The Gaza War is not for territory, but is explicitly about erasing sovereignty. And much of the war, if fought above ground, is aiming at what lies underground, hidden from sight, and not on maps–even if we imagine that we might be able to map the damage, disaster, refugee flows and loss of life as well as destruction of structures across the Gaza Strip in ways that are truly impossible to process. This data overload, or information overload, responds to a proliferated media coverage of the disastrous war, but is also difficult to relate to the terror of the unmapped underground network of tunnels in Gaza, and the ways that the tunnel networks have been a reason for the terrible escalation of aerial attacks that have created such humanitarian catastrophe across Gaza and the Gaza Strip. As much as a war for territory, in a traditional sense, the Gaza War is almost one of purification–not purification in a religious familiar from the Middle East of the Middle Ages, but of the possibility of purifying the region to ensure Israeli national security.
The tunnel network that evolved from an infrastructure of smuggling to a means of tactical defense has become a target that is quite elusive: if the tunnel network beneath he Gaza Strip was underestimated quite dramatically at but about 400 kilometers after October 7–reflecting boasts of an Iranian general “Hamas has built more than four hundred kilometers of tunnels in the northern section of the Gaza Strip,” the estimated underground passages became a basis to underestimate the scale or intensity of its destruction. Indeed, the shock at the scale and technical quality of the underground network has been slowly grasped as far more difficult to target, as its size has since February greatly expanded to seven hundred or even eight hundred kilometers across the entire Gaza Strip. The tunnel network provides both a significant military and tactical challenge,–but one unable to be easily targeted or eliminated, even by existing mapping tools, flooding with seawater, the engagement of robots with facial recognition, or the location of hidden networks and their destruction.
The expanse of tunnels, which Israeli intelligence for all its capacities seems to have misjudged, has become a target that has evaded mapping or location, turning the destruction of tunnel networks into a game of whack-a-mole, even with the prioritization of tunnel detection and warfare tools. Meanwhile, hostages held underground are unallocated, leaving the Israeli army far more “blind” in its engagement with Hamas. The intelligence of the network has been repeatedly minimized by metaphors as it is animalized as a warren, a lair, a spiderweb, or a labyrinth, as if to suggest its animal like nature, promised to be dissmantled as a structure of evil–an inhumane warren, more than a site of human resistance. The engineering of the network that has been able to be reduced in metaphors has expanded as an achievement of engineering–“beyond anything a modern military has ever faced,” per the chair of Urban Warfare Studies, at West Point’s Modern War Institute, making the conflict far more than academic–and a focus of global tactical attention of the shifting terrain of future combat. And, meanwhile, it has only grown, as we have understood the existence of longer tunnels, fifty meters underground, as if underestimating the tools of engineering the warren, and the evolution of underground engineering that has allowed Hamas to dig in for the long war, making any lightning strikes impossible and only endlessly destructive. The destruction has been, as a game of Rope-a-Dope, infuriating Israeli Defense Forces, who seek to target an evanescent enemy; the Israeli Army tries to materialize its existence as a set of targets–even as the Israeli Army has issued repeated maps, in hopes to rationalize their expanding ground operations across an increasingly bombarded and devastated Gaza Strip, locating tunnel complexes where the hostages were once held.
The Gaza War was explained in no uncertain terms as the destruction of this hidden network in which the terrorists who planned the attacks of October 7 could be extirpated from the region of the Gaza Strip, as if independent from the humanitarian needs of inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, in a sort inexorable logic that leads to no apologies, but exists as an imperative that is the only narrative frame for bringing the war to its conclusion. “Dismantling Hamas’s underground strongholds in the north, center, and south is a significant step in dismantling Hamas, and it takes time,” we were clearly warned by Israeli spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, in late December, 2023–aware of the intensity of bombing of hidden “nerve centers” of Hamas, but unaware of the visible brutality wreaked by the tremendous–and perhaps truly incommensurate–destruction above the ground. If Israel has destroyed many “cross-border” attack tunnels that extended some two hundred meters into Israeli territory both in 2008, 2012, and in 2018, the extent of tunnels that were celebrated in Al Jazeera back in 2014 for their ability to store weapons and shield Hamas leaders from air attacks as well as link the Gaza Strip to Egypt–and long designed a site of resistance to Israeli sovereignty.
Destruction of Tunnel Network Dug into Israeli Territory/October, 2018
For as the network has grown as the governance of the Gaza Strip has shifted, expanding as a form of hidden sovereignty able to endure attacks and escape Israeli vigilance and guarding of borders of the enclave. Although “mapping tunnels in Gaza right now is not going to happen,” the tunnels have become the elusive map of power in the Gaza Strip, a “big reveal” that has become the focus of the war, revealing the terror of porous borders that were echoed by the discovery of five Hezbollah tunnels on the Lebanon-Israeli border in 2018, in a military operation, that seems to seek to frustrate the Israeli Defense Forces’ charge to “defend Israel’s borders, since the formation of the Israeli Border Police in 1948, immediately after the foundation of the state of Israel–a Border Police who have long worn the Green Beret, signifying their status and crucial military role, symbolizing the “Green Line” drawn on the early maps of the Armistice of the first Arab-Israeli Wars of 1949, the pre-1967 border that have been taken as contravened by illegal sites of construction. If the Border Police have long imagined “peaceful borders,” the nearly 20,000 structures built along the border of the Green Line were viewed as a “ticking bomb” in the West Bank after October 7 invasion.
Years before the invasion, fears were raised by the scale of apparent bloom of illegal projects of Palestinian construction in Judea and Samaria, assembled by a combination of GIS mapping and aerial photography, as well as field work, that tracks the huge increase in “illegal” construction in 2022 in areas of Israeli jurisdiction by 80%–some 5535 new structures being built in 2022, an 80% increase over the construction in the same area in 2021, that are far from makeshift shacks.
Construction of “Illegal” Palestinian Housing in 2022/Regavim
The construction of what has been deemed strategically placed projects–and can be shown as such in maps of the region above–seem designed to hem in the settlements of Israelis around the so-called “Area C” of the Oslo Accords, if they might also be seen as overflowing the narrow areas allotted to Palestinians. But the huge construction project suggests an influx of cash, that might be seen as analogous to the creation of a costly network of tunnels by Hezbollah on the Lebanon border and in the Gaza Strip, as ways of challenging the stability of borders, and indeed the security of borders that has long been central to Israeli identity, and has become an accentuated topic of public concern in recent yeas–and least because off increased rocket attacks in Israeli territory.
In recent years, the ramping up of cross-border vulnerability of unforeseen proportions has placed the nation on tenterhooks that rendered most major Israeli cities vulnerable from the Gaza Strip with the rockets of Islamic Jihad capable to reach targets in Israel one hundred and fifty miles away, and escalated fears of the increasing proximity of the Gaza Strip to Israeli cities–long before the raid into Israeli territory concretized the fears of cross-border vulnerability in nightmarish ways.
Rocket Ranges of Hamas from Gaza Strip, 2022/Jewish Virtual Library
The same alarmist catalogue of the weapons that were posed at Israel’s cities by a range of rockets from the international market–Qassam, Katyusha, GRAD, and Iranian M-302, M-75, and Fajr-5–were suddenly aimed by surrogates at ranges to reach m-and Israeli populations in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem–were mapped, of course, by the IDF itself, who are tasked to guard Israel’s borders. as an armory poised at most all of Israel’s cities, far from the Gaza Strip, a decade ago. But we had the illusion, or geographic imaginary, for a decade, that those dwelling near the Gaza Strip were as protected as anyone else in the nation, and did not suffer any special degree of vulnerability.
The Deadly Arsenal of Hamas,Israel Defense Force, 2014
map returned to tabloids and newspapers in Israel after October 7, questioning the ability to allow such intensive proximity was haunting the Middle East. The increasing density of the projects of technically “illegal” housing was not a proxy or basis for cross-border attacks, or for firing rockets. But the worry of destabilizing borders by occupying such “seam zones” on borders grew, as they seemed to reveal a long-term strategy after the invasion of October 7, not even twenty-five kilometers from Gaza, and was worried in the days after October 7. The fears Israelis would be hemmed in would be potentially explosive if Israeli military presence in Area C was withdrawn, as in Gaza Strip from 2005; any Peace Talks, it was feared, that would sanction a Palestinian State would have to lead to recognition of their legality and potentially set the stage for a similarly catastrophic invasion of borders, as the rhetoric of an imperative of securitization grew.
Construction of “Illegal” Palestinian Housing in 2022/Regavim
They deep fears that the invasion of October into Israeli territory triggered and made palpable fears of a violation of Israeli boundaries in ways not previously imagined–and could only imagine after October 7. The fears that such an invasion could be facilitated by an existent tunnel network in the Gaza Strip the have defined the “goals” and prerogatives of the Israeli army to destroy, even if their danger is contested and not readily seen. And if we project such tunnels as a “satellite map,” we are preserving the false illusion that we even know their scale, or can “map” the network as part of the landscape–even if they are indeed part of the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East.
For the underground Islamic Jihad tunnels, lying far beneath the ground, and not able to be “seen” or mapped in any actual manner, the tunnel network remains largely figurative, spectral, and assembled in partially from old surveys from previous invasions of the Israeli Defense Forces, offering a poor proxy for targeting, but providing a terrible image of a hidden enemy, unseen and impossible to measure. As the earth that as extracted to construct the tunnels was dumped offshore into the Mediterranean, making it difficult to quantify the scale of earth excavated by tunnel-makers, or the scale of a network that has offered a basis for the Palestinian terrorists in the Strip to survive aerial attack, and indeed to keep the civilian “hostages” taken from Israeli territory under concealment–even as the “tunnel network” is also widely mapped in international news.
If we are shown “Hamas’ Secret Tunnel Network,” “Hamas’ Tunnel System,” or “Gaza’s Underground Labyrinth” in respectable news sources, and “Hamas’ Huge Underground Network” in somewhat salacious terms of more popular news sources, the secret spaces of these underground caverns have a truly Alice in Wonderland-like quality of an underground storehouses, or hidden hideouts, worthy of evil comic book characters, and apartments, tied to shafts, elevators, and other concealed openings, existing under the street plans of the city, as a “city beneath a city,” and even imagined as a future terrain for military combat, hand-to-hand wars, or the future zone of conflict.
1. The tunnel network is a remapping of the boundaries that are formally imposed around Gaza Strip. Although it is odd to see them as a form of counter-mapping against the claims to sovereignty in Israel’s boundaries, they are just that. For the tunnel network, if begun as an economic necessity, has been expanded and exploited to as a basis to deny the limits formally imposed by the 1950 Armistice Line, which has perhaps provided the basis for the energetic chants heard in public spaces across the Western world, to Free, Fee Palestine, that invest a coherence in the currently occupied territories as an enslaved region that has been left at the mercy of a “terrorist state.”
The Armistice Line concluded after 1948 Arab-Israeli Wars did not invest territoriality in a region–
–but recorded a status quo of sorts later preserved in the Peace Accords and 1955 Armistice Agreements at the height of the Cold War, a stalemate of sorts between global powers, to be sure, understood and enshrined in maps along the original reference points of a historic Palestine Grid–
1950 Armistice Line and 1955 situation of Gaza, Mapped within Palestine Grid
–whose construction was, to be sure, the legacy of a colonial or quasi-colonial movement, drafted by the English on the model of their own OS maps as a way of preserving the spatial organization of archeological ruins, but that have created a framework to what is misconstrued as a religious war.
The provisional line that was drafted at the foundation of the State of Israel, and provided the orignary boundaries of the state that was guarded by the IDF, as the persevered the territory that was newly mapped in terms of a UTM projection that extended, as the timeless liturgy of the Prayer for the Israeli Defense Forces suggests, and increasingly patrolled by IDF forces in order to contain threats to the security of Israelis living near the region, as well as the increasing number of settlers near the border. The mapping of the expanded boundaries of the Gaza Strip to deny access to the outside world or to Egyptian neighbors is nothing less than a classic micro-macro point of tension in global geopolitics–“over our land and the cities of our God, from the border of the Lebanon to the desert of Egypt, and from the Great Sea unto the approach of the Aravah, on the land, in the air, and on the ground” in existential terms–even if the 1994 construction of a barrier between Gaza Strip and Israel was stated to be provisional, unlike the current claim to have created an “Iron Wall” that offers no clear basis for future discussion–and indeed seeks to force future negotiations from a position of power.
