Did Israel Avert a Hamas Massacre?
The story behind the Gaza tunnel plot, from Israeli intelligence officials—and Hamas leader Khalid Mishal.
Noises in the Night
Yossi Adoni, a village leader in Zarit, is worried. For years, residents in his small Israeli farming community, on the northern border with Lebanon, have heard drilling under their homes, late at night. His mother, Ruth, for one, says she has often been awakened by “the trembling and noise from a jackhammer.” Her next-door neighbor, Shula Asayag, insists that the subterranean vibrations have become so intense that picture frames and TV sets have crashed to the floor. “My children are afraid to come and visit me,” she explains. Adoni and other officials contend that they have heard similar stories from other towns along the border.
Nearby, Shlomo Azulai tends an Israeli apple orchard. For months he watched in disbelief as clouds of dust appeared on the ridgeline below the Lebanese town of Marwahin and steadily moved in his direction. He observed earthmovers operating in, around, and then underneath an enormous greenhouse. “After a while,” Azulai claims, “the excavator was so far underground I could no longer see it.” When he alerted the Israeli Defense Forces (I.D.F.), he says, they dismissed the moving dust clouds as “small fires”—nothing to worry about. But Azulai has reason to worry. In 2006, Hezbollah operatives positioned across the border fired a guided missile at his Toyota Hilux, driving shrapnel into his arms, torso, and lower abdomen.
Now, eight years later, Azulai and his neighbors believe Hezbollah may have pulled off a far more provocative gambit: building a tunnel under Zarit, which the group could conceivably use to send forces into Israel to massacre civilians.
What once may have sounded like rejected scenes from a remake of Poltergeist, now strike Israelis in the north as harbingers, especially after this summer’s Gaza war, which laid bare a complex of subterranean tunnels that had been dug under Israel’s southwestern border with the Gaza Strip—an area ruled by Hamas, a party whose credo calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.
The threat, indeed, is all too plausible to Israeli intelligence officials, who agreed to share with Vanity Fair the backstory of how earlier this year they may have narrowly averted their nation’s own 9/11. The alleged plan of attack (as pieced together by defense and security professionals through electronic intercepts, informants, interrogations of Hamas operatives, as well as computers and satellite imagery obtained from Hamas compounds during the war) was chilling: a surprise assault in which scores of heavily armed Hamas insurgents were supposedly set to emerge from more than a dozen cross-border tunnels and proceed to kill as many Israelis as possible.
Khalid Mishal, the leader of Hamas, also agreed to speak to Vanity Fair, to give his perspective. He insists that such a nightmare scenario is a post-hoc justification and that employing the tunnels to kill Israeli citizens was never Hamas’s intention. Instead, he insists, his group only targets soldiers and those living on occupied territory.
The New Normal
Israelis and Palestinians have returned to what passes for normal after a 50-day war. And both Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his implacable foe, Hamas chief Khalid Mishal—a man Netanyahu tried unsuccessfully to assassinate in 1997—are declaring victory, pyrrhic as it may be. For Mishal, some 2,100 Palestinians—including key members of his high command and several hundred fighters—are dead. “Over 12,000 injured, mainly women and children,” Mishal tells Vanity Fair, in a wide-ranging interview at his residence in Doha, Qatar. “Tens of thousands of homes destroyed. Mosques, hospitals, churches, electricity and waterworks, ambulances, residential towers, entire neighborhoods destroyed.”
Throughout the war, which lasted most of July and August, Mishal spurned an Egyptian–brokered ceasefire proposal and instead instructed his people to continue firing rockets and fighting on until Israel met his demands, designed to boost his group’s sagging fortunes. In the end, with large portions of the Gaza Strip reduced to rubble by Israeli planes and artillery, he failed to win any of his big-ticket items (a new airport and seaport, and the release of Hamas prisoners held by Israel) and instead acceded to an Egyptian framework, which, had he accepted it weeks earlier (as Netanyahu had), might have spared hundreds of Palestinian lives.
