Posted on 07/03/24
| News Source: Arutz-7
Brigadier General Amir Avivi, chairman of the IDSF and former commander of the IDF School of Engineering, spoke to Israel National News - Arutz Sheva on the continued clearing of Hamas tunnels even now, almost nine months since the outbreak of the Gaza war.
Avivi started by talking of significant information that must be taken into account: "The size and strength of Hamas are similar to ISIS at its peak. At the time there were about 35-40 thousand ISIS combat soldiers, who were much less skilled than Hamas, with much less significant infrastructure. They had many volunteers from all over the world and ISIS faced an entire coalition of Americans, Russians and Europeans, who fought there for years and razed the cities to the ground."
"We have to understand that it will take time to eliminate this monster that was created in Gaza," says Avivi and says that even after six weeks of fighting in Operation Defensive Shield, during the operation itself and in taking over the cities, the IDF continued to operate in the area for about five years to achieve the required results. We must be patient and, above all, make sure that conditions do not allow such a monster to rise up again in Gaza in the future. We need to internalize this lesson and stop the madness that allows terrorist armies to rise up around us."
The era of the tunnels began, says Avivi, at the beginning of the Oslo period and as Israel withdrew from those areas, they took on their own strength. "I was the engineering officer of the Gaza Division in 1997, three years after Oslo, and even then we uncovered 35 tunnels on the border between Rafah in Gaza and Rafah in Egypt. This means that immediately after Oslo they started digging tunnels. At first these tunnels were used for smuggling and in the early 2000s they were converted into incendiary tunnels that exploded under the outposts. After the Disengagement they became offensive tunnels into our territory and defensive tunnels all over Gaza."
So how did it happen that since 1997 we have known about dozens of tunnels and yet we closed our eyes and ignored them? "We can talk and talk about the idea of going to Oslo, but after we had already gone and decided to risk our situation by handing over Gaza and Jericho first, without giving up on settlements and the Philadelphi Axis, we said we would test if it would work and then move forward. Already in 1996 it was clear that the process was a 100 percent failure. Israel saw this failure and discussed what the right thing to do was. Instead of stopping, which is what normal thinking people do, the state decided to withdraw from cities in Judea and Samaria as well and, of course, the same thing happened there – the construction of a crazy weapons industry that led to an Intifada with over 1,000 dead. Once again, the state did not learn the lessons. It did the opposite of what should have been done, for thirty years, continuously."