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Defense minister: IDF will destroy all Hamas terror tunnels by end of 2018

With cutting-edge counter-terror technology, Israel will destroy all Hamas terror tunnels by the end of 2018, Liberman said.

By: JNS.org and World Israel News Staff

Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman told Israeli television that the Jewish state has developed cutting-edge counter-tunnel technology that will enable it to destroy all Hamas terror tunnels by the end of 2018.

Liberman’s remarks followed last weekend’s detection and destruction of a Hamas terror tunnel running under the Egypt, Gaza and Israel borders. It was the third terror tunnel the IDF has destroyed in recent months.

“By the end of 2018, we will have eliminated all of Hamas’s attack tunnels. We may even manage to do so sooner, but the task is to destroy them all by the end of the year,” Liberman said.

Despite Hamas’s continuous efforts to build tunnels and its loss of strategic assets, Liberman assessed that the terrorist group will opt to exercise restraint rather than provoke a security escalation.

“I don’t think that Hamas is interested in war. I don’t think it has a different assessment than we do on how such a conflict would end,” he said.

IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said the discovery and destruction of the tunnel was the result of a combination of “cutting-edge” technology and intelligence.

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Israel’s underground Iron Dome

The IDF’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj.-Gen. Yoav Mordechai, said that Israel’s cutting-edge technology was behind the recent exposure and destruction of three terror tunnels running into Israel.

“Israeli genius and the Jewish brain have found a solution for all the terrorist tunnels,” Mordechai said in an interview with the Arabic-language Al Hurra television station on Sunday. “Just as there is the Iron Dome in the air, there is a technological dome of steel under the ground.”

The IDF general also sent a sharp message to “anyone who digs and approaches the tunnels: As you have seen in the past two months, there is only death in these tunnels.”

He criticized Hamas, saying that “instead of investing millions in the fields of education and medicine, they buried it underground, and now all of it has disappeared into oblivion.”

Mordechai also revealed that Israel “has information on additional tunnels.”

In India on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the Gaza-based Palestinian terror groups “not to try us.”

“Even when I am here in India, I think of you, IDF soldiers, and of the splendid work that you did yesterday in eliminating another tunnel,” Netanyahu said. “We are systematically eliminating the tunnel infrastructure of Hamas and Islamic Jihad; they should not try us.”

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Simultaneously, Israel is building an underground barrier surrounding the Gaza Strip, an obstacle that will eventually eliminate any possibility of digging tunnels from Gaza into Israel.