Thomas Wictor

You don’t ever want to get involved in tunnel warfare. It’s absolutely hideous. Tunnelers always lose, regardless of how sophisticated their underground passageways become. The reason is simple: A tunnel is a trap for those inside it.

In the Gaza war of 2014, Hamas surprised the IDF with attack tunnels. Israeli troops were utterly untrained in tunnel warfare. It took the IDF exactly one day to develop tactics that would defeat the terrorists. I won’t describe these tactics.

And don’t kid yourself: The Hamas tunnel system is state of the art.

Though many Israelis underestimate its capabilities, Hamas actually has sophisticated computer and networking resources in terror tunnels to detect the presence of IDF troops and to automatically fire rockets and missiles at Israeli targets — and a rich sponsor is helping them.

It’s Gulf oil powerhouse Qatar, says Aviad Dadon of Israeli cyber-security firm AdoreGroup. “The Qataris have invested hundreds of millions in both defensive and offensive cyber capabilities,” said Dadon.

Not only is Qatar footing the bill, it also trained Hamas terrorists how to use sophisticated equipment and systems to manage its extensive terror tunnel system, as well, systems to fire rockets at Israel using automatic, timed launching systems.

According to Dadon, Hamas has embedded sophisticated network systems inside its terror tunnels, giving operatives in command and control centers the ability to monitor events in any of the tunnels. Using sensors and other networked equipment, terrorists can quickly be notified if an IDF unit is advancing in a tunnel, allowing them to disperse quickly — and allowing the command and control staff to set off explosives when soldiers approach a booby trap.

Qatar opportunistically used Hamas to test weapons systems. Hamas is now back with its former sponsor, Iran. I think that Qatar has made peace with Israel, the main reason being that the IDF overcame everything the Qataris tried.

People don’t believe me, but this is actual fact: The IDF is invincible. Now that Gulf Cooperation Council money is funding Israeli weapon development, the IDF is invincible to the power of ten. In a moment, I’ll prove it with a video.

Tunnel warfare is suicide

Everybody loves to criticize. My approach is to highlight incredible advances. It’s clear that the IDF has mastered the ability to find and destroy Hamas attack tunnels.

A Hamas operative was killed Tuesday in a tunnel collapse in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis region, according to Palestinian sources.

A Gaza health ministry spokesman confirmed the reports, saying Marwan Marouf, 27, a fighter in Hamas’ Izzadin al-Kassam Brigades, was killed in the tunnel collapse.

There were no immediate reports of additional casualties in the collapse. The incident marked the fourth Gaza tunnel collapse in recent weeks.

On Wednesday, Hamas officials confirmed the death of at least two of its operatives in a tunnel collapse. Last week, seven Hamas men were killed when a tunnel collapsed close to Gaza’s eastern border with Israel.

People are asking the IDF to reveal its secrets. It’s not a reasonable request.

On Tuesday, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot said the military’s extensive counter-measures against Hamas tunnel threats from Gaza are mostly hidden from public view, and rely on the most advanced technology and engineering capabilities.

Speaking at the Fourth Annual Conference in memory of Lt.-Gen. Amnon Lipkin Shahak, held at the IDC, Herzliya, Eisenkot said he was not at liberty to discuss most of the IDF Southern Command’s efforts to deal with Hamas’s tunnel threats, but assured the public that major efforts are underway.

Hamas hates Jews. Hamas underestimates Jews. Hamas holds Jews in contempt. A description of what the IDF is doing to defeat Hamas tunnels was published in 2014. Even though it’s open source, I’m not going to link to it.

Instead, I’ll talk about two things: camouflets and thermobaric warheads.

A tunnel can’t resist a camouflet

During World War I, all sides engaged in tunneling. There were entire tunneling companies that dug and fought deep underground. It was very difficult to find an enemy tunnel. You had to use stethoscopes to listen for the picks and drills. Below are French sappers trying to locate a German tunnel.

In World War I they called it “mining.” The main reason to dig tunnels was to place massive explosives beneath an enemy position.

One of these mine craters has been left intact as a memorial.

Hamas tries to dig explosive mines in Israel, but the IDF is able to prevent this. Although Hamas is alleged to have taught jihadist rebels in Syria how to carry out tunnel bombings, every video I’ve seen is obviously computer-generated imagery (CGI).

