vast network of tunnels across Gaza is a key part of Israel’s military campaign.
The officer said “creativity and innovation come in handy” when facing the challenge posed by the complicated and deadly network.
Often the Israeli army uses tracker robots and other technology operated remotely to do the job.
Israel’s policy bans soldiers from entering the tunnels to directly face Hamas as they have the advantage of familiarity in the narrow, dark, under-ventilated passages.
“We don’t want to go down there. We know that they left us a lot of side-bombs (improvised explosives devices),” the Israeli officer said.
Last week, four special forces officers were killed after such a bomb detonated. It had been rigged to the cover of a ground-level tunnel-access shaft.
Dozens of shafts lead to the network, some as deep as 80 metres.
According to the officer, these shafts are relatively simple to destroy. “Any platoon can do it,” he said.
A total of 130 shafts had been destroyed so far, the Israeli military said last week, but they did not comment on the number of tunnels targeted.
The officer said it is “hard to say how many tunnels (are destroyed) because they are all connected”.
Israel has previously said that it believes hospitals and other civilian infrastructure have been used to conceal the entrance to the tunnels.
Hamas dismissed assertions by Israel that it has a command centre under Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al-Shifa, which Israeli forces entered on Wednesday.
On Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they uncovered a laptop containing photos and videos of hostages during their operation in the hospital.
An IDF official told a BBC reporter that the footage and images were taken after the Israelis were taken into Gaza.
Lt Col Jonathan Conricus said that the laptop suggested that Hamas was in the hospital “within the last few days”.
“At the end of the day, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
“Hamas aren’t here because they saw we were coming. This is probably what they were forced to leave behind. Our assessment is that there’s much more.”
