Free Republic

TEL AVIV – As the debate over Donald Trump’s proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border continues to dominate the presidential race, Israel is reportedly planning to move ahead with a massive above and underground concrete barrier along the entire border with the Gaza Strip. The barrier was revealed on Thursday in a story splashed across the cover of Yedioth Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily newspaper. The story was published with the approval of the country’s defense ministry. Yedioth’s affiliated website, Ynetnews, has the details:

Egypt's pumping of salt water from the nearby Mediterranean into the tunnels is not only creating a mess as it rises to the surface. Palestinian officials say it is also contaminating water supplies as well as threatening to wreck farmland and spread disease. Local residents say that at the peak of the tunnel business, after Hamas Islamists seized the Gaza Strip in 2007 and Israel tightened a closure of its crossings into the enclave, nearly 2,500 underground passages snaked under the border with Egypt. The direction of traffic was mainly into Gaza. Commercial goods - and weapons smuggled in separate...

Gunmen armed with rocket-propelled grenades attacked several military checkpoints in Egypt’s Sinai region, killing 15 soldiers and two civilians, security sources said. The attacks defied one of the toughest security crackdowns in the country’s history. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks but militants who support Islamic State have previously carried out similar operations in the Sinai Peninsula.

In a weekend interview with Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, IDF Southern Command head General Sami Turgeman said that Hamas is back at it—attempting to dig tunnels into Israel. While the IDF destroyed most, if not all, of the tunnels Hamas had dug into Israel in previous years during Operation Protective Edge, it appeared that the terror group was using the resources that are now pouring into Gaza to rebuild homes and businesses to instead rebuild its terror network, said Turgeman. “We are keeping a close eye on Hamas,” Turgeman said. “It is clear that they have gone back to digging...

Critics who think Israel is taking a heavy-handed approach in destroying Hamas terror tunnels should see what Egypt has in mind. Facing the same type of underground routes out of Gaza that allowed terrorists to mount attacks on Israel, Egypt is considering creating a huge, 1,000-meter buffer zone in the Sinai Peninsula – they have already evicted 10,000 people in the process of clearing the first 500 meters -- and digging a deep-water trench that would flood any future efforts to carve subterranean routes for smuggling weapons and terrorists in and out of Gaza. And unlike the fierce resistance and...

Up to 200 smuggling tunnels shut since Egyptian President Morsi took office; some 30% of all goods reach Gaza through tunnels. Egyptian forces have flooded smuggling tunnels under the border with the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip in a campaign to shut them down, Egyptian and Palestinian officials said. The network of tunnels is a vital lifeline for Gaza, bringing in an estimated 30 percent of all goods that reach the enclave and circumventing a blockade imposed by Israel for more than seven years. Reuters reporters saw one tunnel being used to bring in cement and gravel suddenly fill with water on...