THE GEOLOGICAL ROLE OF THE HAMAS OFFENSIVE AND DEFENSIVE GUERRILLA/TERROR WAR-SCALE UNDERGROUND INFRASTRUCTURE, GAZA STRIP, SOUTHEASTERN MEDITERRANEAN COAST (Invited Presentation)

For four decades, since the implementation of the Israel-Egypt Peace treaty, the Gaza Strip has been furnished with weapons smuggled through the northern Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, via sub-border, clandestine tunnels, into the Gaza side of the divided Rafah city. The underlying sequence of calcareous, loam paleosols was an ideal substrate for handmade tunnelling, initially by traditional well-diggers. Until 2005, when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) abandoned control over a narrow corridor along this border, failed invasive, un-invasive, engineering and combat Israeli efforts to neutralize these 4-12 m deep tunnels are hypothesized to have led Hamas to expand its utilization of the Gaza underground. Hamas began preparing to initiate underground-supported war following their 2007 violent takeover of the Strip from the Palestinian Authority by digging hundreds of tunnels in Rafah and developing underground tunnel complexes (UTCs) throughout the Strip. By 2014, IDF ground forces destroyed segments of ~35 cross-border tunnels, only, into Israel that were several km long and ~20 m deep.

The 7-10-24 Hamas invasion into Israel and burning, rape and slaughter of 1,200+ babies, children, women, elderly and soldiers, forced the unprepared IDF to invade the Strip to destroy the Hamas infrastructure. The IDF dealt under-fire with an unprecedented, urban-based theatre of fortified residential/public structures, coupled with hundreds of kilometers of UTCs fed by >1000 shafts, mainly originating from structures. UTCs boasted a wide range of sizes, levels, installations and design. Multi-story UTCs served for logistics, control, concealment, indirect fire and most of the tactical and strategic defensive and offensive components of the Hamas warfare. These UTCs appeared in all of the Gazan lithologies/sedimentologies including loess, aeolianites and loose sand where tunnels even fed into the Mediterranean Sea. Some reached the aquifer.

The proliferation of the geoengineering command of the Gazan underground exemplifies how nearly any kind of substrate can be fully exploited for subterranean guerrilla warfare if time and resources are available. Lessons from the Gaza-Israel engagement are relevant for near future conflicts between Western forces and Islamic militias or Asian entities, and highlight the necessity of geological understanding and thinking for such challenges.