IDF officer: Israel has developed ‘underground Iron Dome’

Discussing the IDF’s underground ‘Iron Dome’, Maj.-Gen. Mordechai also revealed that Israel “has information on additional tunnels, and we will soon learn of their discovery.”

By: World Israel News Staff

A senior IDF officer has praised Israel’s ability to detect and destroy the terror tunnels running into Israel from the Gaza Strip.

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.

The IDF announced Sunday that it destroyed a cross-border Hamas attack tunnel in southern Gaza, the third such tunnel demolished by the army in recent months.

The Israeli Air Force bombed the tunnel, located close to the border with Egypt. The army said the tunnel, which began in Rafah in southern Gaza and penetrated into Egypt, was bolstered with cement walls and ran dozens of meters deep and one and a half kilometers long. It reached underneath the Kerem Shalom border crossing and below diesel and gas pipelines into Gaza, penetrating some 180 meters inside Israeli territory.

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.

“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.”

An important message to Egypt

Mordechai revealed that Israel “has information on additional tunnels, and we will soon learn of their discovery.”

He also pointed to the embarrassment Hamas has caused Egypt.

“I am also surprised that in these days of reconciliation [between Hamas and Fatah], this tunnel was dug in the direction of Israel and from there to Egypt. What an important message that sends to Egypt, which was responsible and supported reconciliation,” he said.

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

“Even where 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.”

COGATGazaHamasJonathan ConricusYoav Mordechai