United Nations Palestine Map Showing Armistice Agreements between Israel& Lebanon, Syria, Jordan & Egypt, 1949-50
The current construction of a heavily fortified “Iron Wall” has provided the current crisis in which the framing of Israel as an occupying power has morphed into charging it as a terrorist state–a reflection of the very terms that Israel’s government charges Hamas, and given the events of October 7, seems to offer ample justification for doing so. The effective boundaries, however, provide the clearest basis for containing terrorist incursions has however not served the state.
The “Green” Line has been an internationally recognized boundary of the Gaza Strip, defended by the Israeli Defenses Forces as such, never intended to be designed or rendered as a border of sovereignty, but has been construed as a political or territorial boundary in local and global geopolitics. If drawn independently from claims to rights of Palestinians, a question kicked down the road to an unspecified date for future resolution by the global consensus, increased fortification defense of a militarized barrier that maps the Green Line as an actual border–
–that hinges on the perimeter fence. If it is design to limit global traffic it is unavoidably now treated as a border that demands protection to protect “our land and the cities of Our God,” as the prayer written in 1967 has it, that have perhaps enshrined the dating of the time-stamped “1967 borders” or “pre-1967 borders” as the basis for a “demilitarized” future, a fact that might be datable in terms of history of globalization–hearkening back to a time when the United States was an engine for almost half the global GDP, before the United States abandoned the gold standard, and before the waning of American global economic dominance of the postwar–the era in which the Universal Transverse Mercator was adopted as a model of a smooth global surface.
The network of tunnels that were dug under imagined border revealed its first porousness in 2005, with withdrawal of Israelis and Israeli troops from the Gaza enclave, and the expansion of a tunnel system that Israel had tried to contain. Increasingly seen as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty, the network has become a way of testing the borders that have emerged in an enclave once in 1955 tied to Israel by roads; the, contesting the so-called “Green Line” that divided Arab from Israeli sovereignty since 1950. If it is a sticking point in Palestinian peace accords, it is the stubborn site of the only survival of the old “Green Line,” the last line standing, that was set out in the 1949 Peace Accords, as a new “underground reality” emerged, not on most national maps, proved a way to erode–quite literally–a map seen as engraved in stone, contesting the original “demarcation line” seen and equated as an “original sin” of the “Palestinian Question.” While territories beyond the Green Line were not incorporated into Israeli sovereignty, the growth of robust tunnels along the contested “Philadelphi Route” running from the Gaza Strip to Egypt, was perhaps the original robust tunnel to smuggle weapons to evade Israeli surveillance, underneath the “security belt” Israel claims as a defensible border, as the tunnels appear to confirm an actual terrorist threat.
Robust Underground Tunnel of the Philadelphi Route from Egypt to the Gaza Strip
The “belt” is not a national border, or an international border, but has become defined as a “security border” analogous to the status of the Jordan Valley, by tactical terms first defined by the General who oversaw the victory in the 1967 War, critical to Israeli security–if not for its territorial identity. The bifurcation of the security border and national boundary at Gaza has grown as the boundary of the Gaza Strip become guarded as a border of Israeli territoriality, I argue in an earlier blog post, shifting understanding of Israel’s boundaries and their guarding. Guarding the Gaza “perimeter” is prioritized to securitize the borders of Israel for Jewish settlers who moved from the region beyond its walls, as new communities expanded beyond that perimeter, the tunnel systems have grown as an increasingly robust form of hidden governance, hidden from surveillance.
If the network of tunnels first built to smuggle weapons in from Egypt in the 1990s before Israeli troops left, it expanded in depth and sophistication as Hamas gained control over the enclave and as it grew economically isolated, both as a network for importing goods and cross-border attack, extending five times below the depth of tunnels dug at the start of the new millennium, across a network claimed to extend over 500 km by 2021, according to propaganda videos of Yahya Sinwar, the length of the New York Subway, able to reach to Gaza City. If the tunnels dug four to ten meters below ground seemed unstable beneath fifteen feet, the deeper tunnels are harder to sense by radar or to hurt by explosive force, as well as to detect from above ground–some over ten times as deep, if reports of 200 feet deep tunnel structures is true. While the earlier smuggling tunnels of c. 2010 were closer to the surface and far more rudimentary in their framework and structural support–
Palestinian Entering Reconstructed Bombed Smuggling Tunnel from Egypt, near Raffa, 2012/Patrick Bay, AFP
–the robust defensive and offensive functions that evolved of tunnel networks demand more careful discrimination in our maps, and are too often suggested as primitive networks imagined as able to be removed from the Gaza Strip–rather than forms of its current governance. The expertise in tunnel engineering by lego-like concrete blocks, ventilation shafts and soil compacters helped expand the engineering of an underground network tied to Hamas, and increasingly hoped by Israel to be able to be removed form the region, the offensive and defensive network has gained increased resilience. And as Israel’s right-wing government linked itself to the defense of adjacent communities near the wall, and tunnels targeting of Israeli forces or settlements near the border grew in response to a vision of sovereignty that exclusively defined the state for Jewish citizens-settlements mostly made for those Israelis who left the Gaza Strip in 2005, now lived in by a new generation of settlers, familiar with demanding protections for living outside a region composed of refugees before the current refugee crisis created by Israel’s invasion.
Israeli Settlements in the Coastal Regions of the “Gaza Strip” before 2005
Unlike the territory of Gaza or the Gaza Strip that is shown in surface maps of houses, buildings, roads and communities, the underground network of tunnels that extend across the Gaza Strip were long both the de facto network of Hamas sovereignty and the targets of Israeli invasion and air raids. The mapping of the tunnel network has shifted from a target of attack to its re-mapping embodying identification of the tunnel network as the underground nefarious form of negative-sovereignty by which Hamas has defined its presence in the Gaza Strip. The metaphorical mapping of the tunnel network has served to embody an image of the “negative governance” of Gaza, and metaphorically mapped to delegitimize the authority of Hamas as a responsible governing entity.
2. The networks of underground tunnels that grew up to support Gaza’s literally “underground” economy as its borders were closed by Israeli Defense Forces in 2005 became, in 2012 and 2014, the targets of invasion and destruction–as airplanes targeted five hundred tunnels, some of hundred kilometers, as one that running from the South to Gaza City, by bombardment and ground operations–destroying 140 smuggling tunnels that evaded the Gaza blockade, including 66 tunnels used to target Israeli forces. The engineering of tunnels expanded to deeper and broader underground corridors to ferry cars of militants and reinforced by iron, with ventilation for larger mobilization, the network emerged in global consciousness as a new terrain of combat, and a new battleground lying far beneath the ground. Even if North Gaza has, as Israel insists, ceased to be under the sovereignty of Hamas from January 2024, the tunnel network dug beneath the territory has provided the firmest illustration of the survival and resilience of Hamas governance in Gaza.
Israeli Soliders Patrolling Newly Discovered Tunnel at Erez Crossing, December 15 2023/Amir Cohen
Tunnel networks in the Gaza Strip have been long targeted as threats to Israeli sovereignty. From their beginning as cross-border passages designed to import weapons from Egypt into the Gaza Strip, the commercial network that Hamas encouraged since taking charge of the enclave in 2007 for incursion. The networks of underground tunnels that grew up to support Gaza’s literally “underground” economy as its borders were closed by Israeli Defense Forces in 2005 became, in 2012 and 2014, the targets of invasion and destruction–as airplanes targeted five hundred tunnels, some of hundred kilometers, by bombardment and ground operations–to cut the enclave off from external contact, destroying the excavation of 140 smuggling tunnels that evaded the Gaza blockade, including 66 tunnels used to target Israeli forces.
Yet if the underground network that has however grown as a dense network of resistance to Israel’s denial of the sovereign presence Hamas has created deep in the underground tunnels of the Gaza Strip, a difference not shown in many maps of tunnel routes–which show tunnels collectively, akin to surface roads of OSM maps, without distinguishing either the origins, depth, or status as a hidden infrastructure, equipped with electricity, internet access, and communications, that long served as a regional tax franchise. The elision of the different tunnels, and their different quality, flattens the history of the network, and indeeds elide its central importance in Gaza’s governance, by portraying it solely as a target of attack.
Gaza Strip in Maps/BBC/NPR
While these maps are entirely the product of Israeli Defense Forces, they flatten the emergence of the tunnel network, and flatten the entire process of constructing, funding, and using the network of underground tunnels demonized as a target of military attack. Since the rise of cross-border tunnels that have been sanctioned as targeting Israeli forces, contesting the sovereignty of Israeli forces beyond the Green Line, the tunnel network was targeted of a vision of sovereignty that was tied to the invasion of Israel, and increasingly responded to by defined the state of Israel as exclusively for Jewish citizens.
But as the tunnel network has become a target of Israeli attack, it has assumed figural status by cartographic logic both to undermine the symbolic identity of Gaza Strip. It has served to demonize the sovereign claims of Palestinians in the region, and an image of the negative sovereignty by which Hamas has defined its place in the Gaza Strip. To flush that presence from the enclave, or to attempt to remake the enclave separately from the enclave that was attempted to be isolated by the Israeli army as a threat–by a 60 km fence, Egyptian built fence, and patrolled harbor–
–whose destruction has been suffered by the Palestinians increasingly trapped between a map and a hard place indeed, as the specter of tunnel networks has come in a grotesque macabre of Grand Guignol to take precedence over their lives, a spectacle of destruction of homes, intent to define attacks on the neighborhoods of Gaza City by targeting attacks on an elusive underground network of tunnels independent of their habitation or of the cost to civilian lives.
The network of underground tunnels that began before 2005 as a hidden black market to define the economy of an isolated strip has been mobilized and expanded both deeper beneath the ground, and as a far more complex project of engineering. Indeed, as it was recognized and even sanctioned as a basis to target Israeli Forces near the Green Line, of the network by Israeli forces is in part a targeting of a vision of sovereignty that exclusively defied the state for Jewish citizens, and the expansion of verified threats from 2014 of feared massive cross-border assaults Hamas planned to against Israeli civilian communities through tunnels dug under the border. The increased targeting of the tunnel network by troop deployments in 2014 sought to clear the tunnels extending into Israeli territory definitely, a decade ago, but despite their success left the cross-border tunnels, to the surprise of Israeli forces, less of the secure boundary they sought to create than a border war.
If these tunnels were viewed as offensive cross-border routes, effectively countermanded by tanks and military brigades, the tunnel network has emerged as a particularly slippery target of resilience and resistance, and as a network of governance that has eluded Israeli strategies for its destruction, it has been metaphorically transformed to an evil network–the hellish site where hostages are kept and a diabolic network of terror, offering evidence of the poor governance of Hamas of the Gaza Strip and the inability of any future negotiations with a network unable to be trusted in any way.
If the tunnels were attacked and destroyed to defuse the presence of Hamas by flushing the terrorist group, by a mandate of “clearing the tunnels . . . through Gaza from North to South and East to West, using satellite and drone intelligence and infrared sensors to “sweep” the enclave by tunnel warriors and intelligence networks, “destroying” the estimated 500 km of tunnels became a goal of state. Indeed, as it was recognized and even sanctioned as a basis to target Israeli Forces near the Green Line, of the network by Israeli forces is in part a targeting of a vision of sovereignty that exclusively defied the state for Jewish citizens, and the expansion of verified threats from 2014 of feared massive cross-border assaults Hamas planned to against Israeli civilian communities through tunnels dug under the border. The increased targeting of the tunnel network by troop deployments in 2014 sought to clear the tunnels extending into Israeli territory definitely, a decade ago, but despite their success left the cross-border tunnels, to the surprise of Israeli forces, less of the secure boundary they sought to create than a border war.
