ammonnews.net

Ammon News - Israel has assembled a system of large pumps it could use to flood Hamas’s vast network of tunnels under the Gaza Strip with seawater, a tactic that could destroy the tunnels but also threaten Gaza’s water supply, U.S. officials said, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

The Israel Defense Forces finished assembling large seawater pumps roughly one mile north of the Al-Shati refugee camp around the middle of last month. Each of at least five pumps can draw water from the Mediterranean Sea and move thousands of cubic meters of water per hour into the tunnels, flooding them within weeks.

Israel first informed the U.S. of the option early last month, prompting a discussion weighing its feasibility and effect on the environment against the military value of disabling the tunnels, officials said.

U.S. officials said they didn’t know how close the Israeli government was to carrying out the plan. Israel hasn’t made a final decision to move ahead, nor has it ruled the plan out, officials said.

Some U.S. officials privately expressed concern about the plan, while other officials said the U.S. supports the disabling of the tunnels and said there wasn’t necessarily any U.S. opposition to the plan.

The weekslong process of flooding the tunnels would enable Hamas fighters, and potentially hostages, to move out, a person familiar with the plan said.

“We are not sure how successful pumping will be since nobody knows the details of the tunnels and the ground around them,” the person said. “It’s impossible to know if that will be effective because we don’t know how seawater will drain in tunnels no one has been in before.”

Because it isn’t clear how permeable the tunnels are or how much seawater would seep into the soil and to what effect, it is hard to fully assess the impact of pumping seawater into the tunnels, said Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It’s hard to tell what pumping seawater will do to the existing water and sewage infrastructure. It is hard to tell what it will do to groundwater reserves. And it’s hard to tell the impact on the stability of nearby buildings,” Alterman said.

Former U.S. officials familiar with the issue confirmed that Israeli and U.S. officials had discussed flooding the tunnels with seawater but said they didn’t know the current status of the plan.

The former officials acknowledged such an operation would put the Biden administration in a tough position and perhaps bring global condemnation.


Wall Street Journal