Israel’s military pushed deeper south Tuesday in Gaza after it called for more evacuations in the southern portion of the enclave in its pursuit to wipe out the territory’s Hamas rulers.
Bogged down by radical Islamic terror cells hiding in hundreds of miles of hidden tunnels, Israeli forces have come up with a brutal new plan: Flood the terror tunnels with seawater.
The war has killed uncounted thousands and displaced most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, who are running out of safe places to go. Hamas has a well-documented strategy of using human shields and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry inflates civilian casualty numbers.
Israel says it targets Hamas operatives and blames civilian casualties on the radical Islamic terror group, accusing them of operating from tunnels dug into residential neighborhoods, under hospitals, and next to schools and bomb shelters.
The United States, Qatar, and Egypt, which mediated the earlier cease-fire, say they are working on a longer truce. Egypt, which borders Palestine, has refused to take in civilian refugees.
Under U.S. pressure to prevent further mass casualties in the conflict with Hamas, Israel says it is being more precise as it widens its offensive into southern Gaza after obliterating much of the north — but one solution may be to simply fill the hidden tunnels with water.
Israeli Defense Forces have gathered five huge seawater pumps in the north, capable of transferring thousands of cubic feet of water an hour from the Mediterranean Sea into the terror tunnels, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
There is debate over whether the pumping would be successful, though, because there are no maps of the terror labyrinth.
“We are not sure how successful pumping will be since nobody knows the details of the tunnels and the ground around them,” a source told the Journal. “It’s impossible to know if that will be effective because we don’t know how seawater will drain in tunnels no one has been in before.”
Israel says it must dismantle Hamas’ extensive military infrastructure and remove it from power to prevent a repeat of the Oct. 7 massacre that ignited the war. The surprise terror attack through the border fence saw Hamas and other Palestinian militants butcher, rape, burn alive, and kidnap about 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
Over a hundred Israeli civilians remain kidnapped and are being held at gunpoint by Hamas.
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article