3. As the tunnel network has become a target of attack in the current Gaza War in response to October 7, it has assumed figural status by cartographic logic both to undermine the symbolic identity of Gaza Strip as a , and to demonize the sovereign claims of Palestinians. If the first networks to be destroying or plugged in Operation Cast Lead, and then, in Operation Protective Edge, destroyed tunnels and tunnel shafts, the networks were the primary military goal–destroying fourteen tunnels extending into Israel to be used to stage a cross-border attack, and thirty two other underground tunnels–that aimed to flush the militant network from the region, and cut it off from a new stream of funds. The tunnel network has come to acquire a an almost early modern medical sense of evacuating the region of the presence of terrorists by a project akin to leeching or bleeding, removing the hidden terrorist network from the territory, in ways that have given the attack not only a retributive quality but a logic of elimination.
The figure of “tunnel networks” have transcended the site where Israeli hostages were taken, and become a haunting figure of the denial of Israel’s sovereign security,–rather than see their engineering as a form of sovereign authority, they are an explicit denial of Israel’s own borders, and affirmation of their terrifying vulnerability. The early release of a hostage who claimed to have been led on a forced march, recalling the Holocaust, through an underground network of tunnels that “looked like lots and lots of spiderwebs.” has provided the figure of speech that was readily seized on and repeated as the image of “spiderweb-like tunnels” were delivered by the witness of captivity, as two hundred and twenty captives remained in the network, their whereabouts, according to Rear Admiral Daniel Haggard, unknown. If Hassan Nasrallah foresaw the downfall of Israel, reinvading his “spider web” theory of Israeli society after October 7, in calling its state a “as fragile as a spiderweb” and depending on American and western support–
–the metaphor gained considerable currency as it was projected underground, as it was reflected back as evidence of the illegitimacy and underhanded deviousness of the Hamas state.
Yet in the Gaza War, as the engineering of the tunnel network has proved extremely resilient, the tunnel system long mapped by divisions of the Israeli Defense Forces have been metaphorically remapped–through terms that George Lakoff has understood as structures that form a basis of our cognition, and indeed become so embedded in our thought processes that we may not be conscious of them at all, but structure our understandings of reality, and indeed the reality that we see in maps, by providing “ways of seeing,” in John Berger’s phrase, deeply tied to feelings of distaste, revulsion, and emotion that easily transit to material sensations of space and discomfort, able to trigger in themselves new states of being. For the arachnid associations of casting the tunnel networks as “webs of terror” or a “spiderweb” and “spider’s web” paralleled Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, as at the same time that one hundred Air Force planes hit one hundred and fifty underground targeted tunnels, the network that was described by the eighty-five year old released hostage Yocheved Lifshitz as “a spider web of tunnels” where she endured a forced march over two to three hours and untold kilometers, to capture her own nightmarish experience, has become concretized as a nightmare for the region, questioning if the expansive network of five hundred km of tunnels that Yehia Sinwar claims exist, or how much of the network was destroyed in the past–or might be destroyed by aIsraeli bombs. The “spiderweb” metaphor concretized that nightmare as an existential threat, as thae footage the IDF released of the “horrific underworld of Hamas terrorism” by late October 2023 embodied thaat existential threat.
Rather than see the tunnel networks as primitive, regressive structures that metaphors reduce them to–“warrens,” “lairs,” or “spiders webs” of primitive governance that brook untrustworthy partners of governance that threaten normalcy–it is helpful to remember the tunnels’ modernity and the normalcy of their development. The tunnel system underground Gaza were born of necessity. As both Israel and Egypt attempted to respond to Hamas’ June 2007 takeover of Gaza by sealing he coastal strip, in an attempt to prevent contact with the outside world, and hamper its economic development, an industry of tunnel digging and excavation has found outside funding by the Islamic network’s promoters. The first tunnels that were dug across the new borders Israel built around the Gaza Strip that were feared to launch militant attacks on troops–
Destroyed Underground Tunnels in Gaza Strip
–were destroyed as open violations of Israeli sovereignty and territoriality from the 2014 conflict, some ten years ago, as the first sense of the expansive underground network of resistance was slowly grasped by Israeli military forces from 2013–even as Hamas officials called the underground network of tunnels a purely defensive network, and a United Nations Commission on the Gaza Conflict ruled that Hamas was indeed entitled to “conduct attacks . . . directed IDF positions in the vicinity of the Green Line” as “legitimate military targets”–the line that once divided Israeli and Arab territory in the Middle East that had, in 1958 maps of Israel’s settlements over the first ten years of its existence, bound the integrity of the coastal enclave of Gaza and around Gaza City as a “Strip” for the first time.
Detail, “Israel’s Ten Years of Independence” (1958), Map of Israeli Achievements and Settlements /Ma’ariv
If the “Green Line” constituted a recognized border, created on the old Palestine Grid, as late as 1955, the cross-border tunnel system suggested a new form of vulnerability to the settlements that appeared after the 2005 withdrawal of Jewish Israelis from the Gaza Strip, many who relocated to the other side of the reinforced border barrier.
1955 Map of Gaza Region Bound by Green Line in the Palestine Grid
Settlements near to Gaza, Al Jazeera, 2023
But as the tunnel system were seen as points of vulnerability to invaders, the tunnels themselves came to replace the territory of Gaza, a cartographic sleight of hand. At the same time as the network of tunnels has been revealed as the true target for Israeli attacks. The targeting of the network has redefined the strategy of attacking the occupied territory of Gaza, whose survival has been tied to the survival of Hamas. The tunnel network has not only grown beyond what Israel imagined in barricading the residents of Hamas behind walls, as it has come to reveal the entrenchment of Hamas network in the territory, whose elevator shafts extend over sixty feet underground and are equipped with wifi and electricity beyond the system of pulleys of old, but a hidden network of governance that is more critical to military operations than the symbolic targets of the Gaza Strip.
For Israel, the Hamas underground infrastructure offered proof only of a massive waste of resources for “a terror infrastructure to harm Israeli citizens,’ rather than serve their development, allowing an attack through the border or a basis to extend their military presence, as if confirming their untrustworthiness as a partner, although the motivations for global financing of the tunnel network, ranging from 190 crypto addresses to the Iranian government, who funnel estimated $100 million annually by shell companies, or Qatar, grew for staging attacks, not building social welfare. If its would be a taboo topic of comparison, the technological engineering of the tunnel network has become an eery parallel to the massive investment of Israel in the Border Barrier with Gaza: if the technological feat of the Border Barrier used some 150,000 tons of concrete and steel, in a massive effort to build sovereign security, 2,000 tons of steel and 6,000 tons are estimated to have been needed to build the durable underground tunnel network–far more hidden from view. Rather than to be visually imposing and intimidate above ground observers, the deeper tunnel networks function as defensive and offensive networks in a distinctive architecture to escape border duties. If they began to generate and create a profit for Hamas, they have come to provide a network deeply integrated in the Gaza Strip, a form of building prestige and winning respect, as well as to effectively able to resist military siege.
The map has in a sense truly replaced the territory, as the region’s extra-territory has never been questioned, in large part as the sovereign territory has never exited or been allowed to exist. fAnd as “Gaza” and “The Gaza War” has been explained by increasing maps, the manufacture of the underground network in maps and the metaphorical construction of the underground network as a target or as a lifeline has less often been discussed. The mapping of the network has been central to the war effort in Gaza–the subject of an intense effort of the Israeli Defense Forces for some time–and been at least one rationale for the intense interest and study of the Gaza War. The productive and utilitarian role of the network were at first central to their creation, and indeed expansion in the period after the blockade imposed by Israeli forces after they withdrew form Gaza to define the identity of the “Gaza Strip”–an area that was never recognized as a part of any nation–but provided a basis of “negative” sovereignty, not mapped, as the maps of land or of nations, but on the margins of other nations, claimed by Egypt, from the town of “Gaza” now “Gaza City,” during the first Arab-ISreali War of 1948, then by occupying Israeli powers, and defined in concordats of military armistice, until it was seized by Israel in 1967 Six Day War, who attempted to transfer its sovereignty to a Palestinian Authority but, after violent outbreaks, monitored its new “borders” to define Israel’s security, without being allowed full governance as the rule of the PA broke down.
In a complex uncertainty of the governing by the Palestinian Authority, the borders of Gaza became subject to Israeli monitoring, and the tunnel network provided the inverse sovereignty of the Hamas network, a social assistance network dedicated to removing Israeli claims over Gaza’s fate, and, as the Palestinian Authority ceased supporting the Strip, dedicated to entrench itself in an enclave that Israel sought to sanction and seal off from Islamic and Arab states, as the remunerative network of tunnels proved a basis for Hamas to gain revenues–and indeed to stage cross-border attacks deemed “legal” against IDF positions that surrounded the Gaza Strip,–or outside the Green Line that traditionally had divided Arab and Israeli land-claims. The sealing off of the Gaza Strip gave Israel an effective de facto sovereignty, separately from any legal system or sovereign claims.
The mapping of the network, however, by dedicated IDF forces, has defend it as a military target to be destroyed, despite the absence of any official sovereignty in the Gaza Strip and the sovereignty of Hamas was sought to be denied: the network provided a way to map, demonize, and concretize Hamas as a “negative state,” an irresponsible and illegal entity, by an onslaught of metaphors to denigrate its presence and demonize its right to exist even within the de facto borders of the Gaza Strip. As the tunnel network was mapped by a dedicated IDF division to control magnified anxieties of an existential nature of cross-border attacks and violations of Israeli sovereignty from 2014, the network served as a figure to disrupt and destabilize Israel notions of sovereignty or the faith the government was able to provide security–making the tunnel network a deeply symbolic target to ensure the continued sovereignty of Israel, and indeed its continued legitimacy as a sovereign state. After the invasion of Israel and as late as December, 2023, Israelis living in the occupied West Bank claimed to have heard tunnels being dug underground sections of the Separation Boundary, fearful of “constant digging noises” over the past several years, and complaining of the perceptions of “Hamas turnel-digging” and underground explosions to security forces, at the same time as the IDF has revealed increasing numbers of “strategic tunnels” that increased a sense of vulnerability.
The sense of excising the Hamas organization by preventing its abilities to govern the Gaza Strip or to run military operations from it became an unwindable war, against a government that was not mapped on any territory, but was only recognized to exist underground. The same Israeli government that refuses to recognize any “place” for Hamas in the governance of the enclave–especially in light of the violence and bloodiness of the October 7 attack–have led to a systematic if quixotic attempt to “degrade” the networks of tunnels. Although the tunnels are the sites of hostages, the Islamic resistance movement that fired an astounding 5,000 rockets into Israeli territory on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah planned and coordinate din the tunnels as a call for a collective “rising” of other “resistance fighters” in “Arab and Islamic nations” tried to create a collective front, no doubt planned far outside of the tunnel network, to resist the apartheid system Palestinians had condemned before the United Nations for the last twenty years. But the ground war against the tunnel system shifted the optics of the war for Israelis, as maps refined for the past twenty years gained growing circulation as a metaphor to deny any sense of sovereignty in Gaza.
4. The tunnel network had expanded rapidly as a form of alternative economic modernization to escape Israeli surveillance was developed as a shadow economy, demanding licensing fees to use tunnels, and added fees for connection to the electricity grid, that by 2011, Nicolas Pelham noted, became a basis not only for a black market in cars and fuel, but a form of domestic revenue that was a Border Authority able to monitor immigration into the Gaza Strip and financial base as support from Iran and Syria seemed to have declined, if imposition of surcharges and corruption remained. The economic development of a tunnel network had metastasized, in the Gaza War, to an operational center of military attack, an intelligence network and underground survival bunker, but also an active site for lathes, laboratories, and both workshops and production center of military rockets that the military network had continued to fire into Israel from diverse locations, creating the very indelible topography of fear material by which the militant network was able to survive and be targeted with expanding range from 2005–the date of the military withdrawal–
–to the present, able to terrorize increasing Israeli civilians and enter into an increasing range of Israeli territory.
