Hamas tunnelling again in Gaza as Israelis fear attack from below

Residents close to the border think they can hear digging 19 months
after the end of the last war

Harriet Sherwood in Kibbutz Nirim and Hazem Balousha in Gaza City
Wednesday 30 March 2016 07.00 BST

The scraping, scratching, grating sound could be an insect in the wall, a rodent under the floorboards, or the creaking of water pipes. Or it could be Hamas operatives digging under the earth from Gaza to Israel.

Some residents of the small communities along the Israeli side of the Gaza border believe they can hear the faint sound of tunnelling in the dead of night. Others are sceptical, saying fear and paranoia are fuelling imaginations.

But there is no doubt that, 19 months after the end of the last war between Israel and Gaza, in which the discovery of Hamas’s tunnels was declared a casus belli by Israel, large-scale digging has resumed.

Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Gaza, has said so. This year he told the people of Gaza that Hamas fighters were “digging twice as much as the number of tunnels dug in Vietnam”.

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