The web of tunnels used by Hamas is estimated to be bigger than the London Underground train network, enabling Hamas’ most senior leaders and fighters to take shelter during the attacks.
What strikes you first about the tunnel is its size. Jutting out from the desert sand at a gradient of about 25 degrees, the rusty tubular steel opening is just big enough to drive a car through.
That is far from an accident. Hamas, as it proved on October 7, is a mobile terror group, and this vast tunnel network, running 50m deep in places and emerging just shy of the Erez Crossing at Gaza’s northern tip, is believed to have been designed for a wider invasion of Israel.
“From here, you can be in Tel Aviv in 50 minutes and Jerusalem in an hour,” says one of the soldiers charged with taking us into it.
The Erez tunnel network is about four kilometres in length – the biggest discovered since the war started, according to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
Its construction appears to have been personally overseen by Mohammed Sinwar, the younger brother of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in Gaza and the brains behind the October 7 massacre in which more than 1200 victims died.
Before being escorted into what an IDF spokesman dubs “the subterranean tunnel system that the Sinwar family had hoped to keep secret”, we’re shown a Hamas video, said to have been retrieved from Gaza. It documents the building of the labyrinth and includes a clip of Sinwar Jr being driven around it in a small 4WD.
By then, his brother Yahya had been released from an Israeli jail where he was imprisoned for 22 years for a series of gruesome murders committed in Gaza in the 1980s. In prison, he boasted of having made a man bury his own brother alive, handing him a spoon to finish the job.
“A Hamas activist in every fibre of his body. A figure of a leader with the personality of a murderer,” noted Micha Kobi, who interrogated him at the time for Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service.
“Religiously extreme, a believer, one who is at peace with his words and his deeds… a psychopath”.
At the entrance to the tunnel, we step over two metre-square shafts that plummet vertically down. Steel ladders are pinned to the wall of each but you can’t see the bottom, giving a slight sense of vertigo as you enter.
A soldier to my right says he thinks the shafts were designed to collect sand that would otherwise fall inwards and block the main passage when the tunnel’s entrance was opened from within as part of a surprise attack. “We see the same in other attack tunnels,” he says.
He and his colleagues will destroy them with explosives, along with the rest of the tunnel network, once we’ve left.
For the first 10 or 15m, the walls are clad in the same steel sheet that is visible from the surface. It’s pitted and coloured with a deep rust, moisture from the thick air condensing against it. Further in, the sheeting gives way to hefty circular steel ribs before the walls straighten and the modular concrete arches seen in most other parts of the Gaza Metro take over.
Along the walls on either side, cables are slung for communications, lighting and power just like in the London Underground. Deeper down, from about the point at which it starts to become harder to breathe, a plastic drainage pipe runs along the ceiling to provide ventilation.
As we move further underground, temperature and humidity rise quickly, and you can see why Hamas is desperate for fuel to power its oxygen generators and ventilation pumps.
Even just 50 or 60m in and perhaps 10m beneath the surface, the air is dank and sickly. Your heart rate picks up, not because of the physical excursion, but the metabolic effect of your body sweating to try to cool itself in a super-humid environment.
The idea of running - let alone fighting - down here seems impossible, and you can see why IDF troops only enter as a last resort. The frame of anyone moving in from the light becomes a perfect silhouette. A single combatant with a rifle could hold off a commando unit for hours.
We don’t see them, but further in there are subsidiary tunnels running left and right, says the IDF. Off these there are various rooms for storage, command and control and accommodation. Many of the entrances are protected by hefty steel blast doors.
“This tunnel is connected to a wider total network that we have discovered in other areas,” says an IDF spokesman. “We found a large number of weapons inside the tunnel in depots ready to be used. It’s all around the tunnel.”
The IDF believes the advance depositing of weapons in concealed areas above and below ground is one way in which Hamas managed to conceal its intentions ahead of October 7. “This is how they kept it a secret.” Fighters did not need to know in advance because the weapons depots were ready, said the spokesman.
While the main part of the tunnel was not used in the October 7 attack and is thought to have been kept secret for a separate assault, the IDF says other parts of the network were used to both stage the attack and retreat back into Gaza with hostages.
Walking through a spider’s web of tunnels
After her release at the end of October, 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz recounted being taken by her captors into a network of tunnels. “We went underground and walked for kilometres in wet tunnels, for two or three hours, in a spider’s web of tunnels,” she told journalists.
“We went through the tunnels until we reached a large hall. We were 25 people, and they separated us according to which kibbutz we were from.”
Other released hostages have described being held in rooms with little light or food. “Every day [in] there is like hell,” said 21-year-old Maya Regev. “Abnormal fear, zero sleep. At night, the longings are crazy.”
The thud of heavy munitions hitting Gaza City could be heard in the distance when we were underground. The idea of that happening directly overhead while being held in anything like the Erez tunnel for months is the stuff of nightmares.
“Every day in captivity was extremely challenging. We were in tunnels, terrified that it would not be Hamas, but Israel that would kill us, and then they would say, ‘Hamas killed you’,” one freed hostage told Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an angry meeting with the hostage families two weeks ago.
Aviv Havron, an Israeli newspaper editor, recounted how 10 members of one family were directly impacted on October 7. Three were murdered; six were kidnapped and later freed; and one, Tal Shoham, 38, continues to be held captive by Hamas in Gaza.
“It doesn’t matter if the hostages are on the ground or underground in the tunnels,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “Their lives are at risk every minute, and they must return home alive ASAP. Only later must these tunnels be destroyed.”
He’s right, of course – the tunnels hold a gruesome fascination, but it is the war itself that’s killing them.
Three hostages who escaped after a full 70 days in captivity were shot and killed by IDF troops just a few miles from us on Friday in the Shejaiya district of Gaza City. Despite being unarmed and holding a white flag, they were gunned down by an IDF soldier perched high in a nearby building.
As protests sprung up across Israel on Saturday, IDF chief of staff Herzl Halevi had to remind his troops – Israeli troops – that “it is forbidden to shoot at those who raise a white flag and ask to surrender”.
As we walked from the Erez tunnel on Friday, drenched in sweat and glad to be back in the sun, soldiers were preparing to mine it.
The blast will likely be filmed and cheered when shown to the public.
The IDF has promised to pursue Sinwar, who they say is “deep underground” in the Gaza tunnel network, until he is killed.
The concern for Israel’s policymakers should be that, in their desire to extract vengeance on Sinwar for October 7, their trigger-happy excesses only play into his hands.
The uneasy alliance of parties forming the government is on the verge of collapse.