Netanyahu has an entirely separate set of problems. After being accused of using excessive force in Gaza that disproportionately killed or maimed civilians, including an estimated 500 children, the U.N. Human Rights Council opened a war-crimes inquiry. In world capitals, support for Israel’s policies is waning and anti-Semitism is back with a vengeance. Across Europe, there are calls to officially recognize a Palestinian state, and last week the former Israeli ambassador to the European Union conceded, “The problem is that we are drastically losing public opinion,” in the wake of scuttled peace talks and the Gaza war.
At the same time, members of Netanyahu’s own security cabinet say he failed to go far enough to decimate or expel Hamas’s leadership once and for all. Instead, the prime minister signed what some contend was a conciliatory ceasefire. Not only did it lack Israel’s central demand—the demilitarization of Gaza—but it actually allowed building materials back in, a concession that intelligence sources fear may help Hamas reconstitute its elaborate network of tunnels, which Netanyahu himself had cited as justification for launching a ground war. As for the Israeli public, there is lingering anger that the vaunted security establishment, which Netanyahu oversees, appears to have left the nation vulnerable to an elaborate and unthinkable attack from below.
Going Underground
To much of the outside world, it was a battle of the skies, a lethal light show: Hamas relentlessly firing rockets—4,600 in all—and Israel responding with Iron Dome, a futuristic system that literally knocks them out of the sky. By any objective measure, the defense shield worked. In all, five Israeli civilians died and 127 were wounded as a result of rocket fire, and Israel’s leadership was able to buy time to plan a response. (The conflict ultimately claimed the lives of 67 Israeli soldiers.)
But according to Dr. Daphné Richemond-Barak, a law professor and leading authority on asymmetric warfare, Iron Dome may have had an unanticipated consequence for Israel. During the system’s debut, in a previous clash in 2012, she says, “Hamas saw how well Iron Dome worked in shooting down incoming rockets. They needed a new way to terrorize Israel. The tunnels gave them that.” Mishal seems to agree: “In light of the balance of power which shifted towards Israel, we had to be creative in finding innovative ways. The tunnels were one of our innovations. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.”
The use of tunnels in war, ironically, has been a mainstay of Jewish resistance for centuries: against the Romans before Christ’s time, against the Nazis during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising and against the British as militias fought to create what in 1948 would become the Jewish State. Other warring factions have employed tunnels in conflicts as diverse as the American Civil War, W.W. I, Korea, and Vietnam. “They’ve been used since biblical days,” Richemond-Barak argues, “but they’ve evolved into a global strategic threat”—even showing up in a surprising number of recent war zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Mali.
Richemond-Barak said she was particularly struck by an attack last May in which jihadists, after rigging a 350-foot-long tunnel with explosives, leveled a Syrian Army command center in Aleppo. Abu Assad, the self-professed mastermind of the operation, claimed that he got the idea from a Gazan who paid him a visit: “They said they had some success in Palestine, so I decided to try it.”
While Israel, a nuclear power, takes pride in having fielded one of the world’s most technologically advanced armies, its adversaries have charted a decidedly different course. For half a century, the Palestinian resistance has proved to be something of an incubator for the tools of unconventional warfare: hijacking, hostage-taking, suicide bombings—all highly visible terror tactics designed to attract the world’s media outlets. As a result, Israel has repeatedly been forced to adapt to its enemies’ lower-cost, higher-yield methods.
Underground networks are just the latest example. According to the Israeli Security Agency, better known by its Hebrew abbreviation, Shin Bet, Hamas began building tunnels under the Gaza Strip as early as 2000. For the most part, these were crude structures designed for one-off attacks against Israeli forces, which withdrew from Gaza in 2005. A year later, however, Hamas used just such a tunnel to sneak into Israel and kidnap a 19-year-old soldier named Gilad Shalit. “This was one of the most asymmetrical incidents in recent memory,” a senior Israeli intelligence official asserts. “One Israeli soldier was held for five and a half years and traded [in 2011] for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.” Another top official agreed, “This was a proof of concept for them. Tunnels work.”
