A spokesman for Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip, has admitted that the organisation was responsible for constructing a huge tunnel uncovered by the Israeli army, which traversed beneath the Gaza border into Israel.
The tunnel was revealed by Israeli army officials last week, who said that it originated from a home in Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip and is 1.7 kilometres long.
The tunnel reaches as deep as twenty two metres, includes an electrical system, a phone line and although incomplete, utilised 25,000 concrete slabs in a project which the Israeli army estimated had taken eighteen months.
In a radio broadcast, Abu Obaida, a spokesman for Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since violently overthrowing the Fatah faction in 2007, said that Hamas armed brigades “dug the tunnel, they were responsible for it.”
Obaida explained that it had been dug in an effort to try to force Israel to release Palestinian prisoners. In 2006, Hamas terrorists used a tunnel to launch an attack and kidnap Israeli serviceman Gilad Shalit, who was subsequently held captive in Gaza for five years. Schalit was finally released and returned to Israel in 2011 in exchange for the release of 1,027 convicted Palestinian inmates.
Abu Obaida said that Hamas now has “a greater capacity” to carry out kidnappings.
In his speech over the weekend, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called on Arabs and Muslims to prepare for “the great al-Aksa intifada” against Israel and called for an end to the current peace talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.
Haniyeh claimed that Israel would not be able to bear the “fire and rage” of an uprising against its “crimes.”