Secret military documents obtained by Middle East Eye revealed the scale of Egyptian operations to destroy tunnels between the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip built to circumvent the Israel-imposed blockade of the enclave…..READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

According to the documents that MEE is publishing in full, more than 2,000 tunnels were destroyed by military engineers in the border city of Rafah between 2011 and 2015.

They also reveal that senior members of the armed forces ordered a feasibility study into a proposal to dig a canal along the entire border with Gaza as an alternative to destroying the tunnels.

The documents, leaked by an army insider, offer a rare insight into the military’s extensive operations in the North Sinai governorate.

The government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is highly secretive about its activities in Rafah and has imposed a media blackout in the region since 2013 where it has waged a brutal and destructive operation against local militants aligned with the Islamic State (IS) group.

It has never released official details about the destruction of tunnels.

According to the documents, all the tunnels destroyed during the period they covered were designated as commercial or transport tunnels.

The revelations come to light following the closure of the Rafah crossing in southern Gaza after an Israeli operation on 7 May and raise questions about Israeli criticism of Egypt’s alleged failure to eliminate smuggling tunnels used by Palestinian armed groups.

Israeli officials have claimed weapons used in Hamas’s attack in southern Israel on 7 October were smuggled into Gaza via tunnels from Egypt.

In December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces would seek to gain control of the entire 14km border strip, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, to ensure the demilitarisation of the area.

Egypt has denied Israeli allegations, saying it has wiped out more than 1,500 tunnels over the past decade.

Diaa Rashwan, a government spokesperson, stated Egypt had also built a concrete wall along the entire border, six metres overground and six metres underground, which he said made it “impossible to smuggle weapons”.

Egyptian army spokesmen have previously put the number of tunnels destroyed at about 3,000. In 2018, a military spokesperson noted some of the tunnels destroyed reached a depth of 30 metres underground.

For the first time, however, the documents obtained by MEE reveal specific details about Egyptian operations to destroy the tunnels.

A document dated 5 February 2015, signed by Lieutenant-Colonel Ahmed Fawzy Abdelaziz, puts the number of tunnels destroyed between August 2011 and February 2015 at 2,121.

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These included 813 that were flooded; 1,181 that were destroyed using engineering tools; and 127 that were collapsed with explosives.

The documents also include communications regarding a proposed idea to construct a canal that would serve as a buffer zone to block the creation of tunnels and loosen up the soil around them.

The proposal was overseen by Mohamed Farid Hegazi, then secretary general of the defence ministry.

The canal proposal was highly secretive and there is no evidence it was successfully implemented.

In 2015, when the idea was under consideration, bulldozers were seen digging along parts of the border in a leaked video of what was reported to be a project to build a canal to flood the tunnels with seawater.

This prompted condemnation by Palestinian officials including Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh. Sobhy Radwan, then Rafah’s mayor in Gaza, warned that the canal would cause landslides and a collapse of Gaza’s infrastructure.

The documents show that Hegazi in December 2014 commissioned the Water Authority of the armed forces to conduct studies in collaboration with the Technical Military College to test the soil along the border and determine the feasibility of a canal.

The water authority and the military college conducted 40 probes to measure the depth of soil layers and determine moisture levels.

The study concluded that the soil along the path of the proposed canal was highly impermeable to water and that “soil saturation will not occur until a period of up to several years”.

Commenting on the findings, Hegazi stated in a letter dated 17 January 2015 that the army chief of staff and defence minister ordered the engineering authority and the military college to “conduct a study for specific alternatives to deal with the tunnels west of the eastern borders at depths of more than 20 metres”.

Hegazi also included experts from the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics (NRIAG), who recommended a scientific method for locating tunnels deeper than 20 metres.

The documents reveal a marked increase in efforts to locate and destroy tunnels after Sisi came to power in July 2013 when the then-defence minister staged a coup against his democratically elected predecessor, Mohamed Morsi.

One document dated 2 May 2013 reported that the total number of tunnels destroyed by flooding to that date was 124 out of a total of 276 tunnels discovered, indicating that more tunnels were discovered in the period after 2013.

Egyptian forces have almost completely razed the city of Rafah in North Sinai over the past decade to create a five-kilometre buffer zone during its war against local insurgents affiliated with IS.

Between July 2013 and August 2015, Human Rights Watch documented the army’s destruction of 3,255 civilian buildings in Rafah, including homes and community buildings.

The campaign has displaced thousands of Bedouin residents and eliminated around 685 hectares of farmland.

Egypt announced it aimed to destroy cross-border tunnels that used civilian structures as their overground points of entry and exit.

At the time, officials said they sought to defend Egypt against “terrorism”. HRW, however, said the campaign was indiscriminate and violated international humanitarian law.

Prior to Sisi, the governments of Hosni Mubarak and Mohamed Morsi had also taken action to deal with some cross-border tunnels.

An Egyptian court in February 2013 ordered Morsi’s government to take all measures necessary to destroy smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Sinai, estimated at the time to number about 1,200….READ FULL ARTICLE HERE