The Israeli army unveiled on Thursday the details of a large underground fence built around the Gaza Strip to contain the threat of Palestinian tunnels being drilled from the Gaza Strip.
The construction of the fence is due to be completed in mid-2019 and will extend for 65 kilometers. The concrete wall will be accompanied by motion sensors designed to identify any tunneling work.
The army had previously announced the project, but details were kept secret until Thursday, when reporters were allowed to see aspects of it.
The army announced a few days ago the destruction of a tunnel dug by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), which controls the Gaza Strip, using air strikes and other means to destroy the tunnel that runs from the Gaza Strip to Israel and extends to Egypt.
The tunnel is the third at least destroyed by Israel since the end of October.
In April 2016, Israel announced that it would find a tunnel extending from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory for the first time after the Gaza war in 2014.
The tunnels are under the wall, which closes the Israeli border with the Gaza Strip and was one of the most effective weapons for the Palestinian factions.
The two most important targets of the Israeli military operation in 2014 were to stop rocket fire and destroy tunnels. It was the third such attack on the Gaza Strip in six years.
The army said it had destroyed more than 30 tunnels in 2014. Hamas says it continues to dig tunnels.
The summer war of 2014 lasted fifty days and was the longest, bloodiest and most destructive of the three wars since the Hamas takeover in 2007.
Killing 2251 Palestinians, including 551 children, according to the United Nations. On the Israeli side, 74 people, including 68 soldiers, were killed.
A report by Israel’s state comptroller last year accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and military commanders of not preparing for the “strategic threat” posed by the tunnels used by Hamas during the 2014 war.
With the construction of the new underground fence and traffic sensors, Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip will not be able to dig and use tunnels, a senior Israeli military official said.
“They understand that the strategic weapon of underground tunnels that break the border will end,” the official told reporters.
– deep “enough” –
For about a year, Israeli and foreign workers have been working around the clock to complete the construction of the fence.
The fence is built underground, east of the existing border fence with the Gaza Strip. It has been completed four kilometers so far – in the area of the town of Sderot, in the northern Gaza Strip, and Nahal Oz, near Gaza City.
The techniques used to build the fence are similar to those used to build support walls for high-rise buildings or underground parking, the military official said.
Heavy machinery digs a deep and narrow trench, then a bentonite, a kind of liquid cement that keeps the trench from collapsing.
A metal reinforcement crate is then inserted, with tubes that absorb the bentonite clay and then pour the cement into the trench to dry inside a wall about one meter wide.
The military official said the underground fence would be “deep enough” to repel the tunnel attacks from the Gaza Strip.
A new security fence, eight meters high, will also be built over the underground wall, which will prevent the infiltration of Gazans into Israel, the official said.
Israeli army spokesman Jonathan Conriks told reporters outside the town of Kissufim, which an Islamic Jihad tunnel was demolished last October, that the fence would be “the first complete underground fence.”
Twelve Islamic Jihad militants were killed after the tunnel was destroyed at Kissufim.
“Any attempt to dig tunnels inside Israel … will be determined and targeted” by the army, he warned.
But the senior military official made it clear that getting rid of the risk of spending does not mean that factions in the Gaza Strip would stop the attacks.
“They are training and building forces for the sea and the land.”