In s sense, the tunnels provided a “shadow government” able to reach into the psychology of Israel citizens, and indeed threaten Israeli sovereignty, far beyond the network itself, or the 100 km of underground tunnels that were already destroyed in Khan Younis and Rimal in 2011, a network that had been cunningly rebuilt with an increased resiliency, refining the tools of engineering that had once provided an economic network fed by electricity, telephone lines, and communication to evade the blockade of the extraterritorial enclave of so-called “Gaza Strip.” The financial bonuses of tunnels had helped to boost the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure, rather than being neglected; expanding a robust north-south highway on one of the oldest roads in the world, the Salah al-Din Road that led to Raffa Crossing, diminished since 1948, and closed to Palestinian traffic and interrupted by 12 checkpoints in the Israeli Army’s occupation of the Strip until 2005, and the planting of grassy sites were important signs of modernization.
The modern infrastructure of Gaza seemed poised to return, in short, due to revenues from tunnels. The repair of the major coastal highway that was later designated as a corridor for “safe passage” from the bombardment of North Gaza in October made it a “road of death,” however, as the airstrikes that aimed to destroy Gaza’s hidden underground network sent an estimated 1.1 M refugees promised “safe passage” to Raffa, and the south, if with few possessions, fearing a return to the “dark ages” leaving all their possessions at home. The image of fleeing residents, displaced by the attack on the tunnel network, sticks in the mind indelibly. The convoys of aid trucks to refugee camps provided a dense congregation of the displaced for who no real safety was offered.
Nov. 10, 2023. – Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images
But if the commercial evolution of tunnel networks began as an improvised form of soft power to cement economic modernization of Gaza at the same time as Israel imposed a hermetic seal around the potentially dynamic trading post of this coastal strip to evade Israeli surveillance of the enclave. There was a sense of closing off other contingent developments for the Gaza Strip, one might argue. If Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres entertained a vision of Gaza as a port through which “merchandise and cargo will pass through its gates to points in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even Iraq,” or “Palestinian outlet to the world,” any such utopic vision faded after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza shifted concerns to security, and to the movement of weapons, terrorist networks, and explosive missiles with new authority after the invasion of October 7.
Any idea of a Middle Eastern future economy based on investment, based on “Agreement on Movement and Access” have been replaced by the specter of the tunnels as a shadow authority of governance have left it more landlocked than the West Bank in the eyes of Israeli security forces. Gaza was once envisioned as a global port by developers in Google Maps platforms, if it is hard to imagine such an image of global connectedness that imagined major ports as flanking Gaza City–
Options for a Gaza Port, 2019/Asaf Ashar
–or even as a global port region with multiple linkages into its local economy–
–have been erased.
Although these optimistic plans for the notion of Gaza City as a global port, or ports in Kerem Shalom and Zikim, in North Gaza, we map refugee camps, and not ports to provide economic power for Gaza and annexed regions of the Sinai to become a source to fund Palestinian governance have been effectively replaced by the powerful image of a network of underground tunnels where violent transnational weapons are stored, infiltrations of Israel planned, and hostages kept in inhumane conditions, as an unmasking of the inhuman nature of evil incarnate. The image of any Palestinian state stretching into the Sinai is hard to imagine emerging from its bombarded ruins.
Yet the image of Gaza as a “global gateway,” connecting the world to the West Bank and Palestinians to the world, provided a model for the region’s regeneration, restoring past metropoles as Wadi Gaza and even coastal tourism in Southern Gaza, and making Rafah a “gateway to Egypt,” profiting from the linkage of Gaza to the global economy of what was only recently optimistically imagined to attract investment for a “Global Palestine” with offshore ports, regional airports, intermodal transport exchanges, and global transport links.
These plans have faded to the distant past, the engineering of Gaza is reduced to its tunnels. As the underground tunnels become the targets of the IDF, more than the underground economy of smuggling tunnels of the past. As tunnels are being uncovered by IDF troops as prizes to affirm the evil of Hamas, under hospitals, refugee camps, United Nations’ Relief workers, and city neighborhoods the tunnels that once were called the “lifeblood” of Hamas have been targeted as its “nerve center,” demanding to be destroyed to squeeze the network from the Gaza Strip, in ways that almost erase the presence of human life across the Gaza Strip–and dehumanize its residents.
The tunnels that proliferated in Gaza as a means to circumvent the 2007 economic blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip was understood as a form of “political security” to separate it form the West Bank, reducing the presence of Palestinian autonomy in the Middle East from 2010 that restricted the flow of raw materials. Yet the underground tunnels engineered to circumvent Israeli military blockades and intelligence surveillance grew as a means of economic survival and a means to evade on the increased circumscription of the enclave to block its economic development have become increasingly both mapped targeted as an architecture for the state or sovereign claims of Hamas that pose existential security threats for Israel. The underground hidden sovereignty that has been an architecture of resistance has been cast as a negative form of sovereignty to eradicate. The notion of removing the network of tunnels seemed to have imagined a surgical removal of Hamas from the region in response to October 7. The former target of military intelligence had mutated to the presence of terrorists that the constraining of the clear boundaries around the Gaza Strip had been intended to prevent, and the massive scale of aerial attacks on the region seem designed to “flush” the presence of the network who had planned the raids from the enclave.
Increased Restriction of the Border of the “Gaza Strip” since 2007
For as the tunnel network has assumed the state of the true target of attack of Israel forces in ways that have intensified the war, it has become a means not only to target the terrorist network Hamas, but to bombard the region with an intensity that have made it the focus of air, artillery and drone strikes in the Middle East, that led Israel to ask 1.1 million Gazans to evacuate Gaza City days after the massacre of October 7.
The mapping of the defensive network of tunnels were engineered under its most populated regions has become a cartographic figure or a metonym by which the terrorist network has been both targeted and demonized. It has been seen as a form of “hell,” as “lower Gaza,” a negative zone of governance, a “city underneath the city” and a “spider web” of “terror tunnels,” “underground combat spaces,” and “form of hell.” The fears of underground networks to engineer attacks has been on the front burner of Israeli Defense Force intelligence for over a decade, long before the 220 hostages taken on October 7 2023 were kept below ground. The tunnel network under Gaza City was early individuated as a target of attack–Israeli Defense Forces had destroyed earlier cross-border tunnels with nine to ten tons of dynamite, it hoped never to see again–had been expanded in ways that the dropping of 2,000 pound bombs on Gaza City in early November suggested a desperate attempt to destroy the tunnel network beneath the city. The range of tunnels across borders–as the recently detonated tunnel through Egyptian territory to the Gaza Strip, under the Kerem Shalom crossing, as other tunnels beneath crossing, the tip of an extensive network not yet fully mapped, and of which no map has been captured, but has unfolded like the specter of an underground state with astounding international ties for a highly surveilled enclave.
Tunnels posed alarming security threats–and evidence that Palestinians are being “held hostage by Hamas,” in the bitter words of an IDF general smarting from hostage crises in 2018, leading diplomats, ambassadors, military attachés, and representatives of IGO’s through a 1.5 km long steel-walled tunnel at Raffa Crossing they protested openly violated Israeli sovereignty, before destroying the capacious tunnel several dozen meters beneath the ground that extended 180 meters into Israel territory. The IDF quickly identified it not as a smuggling tunnel but rather was a “terrorist tunnel,” one entirely designed for smuggling weapons. The IDF had already claimed more sophisticated techniques to locate and destroy underground tunnels–“the most advanced ability in the world against tunnels,” promising it was “far better prepared now than it was before Operation Protective Edge, both technologically and with regards to the troops on the Gaza border.”
Tunnel under Gaza’s Rafa Crossing at Kerem Shalom Border Crossing/Israeli Defense Forces, 2018
Israeli forces have long targeted Hamas militants, focussing with fear on the tunnel infrastructure in Gaza–and the Gaza Strip–from Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012 to Protective Edge in 2014. If the invasions targeted rocket launchers, rockets, and mortars in air campaigns, ground offensives revealed a hidden network of tunnels that was the fear as a possible game-changer in war. The network of “terror tunnels” introduced the the nature of the “tunnel threat” that the IDF argued would “not be tolerated by any other nation,” as a legitimate target of destruction, pricing each tunnel at a cost of three million dollars, and suggesting the ninety million spent on tunnels might have gone to housing, feeding, or providing an actual infrastructure for Gaza’s population: the network provided a basis to aruge Hamas, despite its origins as a social support network, was a negative state, which neglected “the welfare of its people.” Tunnels were designated by an immediately recognizable iconography for IDF forces to target within the Gaza Strip:
Operation Protective Edge Goals, Israeli Defense Forces
The networks were carefully mapped before their destruction, and provided a basis for recording a record of the sites where such tunnels were dug, lest they be animated again.
Underground war has emerged, as it happens, as a global problem and target in the intervening decade, and an independent object of study itself as a terrain demanding its own form of offensive war and military intelligence Worries of cross-border tunnels as infiltration sites were located in other countries–North Korea, of course, and the danger of tunneling under the DMZ–
–in ways that suggest another way that the Gaza War is not only a local struggle but a microcosm or point of tension of global fears and anxieties, as well as struggles. If the tunnels under the DMZ were seen primarily, as the first infiltration tunnels Hamas created on the Israeli border, as offensive tools, able to send thousands of soldiers kilometers south of the DMZ, far behind South Korea’s border guards, the new network of tunnels has however been slowly understood as a resilient defensive network, of an expanse under Gaza City and indeed much of the Gaza Strip, that Hamas has used–and Gaza’s Palestinian residents have not enjoyed access for protective cover–whose mapping is quite incomplete. If Egypt’s government has mapped and destroyed 1,600 miles of the some 1,800 miles of smugglers’ tunnels to Gaza, using seismographic records to detect tunnel construction and employing pulses of electronic wave machines to map their course, the depth of the new tunnel network discovered to be dug in Gaza’s fissile terrain are so deep to evade easy detection. The resoltion of Israel’s government to “systematically respond with even greater force”
The revelation of the architecture of hidden infiltration tunnels Israeli Defense Forces discovered in 2014 led to a new mission for the IDF Mapping Group–an elite team that communicates offensive strategies to ground forces–
–that has been Israel’s most highly classified Military Intelligence Unit, housed in Tel Aviv, in the very building that was used in the British Mandate, Unit 9900, charged with gathering satellite data and information from multi-rotor drones specifically designed for military use against an enemy that is increasingly not visible on open-air battlefields, as a “multi-dimensional” analysis of visual intelligence as an active and alert military reconnaissance network that seeks to keep Israel “one step ahead” of its enemies, constantly mapping field analyses of military threats to shape military analysis in maps of risk that created an illusory tactical advantage pierced by the invasion of October 7, 2023 as shockingly as the attack against the robustly constructed physical Iron Wall. If the metaphor of an “Iron Wall” has deep roots in hard right-wing Zionist arguments that Jews faced “Among the grave questions raised by the concept of our peoples’ renaissance on its own soil . . . more weighty than all the others put together,” the need to take an upper hand in relation to Arabs.
5. The underground tunnel network reconfigured the geopolitical question of the role of boundaries in mapping Israeli-Palestinian relations–even if the architectural form of the receiving arches was among the most ancient forms of masonry. If the digging of tunnels were among the most ancient forms of undermining walls and engineered boundaries, linked to networks of caves and burial systems that were adopted as places of hiding, the rate of growth that transformed economically operative tunnels to a network of resistance, as well as of cross-border attack, undermined the sense of territorial integrity that Israelis have long guarded to preserve–and the IDF was entrusted to protect. As the tunnel network grew into a robust network of defense for armed wings of Hamas and other terrorist groups, by 2014, far more robust networks than those used to abduct Israeli soldiers, as Gilad Shalit, from near the old border of 1948 Armistice preserved as the Green Line on the Palestine Grid.
