Despite military sources previously stating it could take six months, on Thursday, IDF sources claimed that 80% of the network had been destroyed.
IDF sources on Thursday claimed that the military has destroyed 80% of the tunnels in the Rafah area, while also confirming Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s announcement on August 21 that Hamas’s last battalion there had been taken apart.
Despite those IDF sources, other top military sources told the Jerusalem Post in late June that it could take six months simply to fully chart all of the tunnels in Rafah and years to destroy them all.
In addition, even in northern Gaza, which the IDF entered six months earlier than it entered into Rafah, there has been no indication that the IDF has reached anywhere near destroying 80% of the tunnels, with estimates ranging from just under 50% to just over 50%.
On August 21, Gallant said that the IDF had destroyed 150 tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor alone, which makes up only a small part of the full Rafah area.
One possible resolution of the seeming contradiction is that the IDF has destroyed 80% of strategic tunnels, which includes those which are more critical to communications, intelligence, and weapons storage, but not all tunnels, including more minor ones. Entrance of the 200 meter-long tunnel shaft in an agricultural area in the Gaza Strip, March 15, 2024. (credit: IDF SPOKESPERSON’S UNIT)
Other possibilities
Another possibility is that 80% of all known tunnels to date in the area have been destroyed, but that many more have not yet been explored or found.
Yet a third possibility is that the IDF really has destroyed 80% of all tunnels in Rafah, far more than in northern Gaza and then estimated in June, due to having invested far more resources in destroying tunnels in Rafah than anywhere else, and this move was unknown by commanders back in June.
The Rafah tunnels, and the Philadelphi Corridor tunnels in particular, are viewed as having the greatest strategic importance to Hamas because they allow it to smuggle in new weapons cross-border from Egypt.
Confronted by this contradiction, the IDF Spokesperson’s office stood by the 80% claim.
