Israeli forces claim to have discovered the "biggest Hamas tunnel" in Gaza.
Two and a half miles long and 50 metres below street level, the tunnel is wide enough to drive a large vehicle through, and is equipped with electricity, ventilation and communications systems. It ends just 400 metres from the Erez border crossing with Israel in northern Gaza, one of the key points that Hamas targeted during its deadly surprise attack on Israel on 7 October.
The tunnel will have cost millions of dollars and taken years to construct, said The Times, and was the "personal project" of Hamas's operations chief in northern Gaza, Mahmoud Sinwar, younger brother of Hamas's leader in Gaza, Yihya Sinwar.
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The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is now preparing to demolish the tunnel, which was discovered after the invasion of Gaza, with the help of captured Hamas documents and videos, and is said to have been part of the militant group's "strategic infrastructure".
Hamas has claimed to have built more than 300 miles of tunnels under Gaza, "though it is unclear if that figure was accurate", reported CNN.
Nicknamed the "Gaza metro", the tunnels under the coastal enclave are used to "smuggle goods from Egypt, launch attacks into Israel, store rockets and ammunition caches and house Hamas command and control centers", said the news site.
The tunnels are "one of the main reasons why the war is still going on", said The Times, as the IDF, "one of the world's most advanced militaries… has been sucked into an underground battle of dimensions that are unprecedented in the history of warfare".
Of the 1,300 tunnels identified by the Modern War Institute at the US military academy West Point, the Israeli army claimed at the beginning of December to have discovered more than 800 and destroyed 500 of these.
The Guardian has reported that the army was "considering flooding the tunnels with seawater pumped from the Mediterranean" and had "conducted successful tests".