Member of Hamas Armed Wing, Izz el-Deen al-Qaassam Brigades, in Underground Tunnel in Gaza, 2014/ Mohammed Salem, Reuters
6. Since the revelation of tunnels able to infiltrate Israeli territory more shockingly and immediately than was anticipated in 2014, hidden tunnel networks were part of a classic strategic coordination of the Israeli Defense Forces to eliminate an enemy that targeted and degraded with explosives and bunker buster bombs. The design of these unseen underground tunnels, newly uncovered in ways that seemed an architecture of “unfair” or underhanded tactical offensive that the terrorist group developed “under the radar,” seemed to have evaded geographic intelligence (GEOINTEL), signal intelligence (SIGINT) or radar, and escaped visual intelligence (VISINTEL)–as if the crude structures of surprising technical durability was, if the old architectural design of the compact form of a load-bearing arch, that itself dates to the 4th Century BCE, had interrupted military intelligence systems.
IDF Officer Showing Infiltration Tunnel Used to Invade Israeli Territory to Journalists, July 25, 2014
As we stand on the brink of what may be the most destructive war of the new century, with the greatest violations of human rights, it is perhaps the arches of these tunnel networks–adopted as the basic form of Roman architecture–
Fifth Book of the First Vernacular Edition of De Architecture (Como, 1521)
–that will be responsible for the sole surviving element of architecture of Gaza City. If the architecture of the masonry arch that was crowned by a reinforced concrete keystone was at the Yet as the discovery of the cross-border tunnels into the invasion of 2014 redirects the army’s strategic objectives to neutralizing possible clandestine underground attack tunnels from Gaza, the ground incursion by IDF into Gaza shifted a strategy of intense aerial bombardment of the wars with Gaza militants from 2009 and 2012, and escalated a new charge that led to destruction of some thirty-three cross-border tunnels, on which the terrorist group used 1,800 tons of steel and 6,000 tons of concrete that entered the enclave without being registered by IDF surveillance monitors,–about a tenth of the 140,000 tonnes of iron and steel in the underground wall Israeli built to strengthen the forty-mile long Gaza-Isreaeli border over three-and-a-half years. The new mapping of these cross-border tunnels, in part revealed by the sites of greatest destruction in the 2014 war, put tunnel networks on the very front burner, front and center, of Israeli military intelligence.
Map of Destruction of Tunnel Networks in Operation Protective Edge, 2014/IDF/Google Maps
The new tunneling through the ridges of the Gaza Strip challenges not only the surveillance of Gaza residents, or the geocoding of sites of missile launchers, but the mapping of national boundaries and sovereign states. The true targets are opaque, and underground, but open up a new horizon of “subterranean geopolitics” that has been rarely mapped. Bomb damage maps of the Gaza Strip that appeared within weeks after terrorists invaded Israeli territory in 2023 more viscously than ever before, and their vicious razing of residential areas where Hamas has long concentrated its tunnel network revealed a new anger and rage at the network as if it was the prime target of attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to reiterate as he announced a mass mobilization on national television in an exceptional Sabbath, the nation was “not in an ‘operation,’ or in ‘rounds,’ but at war.” The current realization of a far more extensive tunnel network in 2023 Gaza War led to their being seen as a new existential threat–not only as a means to cross the border Israel has defined between areas of Israeli sovereignty and the Gaza Strip, but as a target in need of destruction.
As Israeli ground forces poised to enter the Gaza Strip, they focussed on what they believed the major military infrastructure of Hamas in Gaza City, attempting what looked like a rather surgical strike at the tunnel network that became the first areas of Israeli control of the Palestinian enclave.
The bombardment of the Gaza Strip did not hesitate to target civilians–even more than in the earlier military operations in response to fears of cross-border incursions–that had damaged public and private infrastructure on unprecedented scale in the poor region. But the evident expansion of the tunnels under ostensible Israeli surveillance led to a deeper, more intensive, targeting of the sites of the same networks, in the hopes to degrade the hidden underground network that has become frustratingly elusive to compromise, and, as it has appeared to be of scale far greater than ever mapped in the past, become a rhetorical target that has implied Hamas’ and the Islamic Jihad’s utter lack of humanity–both in digging tunnels under hospitals, refugee camps, and schools as well as infirmaries and refugee camps, accused of putting civilians in harm’s way, and of directing funds to an underground network as the city has starved for lack of infrastructure.
7. The bombardment of the Gaza Strip was not just a terrible controlled experiment or surgical strike to destroy underground tunnels–if tunnels were clearly the targets the Israeli Defense Forces were advancing to eliminate as they were mapped on the Nightly News surrounding Gaza City at six points within the Gaza Strip. And the rhetorical targeting of the network grew asthe aerial bombardment proceeded, and the network was demonized as evidence of evil.
Positions of Israeli Tanks around Gaza City/November 1, 2023 (Google Earth)
But the metaphors used to embody that network of tunnels are drawn on quite dangerous symbolic grounds. The form of purification public messaging has increasingly begun to skirt is from the symbolic status of the tunnels as forms of Palestinian resistance and governance of the strip, and indeed from Palestinian presence. For if the tunnel network was constructed with concrete arches to affirm the ineradicable nature of Palestinian presence in the small coastal enclave, they have been taken as metaphors of the character of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups that have been cast in terms of vermin, insects, as Israeli tanks encircled the Gaza Strip in an attempt to “eliminate” or “systematically remove” Hamas from the enclave.
Elimination was not a euphemism, but the logic of mapping the extermination of Hamas has been understood most clearly through the tunnel network below the Gaza Strip. The surgical removal of the group became tied to the removal of the tunnel network that maps seemed to embody, as they became a target not only for cluster bombs–and internationally banned weapons–to attack Hamas’ military headquarters, but the emotional anger in response to the cross-border attack of October 7.
Carl Churchill, Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2023 (Based on 2014 IDF Map)
In 2014, of course, the terrifying possibility of an invasion of Israel through underground tunnels was stopped, possibly killing hundreds of civilians. The decade-old mapping of the network seemed to suggest a relatively clearcut set of targets to be struck–or paralyzed in critical junctures, interrupting the zigzagging corridors that allowed weapons to be transported across Gaza City and elsewhere in the narrow strip to escape aerial surveillance–but whose survival long after Israeli troops that had mobilized around the border entered the enclave proved not only stubbornly difficult to map with any definite,–but proved a surprising symbol of resistance, underestimated by most westerners and Israelis alike.
The construction of such underground tunnels were first engaged in Israeli security discussions in the early 2000s. But the maps of the tunnel networks, first made in the 2014 invasion of Gaza in hopes to close the tunnels of cross-border invasion of Israeli territory under the border fence, have become elusive hopes of mapping. They have become the true targets of the Israeli army were the under the city, in the “shadow city” that focussed attention from the start of the war on destroying the presence of a terror network that has entrenched its power base deep underground. In many cases, far deeper than were thought. As IDF tanks invaded Gaza City, snipers not only emerged from the tunnels, leaving the shafts that are now estimated to be as great as 5,700, the targets of attack risked luring troops into a new underground battleground that seemed to have science fiction qualities of the new terrain of the future, as much as a centuries-old terrain of war, that promised to create a terrain of intense psychological stress, surprise, quite challenging to map and questionable to explode, collapse, inject with foam, or plug. With challenges of subterranean war beginning to be appreciated–not only in terms of cross-border tunnels, but hidden underground networks to achieve strategic objectives–underground combat suggests a new battlefield indeed.
The transformation of warfare to new underground venues, less hospitable to GPS or clearly mapped satellite maps, have proliferated globally in recent years–from China’s three thousand mile long “Underground Great Wall” designed to escape nuclear holocaust, to North Korean air bases, runways, and radar sites, the future of a war fought in tunnels promises to grow as wars are more often waged by GPS. While Israel has been pretty clear about its intent to target the structure of underground tunnels bored beneath the sandstone and shale ridges of the Gaza Strip in which weapons from rockets to rocket launchers to drones were stored, in an attempt to drive Hamas from the enclave, the metaphors of the maps it has used are more than unfortunate as the charges of genocidal acts, as the arachnoid metaphors does Israel or the Israeli media no favors,–echoing the terrible dehumanizing metaphors so instrumental in mobilizing genocidal movements. If it is not coincidence the state of Israel was founded in the very same year as apartheid became law in South Africa, the charge of Genocide–launched by South Africa at the United Nations–rebuffs the twisted charge of White Nationalist Afrikaners of “white genocide” a decade ago in South Africa, that was given currency in the American mainstream press by Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, mid-way through his Presidential term, the invocation of the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention, adopted to condemn the violence of the Nazi Regime in the Second World War, extending across war and peace and with no territorial scope, was foundational to international law.
If the Convention addressed denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, a denial which shocks the conscience of mankind and results in great losses to humanity,” the racial terms in which it has been cast in the case of Gaza are designed to invoke the origins of Genocide to the targets of crimes willfully confounded with Apartheid. After conventions of 1998 affirmed that “the implementation of a system of Apartheid . . . a grave breach of International Law” and the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court defined apartheid in 1998 as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them,” defining Jews or Palestinians as races hearts to a Hitlerian definition for Jews and elides the diversity of Palestinian peoples by claims of ancestral ties to Arab tribes settling during or after the Arab conquest, or a broad Mediterranean expanse of Turkish, North African, Kurdish, Egyptian, and Turkman identities. The definition of crimes of apartheid as lying in their forms of “systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups . . . with the intention of maintaining that regime” suggests a tie to a regime, however, rooted in identities, of whom two million of whom have been fragmented for some twenty years into the enclave of the Gaza Strip with limited essential needs–water; civil rights; rights of mobility; electrical power; health–is a circumscription of rights by a regime, but not a founding logic of that regime. Yet the recent 2022 definition by Amnesty International labelling Israel’s domination of Palestinians as both Apartheid and a Crime Against Humanity, which stated that Israeli practices in Israel and the occupied territories equate to apartheid and that territorial fragmentation of the Palestinian sovereignty focussed on the need for solidarity and compassion in the face of the fragmentation of Palestinian sovereignty in Israel.
Map: Amnesty Internation; Graphic: Kairos Palestine
Yet the mapping of the tunnel network has become, in ways that seek to erase the huge symbolic centrality of Gaza to Palestinian identity, the very mapping of autonomy in the Gaza Strip.
However deeply unsettling and preoccupying, if not odious, the nature of the Israeli military offensive, “genocide” is clearly not what was planned–despite the many violations of human rights that have been associated with the invasion of the Gaza Strip, as well as violations of international law that developed in large part after the genocidal movements of the twentieth century. Despite the combination of human rights violations and the breaking of international law, the usage of the charge problematically lowers the threshold for what a genocide considerably. It is indeed, perhaps, disturbingly easy to charge “genocide” for heightened rhetorical power of a wrongful attack based on a logic of human extermination, often on ethic grounds. Despite the opacity of many satellite maps and analyses of destroyed neighborhoods and home suggest the clunky neologism, “domicide,” far more accurate from the perspective of the Gaza Strip’s residents, as 40% of of the structures in Gaza were destroyed, as the true targets of the air strikes–underground tunnel networks–have remained largely intact deep underground, and their depth was not suggested in the visualizations that imported IDF shapefiles of previously mapped networks dated almost ten years ago.
But the recycling of metaphors akin to “spiders’ webs,” “underground warren,” “lairs,” or “nerve centers” attribute an animistic quality to the networks are useful figures of speech to direct and mobilize emotions to targets as forms of subhuman evil, as much as merely lying beneath the surface ground. They demonized the opposition in deeply questionable ways, even as the expanse of the tunnel network grew in ways that were not mapped. The scale of Gaza’s destruction truly remains difficult to comprehend and entertain. These metaphors to target the tunnels mask the loss of lives–and 17,000 children separated from their parents in Gaza Strip by the start of February, 2024, a number that can be compared for scale with the 120,000-130,000 unaccompanied minors crossing the far, far larger US-Mexico border annually. Yet the blunt cartographic logic of the bombing of Gaza City grew as maps embodied Hamas’ “nerve center” and operational center as targets of emotional anger, dangerously animated by and entwined with dangerous metaphors.
