Gazans have been griping about a severe concrete shortage for years. Now it's becoming clear why.
"Remember the complaints that the heartless Israelis were not allowing
enough imports of concrete for schools and hospitals?" asks syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. "Well, now we know
where the concrete went — into an astonishingly vast array of tunnels
for infiltrating neighboring Israeli villages and killing civilians."
IDF soldiers now in Gaza have found at least 18 tunnels built by Hamas using an estimated 800,000 tons of concrete.
For comparison it took 110,000 tons of concrete to build the world's tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
In other words Hamas could have built seven enormous skyscrapers and had enough left over to build bomb shelters for kindergartens. And that's only the tunnels Israel has uncovered. Egypt recently claimed it has destroyed 1,370 tunnels. That’s a whole lot of concrete.
As Tablet notes, they used the concrete supplies to transform "a strip of coastal farmland into a giant concrete aircraft carrier that’s impossible for your enemy to sink." And then they left their civilian population up on the deck.
According to Dan Margalit, Hamas made little use of the enormous network of tunnels. He believes they were planning a mega-attack in which they would send out several terror squads simultaneously to capture Israeli children, dead or alive, from every Israeli town in the area.
"For the past 20 years, Israel has been asleep at the wheel," he writes. "The threat of the tunnels has not been taken seriously. It is nothing short of a miracle that we woke up at the last minute."
At the start of the week,
Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said it would take two or three days to neutralize the tunnels, but on Tuesday a senior officer said Israel would need one to two weeks.
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