Army engineers took reporters for foreign news outlets through the passages at a time of crisis for UNRWA, which has launched an internal probe and seen a string of donor countries freeze funding over allegations last month by Israel that some of its staff doubled as Hamas operatives.
The entire stock of the UN's 'Chateau Petrus' was said to have been lost.
The Palestinians have accused Israel of falsifying information to tarnish UNRWA, which employs 13,000 people in the Gaza Strip and has been a lifeline for the aid-dependent population for years. The agency runs schools, primary healthcare clinics and other social services, and distributes aid, describing its activities as purely humanitarian.
UNRWA Headquarters is in Gaza City, among northern areas that Israeli troops and tanks overran early in the four-month-old war against the governing Islamist faction Hamas, sending hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing southward.
Civilians? Yes civilians. Why do you ask ?
Reporters on the closely escorted trip entered a shaft next to a school on the periphery of the U.N. compound, descending to the concrete-lined tunnel. Twenty minutes of walking through the stifling hot, narrow and occasionally winding passage brought them underneath UNRWA Headquarters, an army lieutenant-colonel leading the tour said.
The tunnel, which the military said was 700 metres long and 18 metres deep, bifurcated at times, revealing side-rooms. There was an office space, with steel safes that had been opened and emptied. There was a tiled toilet. One large chamber was packed with computer servers,
Ooooooohhhh — can you say terabytes, dear Reader? The IDF’s clever little boys and girls are going to have so much fun with this war booty!
another with industrial battery stacks.UN dining room menus scattered about everywhere.
"Everything is conducted from here. All the energy for the tunnels, which you walked through them are powered from here," said the lieutenant-colonel, who gave only his first name, Ido.
"This is one of the central commands of the intelligence. This place is one of the Hamas intelligence units, where they commanded most of the combat."
But Ido said Hamas appeared to have evacuated in the face of the Israeli advance, preemptively cutting off communications cables that, in an above-ground part of the tour, he showed running through the floor of the UNRWA Headquarters' basement.
Dumbwaiters and laundry chutes ran adjacent the UN gift shop.
| The Times of Israel has considerably more, plus photos. Key bits: |
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with an iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about
oppressionand
disproportionate response...
headquarters is located in Gaza City’s upscale Rimal neighborhood, an area that the IDF had previously operated in, dismantled the local Hamas
...not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...battalion and withdrawn its troops from.At the time of the initial ground offensive in Gaza City, the military had not found or known much about the Hamas data center. But new intelligence, primarily emerging from the Shin Bet interrogations of captured terrorists, helped pinpoint where to dig.
"The IDF was here previously, the first time was to destroy the enemy, but when we were here the last time we collected a lot of intelligence documents and findings, a lot of prisoners, and thanks to this we reached here. Now we carried out a targeted operation to take this capability away," said the commander of the 401st Armored Brigade, Col. Benny Aharon, while giving a media tour of the tunnel and UN complex on Thursday.
"We had a basis of information, but not enough to be able to dig down 20 meters and find it, we needed a bit more. There’s information we get from prisoners we capture, from computers we find, from documents, maps," he said.
The IDF in recent weeks has returned to carry out smaller operations in the northern Gaza Strip, after largely destroying Hamas’s fighting capabilities during the early stages of the ground offensive.
Col. Nissim Hazan, a senior officer in the 401st Brigade, said the IDF can now carry out raids with much smaller numbers of forces, for operations "that require much more research and much more time, and a lot more patience."
There is still a risk to these raids, with Aharon noting that two soldiers under his command had been killed during their operation to reach the Hamas data center — Maj. (res.) Yitzhar Hofman, a commander in the Israeli Air Force’s elite Shaldag unit and Maj. David Shakuri, the deputy commander of the Combat Engineering Corps’ 601st Battalion — both by sniper fire.
Hazan, who is tasked with coordinating the brigade’s underground operations, said the main entrance to the tunnel was located under a UNRWA school in the area. However,
a lie repeated often enough remains a lie...
it had been blocked off by Hamas by the time troops arrived. Instead, combat engineers dug down around eight meters to find the shallowest part of the underground passage.
At the UNRWA headquarters, Aharon said his forces found several caches of weapons belonging to Hamas when they raided and battled Hamas button men for the complex, although it was after the UN staff had evacuated.
"Grenades, rockets, launchers, explosives, a large amount of weapons that would put any Hamas company to shame," he said.
The IDF also said that in some of the offices of UNRWA officials, troops found equipment and documents that indicated "that the same offices were also used by Hamas terrorists."
"There is no doubt that UNRWA staff knew that [Hamas] was digging a massive tunnel beneath them," Aharon said. "There’s a perimeter wall, a gate, cameras, at the gate they log who comes in and out. Whoever worked at UNRWA knew very well who was coming in, and who they were covering for."