ON THE evening of February 2nd a tunnel beneath Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip collapsed, burying under it two members of Hamas, a Palestinian militant group. This followed a similar incident the previous week beneath Gaza City in which seven Hamas members died. And on February 3rd a third tunnel collapsed.
In a rare public recognition of the movement’s efforts to build a web of tunnels on Gaza’s border with Israel, Hamas’s prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, has paid tribute to the buried fighters. He said the tunnels were “to defend Gaza and become a jumping-off point to all Palestine” (by which he means: a way to attack Israel). He boasted that Hamas has dug twice the number of tunnels the North Vietnamese had in their long war with America. Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, responded by saying “if we are attacked through tunnels by Hamas, we will react with great force”.
Underlying the war of words between Gaza and Jerusalem is a growing concern that the military wing of Hamas, which has invested a lot of the movement’s limited resources in the tunnels, might decide to use them to attack...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/1okjjVj
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