Israel has just begun flooding Gaza tunnels – What it means
Keeping guard in a Gaza tunnel on 30 March 2023
The Palestine Chronicle Editors report on 12 December 2023:
About ten years ago, the Egyptian military, at the behest of Washington and Tel Aviv, began flooding tunnels connecting the Gaza Strip to Egypt.
Back then, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi had just overthrown Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. He needed much political capital to remain in power and to stave off any potential US criticism, however superficial, for his overthrow of a democratically-elected president. To do so, Sisi needed to present himself to Washington as a reliable ally – and the best way of doing so was to crack down on Palestinians, and their Resistance.
Quickly, the US jumped onto the opportunity of supporting any Israeli efforts aimed at further tightening the Israeli siege on Gaza. In no time, Egypt began flooding the tunnels with sewage water. Aside from the environmental disaster sewage water has caused, this also led to the death of many Palestinians, including people trying to escape the siege, along with some of those involved in the thriving tunnel business.
Siege and Tunnels
Since 2007, Gaza has been under a hermetic Israeli siege. Egypt participated in the siege by preventing Palestinians from using the Rafah Crossing as an alternative route for commercial goods – food, fuel, construction material, etc. Also, Egypt has repeatedly shut down the Rafah Crossing, leaving thousands of Palestinians stranded on both sides of the border.
With the destruction of the tunnels, one of the very few lifelines remaining in the hands of the Palestinians in Gaza was severed. Their besiegement of Palestinians was now complete.
But, judging from the events of October 7, and the strong Palestinian Resistance in the Strip since then, it does not seem that the Resistance itself was greatly affected by Egypt’s US-backed strategy of destroying the Gaza tunnels using various strategies
Under the title “Floods and Bombs: This is How Egypt Handled Hamas’ Smuggling Tunnels”, the Israeli newspaper Yisrael Hayom was one of the many Israeli media that made the link between the Egyptian strategy and what they believe Israel should be doing in Gaza at the moment.
On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Israeli army has in fact begun utilizing the Egyptian strategy, namely pumping seawater into the Resistance tunnels. Satellite images analyzed by various media organizations, including NBC News, have shown massive water pipes starting at the Mediterranean Sea and ending in various parts of the coast of the Gaza Strip.
War Crime
While the Americans are, expectedly, enthusiastic about the idea of flooding the Gaza tunnels as a last resort of defeating the Resistance, others have warned against such a step.
Dmitry Polianskiy, the First Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN, for example, has warned that flooding the underground of Gaza with seawater is a war crime.