All 32 of the Hamas terror tunnels discovered by the Israel Defense Forces have been destroyed. These terror tunnels served one purpose: to carry out attacks on Israel.
Hamas has used this system to ambush Israeli soldiers and attempt terrorist attacks on Israeli civilian communities. The terrorist organization used a similar tunnel in 2006 in order to infiltrate Israel, kill two IDF soldiers, and kidnap Corporal Gilad Shalit.
Hamas has repeatedly said that it wants to kidnap more Israelis in similar attacks. The neutralization of these tunnels marks a major step toward protecting Israeli civilians from terror.
Quote from Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (August 6, 2014 in Jerusalem):
The goal of Operation Protective Edge was and remains to protect Israeli civilians. That means to protect our people from roughly 3,500 rockets, three thousand five hundred rockets, that Hamas and the other terrorist groups have fired on our cities, on our towns, on our civilians, on our children in the last month. The goal of this operation was to protect our people from the threat of terror tunnels built to send death squads into Israel, to commit terrorist atrocities against Israel’s civilians, to kidnap and to kill.
Israel deeply regrets every civilian casualty, every single one. We do not target them; we do not seek them. The people of Gaza are not our enemy. Our enemy is Hamas; our enemy are the other terrorist organizations trying to kill our people. And we’ve taken extraordinary circumstances and measures to avoid civilian casualties.
The tragedy of Gaza is that it is ruled by Hamas – a tyrannical and fanatical terror group that relishes civilian casualties. They want civilian casualties. They use them as PR fodder. So it’s not that they don’t want them; they want them. And they pretty much say so. Indeed Hamas has adopted a strategy that abuses and sacrifices Gaza’s civilians. They use them as human shields; they endanger them and deliberately increase the death toll. They fire their rockets at Israel from schools, from hospitals, from mosques. You’ve just seen that. From urban neighborhoods, and right next to schools where journalists are staying. You can discover that for yourself.
