NEW YORK, September 5. /TASS/. Hamas used its underground tunnels in the Gaza Strip to create a highly challenging battlefield for Israel, providing lessons about what future military conflicts could look like, said James Stavridis, former supreme allied commander of NATO.
In a column for Bloomberg, he wrote that the most important element of the conflict between Israel and Hamas is not weapons and manpower, but the more than 600 kilometers of underground tunnels carved out beneath Gaza.
According to Stavridis, underground complexes have been used in warfare for ages, but they are getting more sophisticated now.
"Hamas troops managed to create an entirely different battlefield from the traditional fight above ground," he said.
The Israel Defense Forces have come into possession of a Hamas handbook that details how the group trained forces to fight in the subterranean environment using, night-vision goggles, GPS trackers, elaborate camouflage and protective blast doors.
The column’s headline proclaimed that, "Hamas tunnels show future wars will be fought underground."
"Today, the most elaborate system of tunnels dedicated to war are probably in North Korea," Stavridis wrote. "These are deeply buried, probably impervious to even the largest conventional bomb or missile strikes."
The situation in the Middle East sharply escalated following an incursion of Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip into Israel on October 7, accompanied by killings of residents of Israeli settlements near the border and taking hostages, including children, women and elderly people. Hamas regards the attack as a response to Israeli actions against the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. Israel has declared a complete siege of the Gaza Strip and has started delivering strikes on that area and parts of Lebanon and Syria. That was followed by an Israeli ground operation in the enclave.