11-Aug-14: Deep down below Gaza: Child-abuse, exploitation and murder by Hamas. And who are the principal victims?

Coal mine working children, Pennsylvania 1911 [Image Source]

The Israeli Hebrew-language news site Mako disclosed that the Islamist terrorists of Hamas executed dozens of tunnel workers in the past few weeks. Times of Israel picked up on the Mako report, revealing that the tunnelers, working underground for 8 to 12 hours each day for a monthly salary of between $150 and $300, were executed in order to preserve the secrecy of the tunnels project.

Sources in Gaza told the website that Hamas took a series of precautions to prevent information from reaching Israel. The terror organization would reportedly blindfold the excavators en route to the sites and back, to prevent them from recognizing the locations. The tunnels were strictly supervised by Hamas members, and civilians were kept far from the sites… 

This comes hard on the heels of another shocking revelation based on a report from the Institute for Palestine Studies ["Gaza's Tunnel Phenomenon: The Unintended Dynamics of Israel's Siege", Nicolas Pelham, 2012] that the tunnel constructions were marked by a "cavalier" approach by Hamas officials

to child labor and tunnel fatalities [damaging] the movement’s standing with human-rights groups, despite government assurances dating back to 2008 that it was considering curbs. During a police patrol that the author was permitted to accompany in December 2011, nothing was done to impede the use of children in the tunnels, where, much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies. At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials [and] perceptions of corruption inside the organization have intensified. During the renewed fuel shortages of spring 2012, there were widespread allegations that Hamas leaders received uninterrupted electricity and that gasoline stations continued to operate for the exclusive use of Hamas members. True or not, they fed a growing mood of recrimination that Hamas had profited...

A recent article by Lee Smith ["The Underground War on Israel", The Weekly Standard, August 4, 2014] explains how the Gaza tunnels morphed in recent years from being a source of illicit income for Hamas insiders and assorted other fat-cats, as well as a way of circumventing the Israeli embargo on certain imports, into a strategic weapon. An Israeli strategic analyst is quoted:

"If you multiply tunnels, you can use them to send hundreds of fighters into Israel and create havoc, totally under cover. According to Hamas, the tunnels have changed the balance of power." Israeli officials have expressed amazement at the extent of the tunnel network. “Food, accommodations, storage, resupply,” one astonished official told reporters last week. “Beneath Gaza,” he explained, there’s “another terror city.” That is, Hamas’s tunnel network is evidence of a military doctrine, both a countermeasure to Israel’s clear air superiority and an offensive capability that threatens to take ground combat inside Israel itself, targeting villages, cities, and civilians as well as soldiers. Israel perhaps should not have been surprised to discover the size and seriousness of Hamas’s tunnel network because they’ve seen something similar before, in the aftermath of the 2006 war with Hezbollah. And indeed it was Iran’s long arm in Lebanon that helped build Hamas’s tunnels.

The North Koreans - "the leading tunnel experts in the world" according to North Korea expert Bruce Bechtol - have played a major enabling role:

It’s nothing new for the North Koreans to work with terrorist groups... It started with the Polisario, the North African, and at one time Soviet-funded, terrorist group fighting the Moroccan government. “The North Koreans built them underground facilities, command and control, hospitals,” says Bechtol. “All of it was supported by Soviets, but that changed with the end of the Cold War, when the North Koreans offered their services on a cash and carry basis only.” Their top customer is the Islamic Republic of Iran. The North Koreans, Bechtol says, have helped build some of the Iranians’ underground nuclear weapons facilities, as well as Hezbollah’s underground network. “They built it in 2003-04, coming into Lebanon disguised as houseboys serving the Iranians. Maybe nobody asked, hey, how come these houseboys are speaking Korean?” The significance of the tunnels became clear in the 2006 war, as Bechtol explains. “It lowered Hezbollah’s casualty rate. The Israelis wondered why the air force was not inflicting more damage and it was because of those tunnels. It was the first time Hezbollah was ever truly protected.”

Certainly a far cry from those coal mines of a century ago.

UPDATE Monday 7:00 pm: A Times of Israel report this evening quotes an IDF source and Israel Radio saying Israel has lab-tested two systems for finding tunnels. Field testing is now underway. The systems could be operational along the Gaza border within a year. A cost range of US$288 to $432 million is quoted, without explaining what it covers. Let's stay optimistic.

1-Aug-14: Iran says its terror-enabling role in this war is about to rise by several notches

Khamanei the supreme

This past Tuesday in a speech marking the Muslim breaking-of-the-fast festival of Eid al-Fitr, the Iranian "supreme leader" since 1989 Ayatollah Ali Khamenei celebrated the occasion by urging the Islamic world to counter what he termed Israel’s “genocide” in the Gaza Strip by arming the Palestinian Arabs. Israel, he said, was acting like a “rabid dog” and “a wild wolf,” causing a "human catastrophe that must be resisted", according to this video report.

The next step, a solely-Iranian one that does not depend on the goodwill of the Islamic world, came quickly but has been reported nowhere outside Israel as far as Google knows:

A former adviser to Iran’s defense minister said that Tehran would seek to arm Palestinians in the West Bank with “strategic weapons” including missiles to target Tel Aviv and Haifa. Iranian researcher Amir Mousavi told Lebanon’s Mayadeen TV channel this week that “a major reshuffle awaits the region” as “new and significant fronts will be opened all of a sudden, to support the Palestinian cause in the West Bank and Gaza.”
“A new front must be opened from the West Bank, after it has been armed, especially with missiles,” Mousavi said in comments relayed by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), “because we know very well that the distance between the West Bank and Tel Aviv, Haifa, and other areas is much shorter than the distance from Gaza. Therefore, simple means are required. There is no need for long-range missiles. Short-range missiles can change the entire picture in the occupied lands.”
Mousavi added that Gaza would also receive increased military support from Iran. As for the Palestinian Authority which controls the West Bank and has in recent years cooperated closely with Israel on security issues, Mousavi remarked: “We hope that the brothers in the Palestinian Authority will help rather than impede this.” [Times of Israel, July 30, 2014]

Mousavi [Composite of
images from MEMRI]

Whatever Mousavi's bluster means, it has little to do with blunting Israel's military force and (in common with the strategy of both Hamas and its 'moderate' PA counterpart, Fatah) everything to do with again terrorizing Israel's civilian population.