8. While the targeting of the network of tunnels, already partly destroyed and surveyed ten years ago–and while the networks that extended deep into “Israeli territory” was allegedly destroyed by air strikes–as if the tunnel shafts extending beneath the crossings along the perimeter were the violation of the division of sovereignty was to be destroyed, more than the tunnels themselves. Indeed, the videos of the new architecture that was discovered in the tunnel network by late December underneath the Eretz border crossing–cement walls, concrete arches on the ceiling, communication wiring, and ventilation tubes–increased the size of the “webbed world of Hamas’ Terror Tunnels Underneath Gaza” beyond the five hundred kilometers of Hamas claimed to have constructed in 2021. But if the mapping groups of the IDF, together with journalists who relied on their provisioinal and dated records, estimated some three hundred miles of tunnels lying between fifteen feet to over two hundred feet below the sandy surface of the Gaza Strip, the long duration of the war have proved their guesses staggering under-estimates.
The earlier destruction of these tunnel shafts destroyed by the Israeli Defense Forces was triumphantly displayed–noting the cost of the loss of life that each took as a toll of the battle, Operation Protective Edge ten years back–some to the depth of ten to twenty meters–a map that may have provided the marker of the bunker-buster bombs that were dropped recently on the Gaza City in hopes to destroy an underground network of an infrastructure bored into sandstone and shale below the largely sandy, dry surface ground.
“Operation Protective Edge”/IDF (2014)
And as the tanks congregated around the Gaza Strip’s borders, with an invasion imminent, as internet sources in Gaza were almost entirely cut off, the tunnel network seemed an easily definable target of Israeli air strikes into which no experienced army would venture.
The tunnels that were earlier uncovered and mapped by IDF forces as subterranean entrances to Israel were identified as intolerable threats to Israeli sovereignty–that first targeted the tunnel network as an. underground infrastructure that assisted attacks on southern Israeli cities. Hamas had long strategically placed entrances to infiltration tunnels in densely populated areas, ranging from private homes, mosques, schools to hospitals and medical facilities, as a way to increase support for their own identity as the clandestine defenders of cities, and to grow hatred toward the Israeli occupiers who attacked the entrances, creating a dynamic of the mindset of a besieged city. But the “terror tunnels” that seemed designed for kidnapping Israeli soldiers and citizens were closed by the military, who perhaps overestimated their success in neutralizing the tunnels’ threat.
Since October 7, of course, the hidden network was re-mapped. Identified in public social media releases and footage for international audiences as where “rockets are stored, where terrorists hide, where Hamas headquarters are located” beneath the city of Gaza, the tunnels became targets of attack as the army was poised to invade Gaza, revealed as a “city within the city” that embodied the network of terror that was needed to be eradicated.
The hidden infrastructure of the tunnel network that was re-mapped in anticipation of the Israeli attack on Gaza City, as “a complex labyrinth of terrorist infrastructure” that embodied the “pure evil” of Hamas operations in ways that made it a mandatory target of destruction–an underground network where rockets, rocket launchers, and missiles “freely” moved about the cordoned enclave, where “Hamas leaders plan and orchestrate” attacks agains Israel,” in an “organized attack,” even if their scale was not known, in which the attacks on Israel were indeed mapped.
IDF Video showing Hamas Planning Attack in Tunnels under Gaza City
To be sure, the tunnels were not only in the memory of the Israeli Defense Forces but the focus of attention on their front burner as they tired to understand the scale of the attack on October 7: the mantra that “Destroying Hamas means destroying their tunnel network of terror” appeared on the footage that the IDF released weeks after the attacks of October 7, describing with analytic remove the existence of “an underground city, a complex labyrinth of terrorist infrastructure,’ beneath Gaza City, where terrorist warfare was fought from underground, whose “hundreds of kilometers” of tunnels seem destined to become the “battleground for hand-to-hand combat between IDF soldiers and the terrorists.” as Yahya Sinwar boasted. Whether Hamas bore three hundred miles of underground tunnels beneath he Gaza Strip in 2021, or five hundred kilometers, his claim “we have hundred of kilometers of underground tunnels,” reprised in an early and quite ominous IDF video,—
–needed to be measured against the costs of creating tunnels that demanded some 4000 tons of concrete each and over ten million dollars, and over 1,800 tons of steel, a million and a quarter dollars alone–requiring an influx of cash the terrorist network was presumed to never have access to in the past, far more than the three million dollars estimated to be used in their construction. The staggering underestimate of the extent of the network has ben recently revised to be as much as 450 miles of underground tunnels–more than the subway tunnels of New York City (145 miles), Washington DC (fifty miles) and San Francisco Bay Area (131 miles) combined–if far less broad.
The costs to create this “lower Gaza” or “Gaza Metro” are a billion dollars, and its technology far less primitive and more able to survive bombardment than the IDF had imagined. Accordingly, we must reimagine our images of Hamas as a dedicated team of subterranean laborers who remained largely under the surface of Gaza, no doubt largely removed from aerial surveillance. As IDF officials concede the far greater size of the tunnel network the has long been demonized, the sense of leaving the underground tunnels intact–as perhaps up to 80% remain–suggest a new image of Hamas as master-contractors and engineers, far from the scrappy fighters of the Second Intifada.
IDF Twitter
The shadowy system underground tunnels was invoked, at the same time, in terms that suggested not only emotional anger and response to the violence, but as evidence of the dehumanization of Hamas terrorists, and as a sign of the lack of credible governing. The tunnel network was cast as an illegitimate structure and a false icon of the entrenchment of terrorist groups in the enclave-as if this fact confirmed the negative sovereignty that existed far below the streets of Gaza, and revealed how apparently normal “civilian infrastructure was used to create terror” below the city. As Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attacks, referenced with pride an underground network that seemed the inversion of any sort of normal sovereignty, and which became a metaphor for the diabolic nature of the Hamas network’s claims to power, in rather terrifying ways. Yet as the current size ranges from 300-400 km, destroying cross-border tunnel networks provoked creating deeper, wider, and broader. While the past successes of mapping the underground networks in the last decade came from capturing maps form personnel involved in digging them, no sense of the expanse of tunnels seem to have as yet emerged in the current Gaza War.
Although the sedimentary ground of Gaza can support a terrain of criss-crossing tunnels, at multiple different depths from inhabited areas, and at a depth of two hundred feet, given its unique geomorphology, the 2019 foundation of an International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare in Israel’s Reichman University reflects there rise of subterranean warfare in Syria, Ukraine, and North Korea–and investment in military tunnel complexes by the United States, China, and North Korea, as well as the prominent defensive networks of tunnels in Ukrainian cities–Kiev, Mariupol and Bakhmut–that suggest nothing les than a new horizon that responds to the prominence of GPS in warfare. (The center is dedicated to overlapping questions of national security, law, and military tactics, in a new hybrid with military strategists with global experience with NATO, the IDF, and US Army.)
9. The tunnel network is a test of the ability to wage war in subterranean environments, as well as the demonization of the tunnel network across Gaza Strip. But the construction has become evidence of the evil of Hamas, in ways that have tapped into emotional anger at the invasion in animal metaphors. Israelis now discuss “the terrorist network,” “complex labyrinth of terrorist infrastructure,” or “tunnel network of terror” to remind the world of the target and the compelling rationale for the footage of increasingly escalating airstrikes and IDF attacks. The network of tunnels contrasts to the illusion of a “normal” city aboveground, with public services–Gaza features many–contrast to the redirection of funds to the construction of these seeming “traps” for soldiers that serve not only as an improvised hidden command center, but, in 2016, a summer camp for Palestinian youth, adorned with photographs of heroically poised armed Palestinian fighters, and a diabolical booby-trapped “lair” from which an indescribable evil emanated.
Adel Hana / AP
The celebrated durability of the underground network persisted, probably to the surprise and shock of Israeli troops. After bombing of 150 underground targets, with all internet and electricity almost entirely cut off, IDF spokespeople announced the targeting of a far vaster network than any earlier raids as over a hundred fighter jets targeted underground combat areas and underground infrastructure. The underground infrastructure that was quickly mapped was described as “a spider’s web” tied to illicit traffic and trade–a negative image of illegal governance, that had been the source where the new UAV’s and drones that hit and disabled the sensors and radar on the border barrier had been made.
As tanks assembled above ground around the Gaza Strip, in response to the October 7 invasion, they seem poised to try to destroy the tunnel network at some of its known entrances in North Gaza, near Beit Lahiya, Gaza City, near Beit Hanoun, and Central Gaza near Bureij. The invasion land and sea seemed to target known sites of the tunnel entrances–
–beside where the border had already fallen and been broken through, at the start of a land and sea invasion of the Gaza Strip.
October 27, 2023
The tunnels provided a target both as a command center, and to be sealed to prevent hostilities. But the amazingly modern tunnel complex provided a basis for a sort of “shadow sovereignty” in the Gaza Strip, as well as a strategic network of geopolitical military significance. The tunnel network has grown as a focus of hostilities, first as a target of destruction and, increasingly, as a question of how to target, as its astounding resilience despite aerial bombing has lent its rather rudimentary concrete construction evidence of a basic, if traditional, technological expertise that few seem to have imagined from the first dug tunnels that were used to cross the border.
The significance of the network grew for many of the suppliers of arms and materials to the Palestinian network that have become demonized and indeed targeted as nerve centers for the terrorist network long before the October 7 attacks–and to far transcend the older maps of tunnels from two and a half years ago that were kept in IDF records. The increasingly expanded and deepened network was based on far deeper caverns than Israeli mapping teams had indeed mapped in recent years–and presumed to have destroyed–and revealed the mistaken sense of security that the actual network had ever been neutralized.
Yet if the networks were argued to be destroyed by air strikes removed from any on the ground military intervention several years ago, the networks have revealed a considerable resilience, that has of course helped the terrorist network “dig in” to the critical basis of limited Palestinian sovereignty, a region long housing many religious shrines and sites of worship–as well as cemeteries–that have made the small enclave a site of particular importance, beyond as a foothold for launching antagonizing rockets into Israeli territory. Yet as we found, to the shock of Israeli intelligence forces within the government that had funded and promoted the Boundary Barrier as a guaranteee of security of settler communities that extended to underground walls and was equipped with sensors able to monitor any underground movement or tunneling in the past–
“Israeli Military Destroyed more than Thirty Tunnels out of Gaza,” BBC, 2014
Israeli Defense Forces Mapping Team
–as a “smart” border guard, affording security for the future.
10. The architectural sophistication of the “smart fence” seemed to trump the fear of cross-border tunnels. But belied how the fairly rudimentary nature of these tunnels has changed a decade later that benefited from the strength of sandstone sediment under Gaza City and the western ridges of the enclave to be reinforced in a way unlike the provisional ready-made “offensive” tunnels dug only to stage invasions of Israeli territory that were revealed in the 2014 invasion, the last time that IDF brigades assembled to enter into the Gaza Strip, and shows the rage of tunnels form Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and Rafah that considered as possible avenues of attack.
Many “tunnels” were mapped at border checkpoints, it was revealed in offering clandestine modes of smuggling arms and money into the Gaza Strip it was revealed in 2014, circumventing the eyes of the very IDF troops who monotirood the border crossings–moving beneath the surveillance networks of the border fence beneath outposts of the IDF troops standing guard above, raising questions and fears for the first time of an underground war.
The tunnel network was promoted on social media as a defensive network that radicalized future recruits, within the Gaza Strip, and used in scenographic terms as a site where recruits and children were given tours to suggest the investment in neighborhood defensive networks.
While the Israeli Defense Forces showcased the tunnel networks that they had identified–and believed to have identified a network that was able to be dismantled and destroyed–
–the significance of these underground zig-zag routes that linked sites in the largest cities in hidden routes were very resilient,–but continued to be the ostensible target of escalating bombardment of the Gaza Strip.
They remained the primary targets of forces who congregated on the built “border” around Gaza-Israel barrier, through which terrorists broke through to global surprise on October 7 2023. The barrier, celebrated from its 2021 unveiling as a guarantee of security–
2012 Extension of Israeli Borders
–undermined the promises of the government to the nation.
