Inside Hamas' terror tunnels: What really lies beneath Gaza

The Gaza Strip, a narrow 25-mile stretch along the Mediterranean coast, is home to just over 2 million people. Once alive with bustling streets and towering buildings, it now lies in ruins—its surface a scarred testament to decades of conflict. But beneath the rubble, hidden from the world above, sprawls a vast and sophisticated network of tunnels, longer than London’s Underground. This subterranean labyrinth has become Hamas’s most potent weapon in its war against Israel, a shadowy infrastructure used to smuggle weapons, move fighters, and outmaneuver one of the world’s most advanced militaries. How did this underground maze evolve from a desperate lifeline for divided families into the world’s largest subterranean war zone? The answer lies in a story of ingenuity, exploitation, and unrelenting conflict that stretches back decades.

Rafah: Where It All Began

Our journey starts in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza with a history as fractured as the land it occupies. Over the 20th century, Rafah changed hands repeatedly—Ottoman, British, Egyptian, Israeli—before a seismic shift in 1979. That year, Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty, ending decades of hostility. As part of the deal, Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, and a new border cleaved Rafah in two: one half returned to Egypt, the other remained under Israeli control. Between them rose an impenetrable wall, severing families and neighbors who had lived side by side for generations.

The people of Rafah refused to let concrete and barbed wire dictate their lives. Armed with shovels and resolve, they dug the first tunnels—simple, sandy passageways connecting basements on either side of the border. A family in Gaza could slip through to visit relatives in Egypt, defying the wall’s cold division. These early tunnels were a quiet rebellion, a symbol of human connection enduring against all odds.

But ingenuity soon met opportunity. With Gaza cut off from Egypt, shortages of essentials like food, fuel, and medicine plagued the Strip. Smugglers saw their chance. What began as family reunion routes morphed into underground trade networks, ferrying car parts, gasoline, and cigarettes into Gaza at steep markups. For a blockaded population, these tunnels became vital arteries—“the lungs through which Gaza breathed,” as one Palestinian poet described them. Egypt and Israel, aware of the smuggling, largely turned a blind eye, tacitly accepting that the tunnels kept Gaza’s economy and morale from collapsing entirely.

From Lifeline to Weapon

The tunnels’ transformation into a tool of war began with the First Intifada in 1987. Decades of Israeli control had fueled Palestinian frustration, and protests erupted across Gaza and the West Bank. What started as marches and stone-throwing escalated into armed clashes. Weapons appeared in Gaza’s streets as if conjured from thin air—smuggled through the tunnels that had once carried only cigarettes and hope. Israel’s attempts to destroy them faltered; the network grew more elaborate, and Gazans clung to it as a lifeline.

In 1993, the Oslo Accords offered a glimmer of peace, creating the Palestinian Authority (PA) to govern parts of Gaza and the West Bank. Israel asked the PA to crack down on the tunnels and stem weapons smuggling—a test of its commitment to coexistence. But corruption and incompetence crippled the PA’s efforts, leaving the tunnels untouched. By the Second Intifada in 2000, they had become a cornerstone of Palestinian militancy. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Fatah smuggled arms at unprecedented rates, assembling bombs underground that would later detonate in Israeli cafés and buses, killing over 1,000 civilians. Israel responded with force, demolishing suspected tunnel sites, but the operations displaced families and drew global criticism—yet failed to stop the network’s growth.

In 2005, Israel tried a bold gambit: unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. The hope was that self-rule would ease tensions. Instead, it backfired. Without Israeli troops on the ground, Hamas and other groups expanded the tunnels unchecked, turning a covert system into an underground empire.

Hamas Takes Control

The tipping point came in 2006, when Gazans elected Hamas to lead them. This wasn’t a blanket endorsement of terrorism—exit polls showed 40% of Hamas voters supported peace, and over a third favored a two-state solution. They saw Hamas as a counterweight to the PA’s corruption. But power-sharing with Fatah collapsed into civil war, and by 2007, Hamas ruled Gaza alone. Their mission was clear: target Israel. Billions in aid, meant for civilian welfare, poured into the tunnels instead, building a war machine carved from rock, some shafts plunging 20 stories deep.

For ordinary Gazans, the tunnels retained a dual purpose. Alongside weapons, they delivered food and medicine amid Israel’s and Egypt’s blockades. Smuggling exploded into a lucrative industry, controlled by “Snakeheads”—operators who built tunnels and rented them to militant groups, pocketing up to $200,000 a day. But the labor came at a grim cost. With work permits to Israel revoked after Hamas attacks, Gaza’s men—and often children—turned to digging. Small and agile, kids as young as 10 chiseled through bedrock, risking cave-ins, electrocution, and toxic gases. Hamas itself admits at least 160 died in the process. For these children, the danger was a known trade-off for a few dollars to feed their families.

Israel’s Response and the Escalating Stakes

For Israel, the tunnels were an existential threat. In 2006, Hamas fighters emerged from one to kidnap soldier Gilad Shalit, holding him underground for five years. Israel built a high-tech border wall with sonar sensors, but Hamas dug deeper—sometimes hundreds of feet down. Military operations in 2014 destroyed over 30 tunnels, while Egypt flooded others with seawater. Yet the network endured, growing stronger with concrete and steel. By 2021, Israel’s “Steel Dome” initiative claimed to have neutralized 62 miles of tunnels, but Hamas countered that 350 miles remained—a fortified underworld with tiled floors, air conditioning, and plumbing.

The cost—estimated at nearly $1 billion—came largely from diverted aid. Cement and steel meant for homes and schools vanished underground, leaving Gaza’s surface to crumble. Israel halted construction material shipments, tightening the blockade and deepening civilian hardship. Today, Hamas wages war from this hidden realm, shielded from airstrikes by layers of earth. Its leaders bunker beneath hospitals and homes, barring civilians from shelter while using them as human shields—a tactic that inflames global outrage when Israeli strikes inevitably kill innocents.

A War Without Winners

Israel faces an impossible choice: send soldiers into booby-trapped tunnels, risking their lives, or target Hamas from above, risking civilian casualties and international condemnation. Hamas exploits this dilemma, dragging the conflict into a prolonged quagmire to erode Israel’s global standing. The strategy is working—critics, from citizens to world leaders, accuse Israel of genocide, while its military insists it targets only Hamas, a designated terror group.

Above ground, Gaza lies in ruins. Below, the tunnels endure as both lifeline and weapon, a paradox born of desperation and defiance. For the people of Gaza, peace remains a distant dream until Hamas is defeated—and until the world sees the full cost of this underground war. Only then might the Strip’s 2 million souls rebuild a life unshackled from the shadows beneath their feet.

ABC contributed to this article.