Vanity Fair Highlights Tunnel Threat To Israel

Thanks to Vanity Fair for calling attention to the hugely underreported threats faced by Israel, both before and since this past summer’s Gaza conflict. Adam Ciralsky writes:

‘Hamas had a plan,’ says Lt. Col. [Peter] Lerner, summarizing on the record what six senior intelligence officials would describe on background. ‘A simultaneous, coordinated, surprise attack within Israel. They planned to send 200 terrorists armed to the teeth toward civilian populations. This was going to be a coordinated attack. The concept of operations involved 14 offensive tunnels into Israel. With at least 10 men in each tunnel, they would infiltrate and inflict mass casualties.’

As a senior military intelligence official later explained, the anticipated attack was designed with two purposes in mind. ‘First, get in and massacre people in a village. Pull off something they could show on television. Second, the ability to kidnap soldiers and civilians using the tunnels would give them a great bargaining chip.’

Mishal insists that ‘the tunnels may have been outwardly called “offensive tunnels,” but in actual fact they are “defensive’ ones.”‘ When pressed to explain why most of the tunnels actually ended up under or near civilian communities or kibbutzim—not military bases—he concedes, ‘Yes, true. . . .’

The one thing that we wish they would have done differently would be to have pointed out, in response to Khaled Meshal’s assertion that “his group targets soldiers and those living in occupied territory,” that Meshal considers all of Israel occupied territory, including Tel Aviv. Therefore, by his own words, he considers all Israeli civilians to be fair targets.

You can read the whole thing here.