The borders of Israel, as the concrete barrier walls that surrounded the Gaza Strip, have been refashioned as a necessary form of security–and heralded as such by the Israeli government. They had quite a different reality for those Gaza residents who have grown up in a society where they only knew closed borders–an imposition of a new reality of boundedness that must be integrated into the psychology that permitted the truly Hobbesian nature the recent attack. In contrast to these walls, the tunnel network has since metastasized in the imagination, as it has grown in size and sophistication, to become a “nerve center” for Hamas, and an emotional target as a surrogate for the destruction of the terrorist network. Underground, hidden, sprawling to evade surveillance, evil, and responsible for death, it has become a metaphor for the survival of the network, whose continued survival would meant the survival of Hamas.
11. The sense of security and stability of securitization rocked the nation’s leadership as a huge defeat of the promise of security. Despite the destruction of twenty-three tunnels in a previous Gaza War, Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the world saw that tunnel network has been long identified as a military asset was alive, and needed to be targeted with a vengeance of Deuteronomic proportions, intent to extirpate the site for planning and storing weapons for the October 7 attack of surrounding settlements and drive Hamas from the enclave it was effectively entrenched. If the settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip were targets of Hamas–they were homes many of the Jews in the Gaza Strip had resettled–the defensive tunnel network seems ago be the grounds for continuing a long, drawn-out war different from what Israel had imagined or was prepared.
While the expanse to which the terrorist network penetrated Israel is impressive–the red dotted line–the power base of the enclave colored green as a Palestinian haven finds its power center and operating network underground. If the tunnel network was once a concern for ferrying terrorists beneath the Gaza Boundary, not yet the fully monitored Boundary Barrier with surveillance towers and radar, the shock of the invasion has led to a concerted bombardment and search to destroy the sophisticated underground tunnel network, equipped with reinforced concrete walls, steel supports, and electrical wiring as well as tracks. The architecture that was modeled after cross-border tunnels–tunnels that the Chief of Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, Mohammad Bagheri, boasted were a logistical triumph of military engineering constructed over 400 kilometers, if not 500–a network of surprising sophistication, twice as long as the 233 km of New York City’s subway system.
The clear pride in the construction of key, endurable defensive infrastructures under the Gaza Strip, even as it was surveilled by Israeli forces, have allowed Islamist militia to survive Israeli fire, amove weapons both by motorcycles and cars, in a “Metro” forbidden civilians are forbidden to enter. The structure Hamas was showcased to persuade Gaza residents of its power, but despite the scale of hidden defensive industries below the city, unlike air raid shelters, they were unable to be accessed by civilians, but for purely for military use by Palestinian fighters; Hamas even argued that any protection for residents of Gaza must be instead the responsibility of international monitors.
For the Israelis must have only discovered the durability as the network was targeted from the arrival of bunker-buster bombs of 2000 pound payloads in October, bombs usually able to liquefy and penetrate the ground. Despite finding over eight hundred entrances into the tunnel network after the ground invasion, in the densely inhabited Gaza City alone, by late December, the network as proved elusive as a target, and perhaps belie claims to have destroyed functionality of 80% of the network. It is increasingly uncertain how much of the underground network survives, but it has been relentlessly cast in terms of its deception as a “labyrinth” demanding to be flushed, or demeaned as a “maze,” or dehumanized as a “spider’s web,” demanding to be destroyed, rather than a structure of durability. IDF footage sent out of the tunnel network implied a level of subhuman activity, but also a sense this was not the “normal city,” seen above ground, but a demonic structure of reinforced concrete arches, impervious to bombs,–“Hamas architecture,” for many, in ways that might make some ask if Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, divided by barriers, was a “normal city,” or the idealized urban structures of open space and free circulation for its citizens.
Yet the underground defensive network had of course been long boasted to be able to survive aerial bombardment for a year or more by its Iranian funders. Iran’s Interior Minister boasted its structures of “passive defense” offered, akin to the “Rope-a-Dope” stratagem of American heavyweight champion Muhammed Ali, a means to force military attrition of Israeli Air Force attacks, where “resistance forces” might absorb the shocks of aerial bombardment to exhaust the attempted destruction of Israeli bombs and armaments. The network was known as the “Gaza Metro,” perhaps with a sly wink toward its modernization, or, for Israeli’s, as a sign of its rather primitive nature. But such a term obscures not only that it has still been functional, but has in fact profited from the multiple layers of functionality for which it has been built–from smuggling to storage of arms to operational headquarters–remains functional, despite premature boasts for its destruction. The shifting identity and character of the underground web of tunnels was only recently discovered, as escape routes and smaller tunnels off a central one have been found, rather than the clear zig-zags that were first targeted by arial invasion. Indeed, the elusive goal of the ability to target the tunnel structures, or the more elusive one of targeting Hamas leaders–an early if elusive hope!–has been mirrored in the difficulties of mapping the underground structures.
The ability of mapping the underground structure seems impossible without entering the tunnel network, and provides a continued obstacle as GPS would not be functional so deep underground. With over 800 shafts have been destroyed since the December invasion of the Gaza City, it has proved far less simple to target than the trans-“border” tunnels beneath the Gaza-Israeli barrier completed to so much fanfare in 2021; the underground network seem indeed to have survived the border barrier that was breached, until its recent repairs, whose future has been compromised. The generic tunnels built at great cost under Gaza City probably would not provide the precise means needed to track their expanse in their generic, unmapped and vaguely Mediterranean architecture of bleached white concrete walls, psychically challenging to enter as a new terrain of war few bargained to enter or imagined would not be destroyed by massive aerial bombardments.
12. Hamas not only shifted the functionality of the tunnel network, as the barrier–which Israelis imagined a man-made border, akin to the American Wall on the US-Mexico Border, was broken through. The evil that was projected on the tunnel system in You Tube videos and guided tours suggested a tunnel city that discredited its own Hamas architects as potential partners or credible governors, as it was mapped as a devious operation to attract the Israeli army underground, or indeed to reveal that at no point had Hamas ever planned to be but a thorn in Israel’s side, investing millions in planning an attack similar like that of October 7, and a resistance network that could withstand aerial attack it seems to have invited, as Israel focussed exclusively on the land borders of the Gaza Strip as a basis to ensure settlers’ security.
By early November, as forces massed on the Gaza Strip’s borders, readying themselves to identify the entrances to more tunnels in Gaza City, the expanse of tunnels posed a challenge of mapping, given that GPS or even night goggles could not be used to map the underground network, which lies so deep below the surface that GPS would need to be replaced by magnetic sensors, more suited to a deep underground, movement sensors, and step counters in an environment so removed from he surface to be compared to being “underwater,” and demand special training to learn to explore.
What remained were only the older maps, tied predominantly to cross-border smuggling, and would involve some sort o dangerous underground tunnel combat, which would probably demand an entirely different set of armaments and strategies of engagement than those in which soldiers were trained. Would this generation of the IDF be the first to engage in such underground combat? Israeli commanders, initially were reluctant to enter the network where they believed the terrorist network would attack them, now seems determined to enter in hopes to locate hostages, after they have worked to remove booby traps from their above-ground entrances.
Gaza Tunnel Network Known to IDF from a Decade Previous to October 7, 2023
Yet if the tunnel network was embodied as a source of evil, and targeted as a structure to infiltrate Israel or perpetrate terrorist acts, the networks have been targeted by the IDF as if the need for the destruction of the of the underground networks was able to sanction imposition of a collective death penalty on residents, as if legal grounds to distribute the guilt of terrorist actors to all residents, as if they were perpetrators by association, collaborators who Hamas had put in dangers way. It was as if all who stood in the way of the destruction of tunnel networks were collateral damage of a bombardment that has now left over 20,000 dead. During the invasion of the Gaza Strip, few journalists have been able to report on the ground from Gaza or the Gaza Strip, in part due to the silencing of journalists and media,–in part due to internet blackouts, and in part the targeting of Palestinian journalists who were suspected of giving biased accounts of the invasion. The embodiment of the network became a basis to target neighborhoods from he first air strikes after October 7. With no maps of the current tunnel network, and no plans to map the existing underground network, the old maps recirculated on social media in attempts to understand the rationale of the extensive bombing raids.
In place of journalists on the ground, we have taken to register unprecedented reprisals of aerial bombardments as the have been mapped remotely, by satellite, with open source data, in a cartographic detective work and powerful data visualizations. For the open source maps and satellite imagery, combined often with maps released by the IDF, have served to give a sense of the attempts to destroy this hidden power base that has been called the strategic infrastructure and powerbaye of the sovereignty Hamas has waged in the Strip, where the underground sovereignty of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other ‘terrorist networks” is contested by the affirmation of a controlling the strip by radar maps and from the air.
Above ground, the devastation only grows. There is even, we have been reminded, “no rest for Gaza’s dead”: the improvised “makeshift cemeteries” of those killed in the bombardment are not targeted with the intent of desecration, the iDF has assured us, and troops have “no policy of harming or desecrating cemeteries,” but the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs of Palestine has reported that over 2,000 graves have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli forces as they entered the territory in ways we have not yet and cannot yet map to examine, even as the IDF allows “gravesites, like other civilian sites or structures, can come to be damaged” in war as troops do try to search sites of burial for remains of hostages that might be concealed there, creating a terrible traffic of corpses and human remains that may be exhumed, forensically examined, and returned, in search of the remains of twenty-eight bodies of Israeli citizens who have died in the Gaza Strip who it hopes to provide burial rites. The exhuming of bodies is an underside of the war, a search for the dead that eerily parallels the search for living hostages in negative: the shallow graves of Palestinians, meanwhile, offer the hope of providing future burials in a different setting.
Burial Site in Al-Shabaya District of Gaza City, 2024/AFP
The costs of human life are rarely calculated or observed. Yet the destruction of a tunnel network that IDF has repeatedly mapped and remapped is a possible goal–a hope that has extended to many improvised solutions, by technologies from night vision goggles to invade the tunnels without being ambushed in the dark, to flooding the tunnel network with sea water from the Mediterranean–despite the huge risks that this would pose to the future of Gaza’s groundwater or its quite shallow aquifer–already quite depleted and highly salty–compromising future habitability of the Gaza Strip, to destroying all entrances to a prime military asset, if one that was a constant challenge to destroy. (The violence of some of these actions, as the flooding by salt-water, a proposal that was floated as the IDF forces realized the scale of the tunnel network they sought to destroy, would effectively poison water supplies to the region equivalent to environmental warfare; in a region that has lacked freshwater and lost 97% of their average daily water consumption since before the war began, suggested a cruel poisoning of the groundwater. The prioritization of the destruction of the tunnel network by Israeli forces over the region’s ecological devastation suggested “part of the variety of tools for dealing with the tunnels,” checking the ties to groundwater, but filling a tunnel network of 350-400 miles long was not a practical manner, let alone assessing the risks to local water quality.) The intact status of an estimated 80% of tunnels–four fifths of the underground network–reveals, and Hamas operatives have not been found who possess anything like a map of its shape, one of the key means by which IDF intelligence understood previously discovered underground networks.
13. The depth of the tunnels in the network was not known, so much as approximated, but reached into natural pockets of geological sediment which could not be reached even by powerful bombs–suggesting that one might do well to map the tunnels not as an illicit form of underground sovereignty, than a part of its unique geology. But the tunnel network was, of course, responsible for the acceleration of a bombing campaign that sent shudders globally. The damage map of bomb strikes of vivid red splatter seek to illustrate these human costs, more than a data visualization–but suggests how much violence the targeting of tunnels had served to justify.
The composite damage analysis of structures in Gaza remotely sensed by Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite on which this is based by the end of November had already suggested a damage extending form the coast to the interior of nearly 98,000 buildings–a razing of the area of North Gaza that was once one of the most densely populated areas in the world–
Destruction of Buildings in North Gaza based on Satellite and Drone Records, October 7-November 18, 2023/ Corey Scher (CUNY) and Jamon Van Der Hock (University of Oregon)
–without setting a food in the region. We observed it remotely, assured by the news of the need to destroy and extirpate the hidden network of tunnels that provided the true target of bombardment.
