“It would be a slow, grinding, months-long task to reduce them entirely, and probably the digging will go on as the [Israeli army] tries,” said Richard Outzen, non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Turkey and senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a defence policy think tank.
While few know the full extent of what some Israeli officials call the “metro”, the tunnels are believed to cross the entire enclave for hundreds of kilometres, with experts estimating a depth between a range of 15 to 60 metres (50 to 200 feet). In 2021, the Israeli army said that there were 300km (186 miles) of tunnels running under the strip.