The Israel Defense Forces released a video on Wednesday which showed the detonation of explosives inside a tunnel believed to have been built by Hamas operatives just over the Gaza border in the western Negev.The IDF on Tuesday detonated the Hamas attack tunnel it uncovered 10 days ago leading from the southern Gaza Strip into Israeli territory.The military blasted the tunnel after conducting examinations of its route and inspections of its depth and length. On Monday, the IDF announced that it had detected the first underground attack tunnel dug by Hamas into Israeli territory since the 2014 war between Hamas and Israel. The 30-meter deep shaft was likely dug after the military’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge offensive, according to an IDF assessment, though this has not been verified.A senior security source said a “systematic, intelligence- based, technological, engineering and operational” approach resulted in the finding of the tunnel. “We have to turn this event, of finding a tunnel, into a system, and find more tunnels,” he added.“The challenge is very big. The tunnels are very deep. We have capabilities that do not exist anywhere else in the world. We can detect them, at depths of 30 to 40 meters,” the source said. “It is a very complex process.” He declined to discuss the detection techniques, which remain classified, saying only that “we have developed all sorts of capabilities in recent years, and they have reached the fruition stage.” According to defense sources, before Operation Protective Edge, the defense establishment was able to find tunnels through randomly drilling holes next to each other along the Gaza border.“This [the current discovery] was not random, but the result of following a pattern. It is a technique that identified their tunnel,” the source added.