The scale and intensity of the bombing is hard to grasp by a data visualization, but marked the first forced migration of Palestinian residents southward, and was of course not yet close to complete.
14. Yet the tunnel structure underneath Gaza City displayed striking resilience, that suggests its planners had anticipated the possibility of arial attack, and that the tunnel networks used for moving food had been qualitatively changed as increased steel and reinforced concrete. The new quandaries raised by campaign to destroy the reinforced concrete and metal sides of this tunnel has created a new logic for the invasion, given the apparent survival of such underground networks even in the face of bunker-blaster bombs whose use is not able to be continued without destroying the city, The forces on the ground in Gaza had discovered revealed many entrances or “shafts” to the network in December, but the discovery was conveyed in dangerous metaphors –a “lair,” a “warren,” or a “sprawling maze,’ a “labyrinth,” in ways that conveyed the desperation of abilities to destroy the military asset that maps suggested might be destroyed once again, but were also metaphors of dehumanization, similar to those of animals, rodents, or, sadly, immigrants.
These metaphors demonized and cast as illegitimate if not diabolic the infrastructure of such strategic importance to launch military attacks. They cast the network as a necessary target by such terms of dehumanization, which evoked a sense of infiltration and need for extermination. The movement from the “spider’s web” or–in the words of a freed eighty-five year old who lived in Kibbutz Nir Oz upon her release in late October–a “hell that we never knew before and never thought we would experience”–met the metaphors of the invading terrorists who “swarmed” the kibbutzim themselves, describing how the tunnels she was taken to “looked like a spider’s web” upon her release, became a new metaphor to understand the tunnels, which Israelis hoped to clear and collapse, but also took as evidence of the nefarious untrustworthiness and maladministration of governance of the impoverished Gaza Strip, over 80% of whom live in poverty, while millions were funneled to the construction of the unseen network,.
The tunnels once used to ferry goods into the enclave, is now equipped with roads, track, and media lines and electricity–a durable infrastructure. The skill of the achievement is belittled in invoking metaphors of insects, animals, or underground beings, able to be “flushed” from the claims they pose to seats of sovereignty. The tunnels suggest the absence of sovereignty, beneath a region that is nominally occupied and under Israeli sovereignty. Use of the dangerously dehumanizing figure of insects or animals ignores that monitoring the small enclave by air, land and sea created no place than in the tunnels that had long exploited the unique geological formations beneath Gaza City–although the network was an illegitimate apparatus in a criminal attack, the tunnels effectively recast complex questions of responsibility of aerial bombardment in terms argued to be necessary military goals, demanded as a response to the brutality of the weapons that were assembled if not manufactured there, booby-trapped spaces that demanded immediate destruction in times of war–
–that have encouraged overlays between the targeting of bombardment and the tunnel network, as journalists tried to assess how the old maps of tunnels corresponded to the onslaught of bombs in specific neighborhoods. But the outdated information on tunnel networks was a rough guide indeed for dropping bombs to “take out” the tunnel network could drive the Hamas network from the Gaza Strip–as if the network could be removed from neighborhoods they were closely integrated by destroying the tunnel networks from which they had launched attacks.
Were these tunnels legitimate targets for destruction? The attempts to force residents to leave their homes while the network of tunnels was destroyed created a forced migration of unprecedented scale. And the level of surface-damage that the destruction of the tunnel network created, the hopes to destroy this invisible power infrastructure may be hard to hold up, as talk of the resettlement of the Gaza Strip has returned to Israeli news, as if the forced migration were permanent. This is all the more inevitable as satellite imagery has helped to reveal, with open source maps, the destruction of an astounding 250 residential buildings, sixteen mosques, seventeen schools and three hospitals, as well as leveling entire neighborhoods and agricultural greenhouses. Little local capital existing to rebuild them, and even graveyards destroyed, and once plentiful historic sites of worship razed off the map–from Al-Rahan mosque or the Khalid Bin Al-Waleed mosque in Khan Younisto the seventy other mosques in the Strip–
–we lack a word to describe the evacuation of memory removed or scale of destruction of the raids, argued to be legitimate to destroy the networks of tunnels that were built underneath them in old images that the IDF produced that attacked the location of tunnels beneath sacred sites. Indeed, the destruction of these sites has allowed the invasion to be mistakenly characterized as a “sacred war”–in ways the Israeli government hasn’t dispelled–as much as the military role granted to settler militias, eager to target Palestinians to “liberate” land they see as bequeathed by Holy Law, in Gaza and the West Bank–they threaten to invert Rico’s genealogy, making Sacred Law trump International Law–though a religious war threaten to undermine the Zionist ideals of secular Jews to found a nation, in dangerous emulation of theocratic regimes.
Such images not only dangerously question the religiosity of Palestinians, but risk the resorting to dangerous metaphors indeed of dehumanization, however, that risk the perpetuation of a cartographic logic of destroying the underground power strategic network and to use the need for its destruction to rationalize and justify the destruction of those who dwell and what lies above the ground. Is a relentless concentration on the tunnel network a form of burrowing into a rabbit hole, as a way of getting lost, in a flight from reason, or tunnel vision inspired by geolocation tools?
15. The charge to destroy the network of tunnels that the IDF cartographic team has mapped as a form of negative sovereignty, rooted in its illegitimacy, represented as evidence of its shadowy, illicit, nature, neither above-ground or honest, a dangerous logic for a war with no clear end or exit plan?The IDF maintained a clear line of dialogue with Gaza’s remaining residents, or seemed to hope to, by early December, with hopes “to preserve your security and safety” even as they resumed the vigorous bombardment of the tunnel network of Hamas and “other terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip,” seemed to believe in an ability to sever Palestinian populations from the map of the tunnels that lay underground, issuing public alerts to all remaining in Gaza City neighborhoods of Al-Mahatta, Al-Katiba, Hamas, Al-Saar, Bani Suhaila and Ma’an to depart their homes, and move to shelters in Al-Fukhari, Al-Shaboura, Al-Zuhur, and Tan Al-Sultan. The map that divided the Gaza Strip in neighborhoods “in an effort to help you, in the next stages of war . . . [you might] preserve your security and safety, echoed the forced migration of Palestinians of Gaza City to the south.
The later illustration of the extent of tunnel entrances or shafts in Gaza that has been issued in late December as a basis to justify the destruction of neighborhoods and buildings where the tunnels exist seemed a justification for the need to fled neighborhoods that were being bombarded to eradicate Hamas from the Gaza Strip–
Israeli Defense Network, December 20, 2023
–but their abstraction of tunnel shafts as targets cannot but suggest a relentless strategy of destruction in which citizens’ residents and citizens are collateral damage, as well as the primary economic infrastructure in the Gaza Strip that kept the economy alive as it has been separated from the rest of the world. If it is the structure that the Gaza’s economy has depended upon, will its destruction merely open and prepare real estate for a logic of resettlement, as less secular Israeli parties hope?
16. The rather terrifying promotional pictorial superimposition of planned luxury condos in a photograph of the ruins of an only recently destroyed bombed out residences suggests a cognitive dissonance that echoes the invisibility of the lives of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for Israeli; if the image has been disowned by the developers as a plan, it rivaled the horror of a cognitive dissonance before humanitarian disaster is jarringly affirmed by the appearance of a bombed out landscape beneath apparently cheery inunction to customers, “Wake Up! A House on the Beach is Not a Dream!”
Harey Zahav/December 17, X
The provocative heartlessness of the plan by developers with “vision in building settlements” on the West Bank and Jordan Valley was first proposed a new age of the Gaza Strip, but was promoted by a right-wing pundit journalist of the Israeli party Home Rule. The mockup first circulated at a Tel Aviv conference on Practical Preparation for Gaza Settlement, as if an artist’s rendering seeks to erase any memory of the displacing of 1.9 million residents of Gaza as they face food insecurity, cold temperatures without fuel or access to food and water. It replaced this devastation with the cheery optimism of “flipping” astounding for it silencing if not denial of the major humanitarian crisis of the 2024, which has placed lives of residents are at risk, leaving many burning old furniture for want of heating fuel in Gaza City, iff not mourning dead relatives and caring for wounded. The tasteless mashup is perhaps a way of compensating with the idea of continuing a real estate business in a time of war, when the nation is in a complex space, but made rapid rounds on global social media as evidence of the absence of any consciousness of the scale of the recent war crimes.
There is a weird echo, in this denial of the scale of devastation, with the way that actual IDF maps privilege the tunnel network above human costs. Indeed, the superimposition of proposed future developments. The eeriness of the cheery injunction to imagine beach property is reflected in the jarring legend, an apparent substation of those legends of the sites of bombing, tunnels, or targets of aerial bombardment, by now familiar in most satellite maps of the Gaza Strip, now replaced by the cheery icons of real estate developments that have been offered by Harey Zahav as the realizing the option of beachfront properties–“A house on the beach is not a dream”—
While this image evokes the worst anti-semitic stereotypes of rapacious real estate firms, the faux real estate poster raises questions–never considered, it seems–of reconstruction costs of an unprecedented level of destruction aerial bombardment has created on the Gaza Strip, and of what reality it will leave. While such far-right groups as the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy horrifically and unconscionably floated proposals of “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip,” and a right-wing minister in the Netanyahu regime Itamar Ben-Gvir has advocated encouraging a policy of “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, the rendering is hardly endorsed by the government. (Context is important here: Ben-Gvir launched the incendiary statement of “voluntary emigration,” an absurd proposal, on the International Court of Justice was considering charging Israel for “genocidal acts” of forcibly displacing Gaza residents; ”voluntary emigration” was a purely “voluntary” alternative, he argued supported by Nikki Haley, no less. And while the architectural rendering provocatively invoke crass motivations of profit as a hidden exploitation for the scale of such destruction, the questions of what will take their place that they raise is both urgent and real.
The vulgar architectural mock-up image is all too easy to tie to the worst anti-semitic stereotypes of rapacious real estate firms, the poster raises questions–as if they were never considered–of the future of a bombed out landscape with no hope for a suitable Marshall Plan to front the level of destruction continued bombardment created on the misbegotten Gaza Strip, and what reality it will bring. While right-wing groups as the Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy have quite unethically and unconscionably declared that “there is currently a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” that led to charges of how “[an] Israeli real estate firm is already cashing in on genocide,” producing blueprints that flip bombed out areas on the Gaza coast into luxury condominiums that recall Florida or the Mediterranean villas of the South of France, incredulous at the callousness occupying Palestine, the firm quickly backpedalled on what they called a “joke” on the drafting table as the image verged on provoking international horror.
The hidden “reveal” the image that seemed to prove the hidden agenda of bombardment as a use of public funds for for private gain, in a satire of the public-private leveling the residences of Gaza City for realtors eager to find beach-front property, as if economics trumped recognition of the humanitarian disaster. The arrogance of the greed of the realtor is truly a terrible stock figure of anti-semitism, crudely drawn, prompting accusations of short-sightedness and misplaced priorities that will leave Gaza Strip as a profit-seeking venture imposed blithely upon a disaster scene whose extremity it did not acknowledge. As much as targeting tunnels, one might imagine this was motivated by a keen sense of the property appreciating of coastal property for future speculation.
The real danger might be far greater than callousness. But it is rooted in the danger of metaphors of dehumanization that the focus on the underground tunnels as a negative form of sovereignty has allowed. For asthe war becomes a sacred war of targeting the hidden network of tunnels, a goal that has replaced any sense of the human cost to Gaza residents, by privileging the targeted tunnels the result is far more terrible than its subservience of all this destruction to a scheme to turn a profit.
It is not only dangerous to the future of the secular state, but, of course, to any future settlements or settlement schemes. The pressing danger that the war is co-opted, is running off the wheels, driven by a logic that has escaped its planners, as the plan to target tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip takes over the war, and imagines that the enclave is the only guilty party in the war, and that Israel is not surrounded, in ways that international boundaries cannot clearly be relied upon to protect.
Musings on Maps 
Very informative analysis of timeline and objectives of the Israelis. If only the pro-Hamas side would objectively consider this as the true ‘reality’ of what has happened since early November, 2023.