The video above uses a destroyed, abandoned neighborhood as the stage. It’s definitely not a military installation. And jihadists always screw up flying birds. They’re trying to get a jerky, strobe-light Saving Private Ryan newsreel effect but on the cheap, so when you pause the video, the birds wink in and out of existence.

This is all at the 0:22 second mark. Two birds.

One bird.

Two birds.

One bird.

Every single jihadist video has creamy waterfalls of earth that look like chocolate milk, and magic birds fly by—splitting and merging, splitting and merging.

Back to World War I.

Not content with explosives, the British used underground tunnels to emplace giant flamethrowers that had a range of 300 feet (91 meters).

On the right of the drawing above is the nozzle, which was shoved by a hydraulic jack up through the earth. It emerged like a submarine periscope and automatically swiveled side to side, spraying the massive jet of flame for four minutes. The Germans dug flamethrower tunnels too, but they jumped out of the ground holding the weapon in their hands and opened fire at pointblank range.

To prevent the enemy from mining, you countermined. That is, you dug a tunnel that would either go beneath the enemy tunnel or would meet it. If you went beneath the enemy tunnel, you packed your own tunnel with explosives, evacuated, and blew up the other guy.

Much worse was to meet the tunnel. Then you broke through the earth armed with pistols, daggers, picks, and sharpened spades, and you and the enemy fought it out in the darkness. The accounts of such battles are incomprehensible in their savagery.

There was a way to avoid digging long tunnels or engaging in horrific underground combat: the camouflet. First you located the enemy tunnel. Then you took a mining hand drill and made a borehole down to where the enemy lurked.

When your borehole was right above the tunnel, you dropped in dynamite. This “camouflet” caused the enemy tunnel to collapse.

The Israelis have invented new munitions that are much more powerful than dynamite. They create shock waves that knock down structures of all kinds.

However.

I would never have thought this possible: The shock wave can be directed.

There’s a gruesome video of an Islamic State terrorist who was de-fleshed between his collarbones and his shins. Now I don’t need to show you that video. Instead, watch this. Watch it without a twinge, because nobody was killed.

It’s another fake video, in that the Free Syrian Army (FSA) didn’t fire the BGM-71 TOW missile that hit the tent. An Arab special operator did. Two videos were spliced together; the Arab League is concealing its actions in Syria for a variety of reasons, all of them good.

Seems like dirty pool, doesn’t it? Using a missile on a tent and blowing up some poor, oblivious dope.

Well, that was a BGM-71 with a thermobaric or fuel-air warhead, a missile that doesn’t exist. I don’t know what was targeted, but there was no fragmentation from the missile, and there was no secondary explosion. I’m guessing that the tent was a communications center.

And the man outside survived. Here he is getting to his feet.

Israel has created and the Arab League is using a weapon that can aim its shock wave in a specific direction. That soldier—I’m sure he’s Iranian—walked away from a gigantic explosion. He’s probably deaf, but he’s alive. The force of the explosion went straight up, not forward. That missile was traveling right at the man. He was within arm’s length when it detonated, yet he lived.

The Hamas terrorist Marwan Marouf took the full brunt of the shock wave inside his collapsed tunnel. Unlike in Syria, the people who created the explosion showed no mercy. Marouf was killed by concussion, not falling debris.

Here’s a photo of his body. Although it won’t make you throw up, you can see that the contents of his skull were liquefied. For his funeral, they jammed cotton into all his head holes to keep his brains from oozing out. Even his mouth was stuffed with cotton. Hamas funerals have become ghastly self-parodies.

Israeli and Arab League troops can now control the direction of the shock waves that their weapons produce. Nobody else in the world has this capability. Therefore Israel and the Arab League cause virtually no collateral damage. I was right: Israel accidentally killed only a handful of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza war, and the majority were people who Hamas locked inside buildings to die.

Hamas fires rockets at its own people. All the holes you see below were made by Palestinians.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad murder children.

Never again fall for the lie that Israel or the Arab League commit war crimes.

If they commit war crimes, you’ll know it by the piles of corpses reaching to the sky.