Israel wants to flood Gaza tunnels with sea water, but the plan does not seem to be working yet
The Wall Street Journal
U.S. officials said Israel had assembled a system of large pumps that it could use to flood Hamas's vast tunnel network under the Gaza Strip with seawater, a tactic that could destroy tunnels and drive militants from their underground shelter but also threaten Gaza's water supply.
The Israel Defense Forces completed the assembly of large seawater pumps about one mile north of the beach refugee camp around the middle of last month. Each of at least five pumps can draw water from the Mediterranean Sea and transfer thousands of cubic meters of water per hour to the tunnels, flooding them in a matter of weeks.
The officials said that Israel first informed the United States of the option early last month, leading to a discussion about its feasibility and impact on the environment versus the military value of disabling the tunnels.
U.S. officials said they did not know how close the Israeli government was to implementing the plan. The officials said that Israel has not made a final decision to proceed, and the plan has not been ruled out.
Reactions within the United States were mixed. Some U.S. officials privately expressed concern about the plan, while other officials said the U.S. supports disabling the tunnels and said there was not necessarily any U.S. opposition to the plan. The Israelis have identified about 800 tunnels so far, although they admit that the network is even larger.
A person familiar with the plan said the weeks-long tunnel sinking operation would enable Hamas fighters, and possibly hostages, to get out. It is not clear whether Israel will even consider using the pumps before all the hostages are released from Gaza. Palestinian militants who attacked Israel on October 7 took more than 200 hostages and returned them to the Gaza Strip.
"We are not sure how successful the pumping will be because no one knows the details of the tunnels and the surrounding land,"the informed official said. "It is impossible to know whether it will be effective.
The deliberations on the plan to flood the tunnels illustrate the balance that Israeli forces must strike between pursuing their war goals and the intense international pressure they face to protect civilians. The Israeli military campaign has flattened neighborhoods and displaced more than one million Gazans from their homes in Gaza.
An IDF official declined to comment on the flood plan, but said: "the IDF is working to dismantle Hamas' terrorist capabilities in different ways, using different military and technological tools".
Hamas used the extensive tunnel system to hide and move undetected between houses in Gaza and to hold hostages. Some of the most sophisticated tunnels are built with reinforced concrete, contain power and communication lines, and are long enough for an average-sized man to stand in them.
Most Gazans currently have no access to clean water. Among the sources of drinking water in Gaza are purification plants that were recently disabled. Before October 7, three Israeli pipelines sent water to Gaza. Of these, one has closed and the other two are operating at sharply reduced levels.
At its peak, the system provided 83 liters of water per person per day. Now the Palestinians receive no more than three liters a day, according to the UN. The UN says that the minimum should be 15 liters per day.
Since it is not clear how permeable the tunnels are or how much and to what extent seawater will seep into the soil, it is difficult to fully assess the impact of pumping seawater into the tunnels, said John Alterman, senior vice president at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"It is difficult to know what pumping seawater will do with the existing water and sanitation infrastructure."It's hard to know what it will do with groundwater reserves. It is difficult to know the impact on the stability of nearby buildings,"Alterman said.
Former U.S. officials familiar with the case confirmed that Israeli and U.S. officials had discussed flooding the tunnels with seawater but said they did not know the current status of the plan.
Former officials acknowledged that such an operation would put the Biden administration in a difficult position and possibly bring global condemnation, but said it was one of the few effective options to permanently disable the Hamas tunnel system estimated to stretch for about 300 miles.
One of the former officials said that Gaza's water and sewage systems were badly damaged and heavily polluted, and they would need to be rebuilt with international assistance after the war.
Wim zwennenburg, who has studied the impact of the war on the environment in the Middle East, said that assuming that about a third of the tunnel network has already been damaged, Israel would have to pump out almost a million cubic meters of seawater to disable the rest.
Zoenburg, who works for PAX, a Netherlands-based Peace organization, said Gaza's aquifer, from which residents draw drinking water and other uses, is already becoming saltier as sea levels rise, requiring more energy to feed the desalination plants on which residents depend.
He said in an email that floods could affect the already contaminated soil in Gaza, and hazardous materials stored in tunnels could leak into the ground.
Egypt in 2015 used seawater to flood tunnels run by smugglers under the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, prompting complaints from nearby farmers about damaged crops.
Typically, militaries tasked with clearing tunnels, including Israel, use dogs and robots to check for threats or to search for hostages before sending ground troops, said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense and an officer in the Marine Corps and the CIA.
"Dogs are the most effective," he said, but troops should follow them to clear the tunnels. "Robots move slowly."And the use of humans is fraught with danger."
Mulroy said that the use of water over a long period would force Hamas fighters out.
But, he said,"If you salt the water, it can aggravate the humanitarian crisis".
