Israel wrapped up its ground offensive in Gaza this month and declared its tactical objective achieved: All of Hamas' known “terror tunnels” were destroyed.
But given the devastation this military operation caused in Gaza — hundreds of innocent Palestinians killed, thousands injured and displaced, whole neighborhoods flattened — and the cost to Israel in military casualties and international reputation, it's worth asking: Was there another way to solve the problem?
There might have been.
Yossi Langotsky, an Israeli geologist who led Israel's successful search for natural gas deposits beneath the Mediterranean seabed, told The Jerusalem Post that he pushed the Israel Defense Forces for a decade to tap geologists' expertise to locate Hamas' tunnels but was rebuffed.
Paul Bauman, a Canadian geophysicist and expert on discovering underground voids, told The Times of Israel that he showed the IDF how it could map the tunnel threat several years ago but it never followed up.
Nigel Knowles, founder of Britain's Geotec Surveys, a company that helps clients locate hidden pipes, tunnels, mine shafts and other underground “threats,” described for me how Israel could use a wire-and-peg system called resistivity imaging to produce a subsurface picture allowing experts to spot possible tunnels. Such a system can see more than 100 feet deep — the reported depth of the deepest Hamas tunnels. Cost-wise, it would be a “drop in the ocean to cover the border with resistivity lines,” Knowles said. “It's blatantly obvious.”
This kind of technology wasn't, it seems, a secret to the Israeli army. An Israeli officer involved in military planning told me that, in fact, the IDF located and destroyed 10 tunnel shafts from Israel's side of the border after Hamas used a tunnel to capture Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006.
But Israeli decision-makers deemed the tunnel-detection technology too primitive for a broader investment. Israel viewed it as only a partial solution, not a game-changer like the Iron Dome anti-missile system.
Tunnels that enabled militants to move underground — out of sight of Israeli surveillance — but didn't terminate in Israel wouldn't be addressed by a border-mapping system. Moreover, I'm told that Israel had a better sense of where the tunnels originated in Gaza than where they terminated in Israel, making invasion more attractive to the military planners charged with locating and destroying them.
Had Israel invested the same energy as it did into the Iron Dome system into the much less complicated technology required for tunnel mapping along a tiny 32-mile border, perhaps it could have neutralized this threat in a less deadly way.
Israel now will have to invest time and money in perfecting the tunnel-detection technology anyway. It's not just from Gaza that a tunnel threat exists, but also from the West Bank, Lebanon and Egypt.
Janine Zacharia is a former Jerusalem bureau chief for The Washington Post.
