Posted on 05/16/2004 12:06:14 PM PDT by yonif
Tunnels under the Philadelphi Route that cuts through the Palestinian and Egyptian town of Rafah make up one of the greatest threats with which Israeli forces in the area have to contend. Many senior IDF officers have described them as "a subway running between the Palestinian side to Egypt."
The tunnels, built by Palestinians to smuggle vast amounts of weapons, can reach up to hundreds of meters in length and are built from inside Palestinian homes in Rafah. Some are boobytrapped, packed with hundreds of kilograms of explosives that lead up to military posts located along the narrow Philadelphi Route, which under the Oslo Accords remains under Israeli control.
A short list of items smuggled via the tunnels to terrorists in the Gaza Strip includes Katyusha rockets, mortars, shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles, anti-tank grenades, large amounts of explosives, ammunition, and rifles. The arms come from Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, and Libya. The underground smuggling is necessary because the navy has successfully blocked attempts by Palestinians to smuggle weapons into Gaza via the sea.
The army frequently conducts operations along the Philadelphi Route and in the outskirts of Rafah in an attempt to uncover and destroy the tunnels. One of the painstaking tasks is similar to that in which the five soldiers died on Wednesday evening: boring holes meters under the ground, placing explosives to blow up tunnels.
The IDF has uncovered and destroyed 11 tunnels this year – and close to 100 during the past three and a half years.
Patrols of the route are carried out in armored personnel carriers, armored D9 bulldozers, and armored cars. Movement is slow and cautious. Maneuvering among the sand dunes, daily patrols securing the route often encounter mines or come under fire from anti-tank rockets and small arms. After dark, the situation becomes more hazardous. Last December, Hamas claimed responsibility for a double bombing at the Hirdon outpost, one of the IDF positions along the Philadelphi Route. A bomb containing hundreds of kilograms of explosives blew up on the west side of the outpost, placed there via a two-to-five-meter deep tunnel. An hour later, the second bomb exploded, meant to strike rescue teams responding to the first explosion.
Soldiers were unscathed, although the outpost suffered some damage.
The same month, troops thwarted at the last minute an attempt to detonate a tunnel rigged with explosives near Kerem Shalom.
Special engineers oversee the digging of the tunnels, and ensure they have the necessary support to prevent them from caving in. The tunnels can be dozens of meters deep in order to evade detection by IDF surveillance equipment. Some are several hundred meters long. The dirt dug out is hidden in flour sacks and gradually removed from the site.
Kalashnikov assault rifles and ammunition that sell for exorbitant sums in the Gaza Strip can be smuggled in from Egypt at a fraction of the cost.
Professional smugglers operate the tunnels, purchasing weapons from dealers on the Egyptian side and then selling them to terrorists in the Gaza Strip. The same professional smugglers scout out local homeowners willing to allow tunnels to be dug either inside their homes or in their yards. Those who agree are offered some $1,000 each month; if the tunnel is detected and their home demolished by the IDF, the homeowners receive further compensation and assistance from the Palestinian Authority, which helps to rebuild their homes in Rafah's Tel Sultan neighborhood.
One of many tunnel smuggling suspects arrested by security forces is Rafah resident Ikram Tubasi, 31, a member of the PA security forces's coastal guard. Tubasi was involved in purchasing weapons in Egypt and smuggling them to the Gaza Strip, where he sold them to terrorist organizations and senior members of the PA security forces.
Tubasi revealed to investigators the methods he used to smuggle the arms, including the use of three youths from the Egyptian side of Rafah who used the tunnels to smuggle thousands of bullets for Kalashnikovs.
He also named members of the PA security forces who received the smuggled goods, and told investigators that six rockets that had been smuggled into the Gaza Strip in 2001 at the request of PA financial adviser Fuad Shubaki, who organized the Karine A weapons ship in January 2002. Tubasi said the rockets were dismantled in parts and smuggled into Rafah through a tunnel and loaded onto a truck and taken to Shubaki.
"If we don't act," an official told The Jerusalem Post, "not only IDF troops and Israeli communities in the Gaza Strip, but Sderot and Ashkelon will come under serious threat."
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