As for how to get those "strategic weapons" into place, Mousavi is not bashful. The “resistance camp” - his euphemism for Iran's clients in our area: Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraq, Syria - have “established very important channels via Jordan, the Golan Heights, and other areas.”

Israel has gotten to see some of the "important channels" - those running underground from the Gaza Strip into the earth directly underneath Israeli civilian settlements - from up close and from inside (like these) in the past three weeks. It's been an explosive experience.

Iran's wholehearted and whole-pocketed backing (other than during a brief spat in 2013) for the terror practiced by Hamas, PIJ and Fatah is an open secret. In "Iran’s fingerprints all over Hamas-Israel conflict", lawyer and former-Iranian Sayeh Hassan (Toronto Star, July 19, 2014) writes that while

few have picked up on the significant Iranian connection to the conflict... one cannot comprehend the events of recent weeks without an adequate understanding of Iran’s role in Gaza... Many of the more than 1,000 missiles fired at Israelis in the past month were manufactured in Iran, transferred by Iran or built in Gaza with Iranian technology. This includes, for example, the Iranian-built Fajr 5 and the made-in-Gaza M-75, both of which have a range of 75 kilometres. In 2012, Iran openly admitted to having given Hamas the technology to manufacture the M-75. These weapons have been a strategic game-changer for Hamas, allowing it to extend its range of attack to Israel’s two largest cities: Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The longer-range M-302, which enabled Hamas to hit cities in northern Israel, was reportedly imported from Syria via Iran... None of this would be possible without extensive funding from Iran. At one point, the government of Egypt revealed that Iran was funnelling upwards of $300 million annually to Hamas. Additional numbers are equally staggering. Prior to Israel’s current operation, terror groups in Gaza possessed an estimated 10,000 missiles. Hamas operatives, many of whom were trained in Iran, now also number at least 10,000. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is even closer to Iran than is Hamas, boasts several thousand fighters in Gaza. Analysts have noted that the two factions have been competing to see which one can fire missiles deeper into Israel. Despite a falling-out between Hamas and the Iranian-Syrian axis when the group moved its headquarters out of Damascus in the wake of the Syrian civil war, co-operation in fighting the common enemy, Israel, has resumed... Iran’s mentorship of Hamas in Gaza is modelled on its development of Hezbollah in Lebanon. In both cases, Iran seeks to advance the Islamic Revolution throughout the Middle East and support local groups willing to wage a proxy war with Israel. Unfortunately, those who pay the price for Iran’s destructive ventures are Israelis and innocent Palestinians alike... Tehran’s fingerprints are all over the current round of violence.

Final note: as critically important as Iran's support is for the terrorist forces of Gaza, its role is augmented by both North Korea and Qatar. They may be relative minnows in a sea of sharks but each brings to the Gaza war a passionate dedication to the harm that terrorism inflicts on ordinary people, making what they have to offer (advanced weapons in one case, cash in the other) indispensable to the dreams of the Hamas fat-cats.

6-Sep-06: Lebanese Underground

Tom Gross provides an invaluable service by publishing the results of the monitoring of the BBC's Arabic service for this article.

On August 1, retired Egyptian Major General Hussam Suwailem, the main studio guest for the daily "Hadith al-Saa" program on the BBC Arabic World Service (the equivalent of the "Newshour" program on the English-language BBC World Service) said Israel's airstrikes were failing because Hizbullah was "invisible". Hizbullah's underground network where they were hiding, he said, was so extensive that it amounted to an underground city. He said the network had been built by North Korean companies in the six years since Israel left Lebanon. The tunnels, he added, were dug deeper than the penetration ability of the GBU-28 bomb used by Israel; they each linked to three small military cities, and in some places the network goes as far as to reach inside Syria. Inside this network, he continued, communications structures were built with the co-operation of German companies. Suwailem further stated that the central command center of Hizbullah is in the Harmal area (in the Northern Beka valley), in which the al-Manar TV transmitters were also placed.

Six years of preparation. A vast underground city. North Korean and German technology. A cross-border structure reaching all the way into Syria. Sort of suggests they had a fairly serious war in mind - perhaps a war that isn't over yet.

As Tom Gross points out:

Hizbullah fired 4,228 rockets at Israel during the 34 days of fighting, leading to 53 fatalities, 250 severely wounded, and over 2,000 less seriously wounded. There was extensive damage to hundreds of dwellings, several public utilities, and dozens of industrial plants. One million Israelis lived near or in shelters or security rooms, with over 250,000 civilians evacuating the north and relocating to other areas of the country.

And with all of this, we're treated to the spectacle of prominent politicial scientists speaking at an Islamic-sponsored conference in the US last week and blaming the entire catastrophe on Israeli premeditation and on its "influential Washington lobby". What's the world coming to if you can't form your political opinions on the basis of academic objectivity? Suggested answer: a fairly dangerous place. See CAMERA's research data for some disturbing indicators of how and why. And Benny Morris' powerful analysis "The Ignorance at the Heart of an Innuendo".