The military has destroyed 80% of the tunnels in the Rafah area, IDF sources on Thursday claimed, while also confirming Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s announcement on August 21 that Hamas’s last battalion there had been taken apart.
Despite that claim, other senior IDF sources told The Jerusalem Post in late June it could take six months to fully chart all of the tunnels in Rafah and years to destroy them.
Confronted by this contradiction, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit stood by the 80% claim.
In addition, even in northern Gaza, which the IDF entered six months before it deployed in Rafah, there has been no indication that the army has reached anywhere near destroying 80% of the tunnels, with estimates ranging from almost 50% to just over 50%.
On August 21, Gallant said the IDF had destroyed 150 tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor alone, which makes up only a small part of the full Rafah area.
Other possibilities
One possible resolution of the seeming contradiction is that the IDF has destroyed 80% of strategic tunnels – which includes those that are more critical to communications, intelligence, and weapons storage – but not all tunnels, including more minor ones.
Another possibility is that 80% of all known tunnels to date in the area have been destroyed, but 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 or than estimated in June – due to having invested more resources in destroying tunnels in Rafah than anywhere else, and this move was unknown by commanders 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 weapons from Egypt.