Tunnel vision: the subterranean tactics of Hamas

“From a military perspective, this war is all about the tunnels. They are used for weapons manufacturing, storage, and they are used to manoeuvre. The golden rule for any military is manoeuvrability,” says military expert Major Andrew Fox.

I had the pleasure of sitting down for an interview with Fox last week as he visited Israel. We spoke about the visuals of vast amounts of damage to neighbourhoods in Gaza that have outraged many in the international community.

Images of the damage have been used in information warfare and are guaranteed to elicit a robust response from the international community, but to fully understand what’s happening above ground, you need to look below ground, he said.

“Let’s tackle the damage head on. The tunnels are a weapons system of their own. People, think of them as hidey-holes, a way to avoid Israel Defense Forces [IDF] airstrikes, and they are. But they are much more than that. To destroy the tunnels, you must destroy what’s above.” Fox said Hamas is able to turn this into a weapon to get the international community to pressure Israel to stop. It has worked before. “Every tunnel is connected to every mosque, every hospital, every school, so above ground is where damage is done,” he said.

A former British Army officer who completed three tours in Afghanistan, including one attached to the United States Army Special Forces, Fox also served in Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East, is a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and serves as a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society focusing on defense, the Middle East, and disinformation. He has visited Israel numerous times since the start of the war with Hamas following the atrocities of 7 October, and has spent a considerable amount of time with the IDF in Gaza.

In recent weeks, Fox visited Gaza with a cohort from the High Level Military Group (HLMG). The group is “an independent body of former chiefs of staff, senior military officers, and cabinet ministers from NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] countries with many decades of expertise at the highest level of land, air, and sea conflict and the legality thereof”.

The HLMG has filed a counter-claim at the International Criminal Court (ICC) following the announcement by Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan of warrants of arrest for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Fox explained what the HLMG had observed. “The IDF looks at rules of engagement; at collateral damage; at civilian presence; at sites of a protected nature; what munitions need to be used; and the target. This is all stuff we use as well,” he said. “One in every two airstrikes is cancelled because they fail one of those six standards. This is absolutely moral, correct, and legitimate.”

In order to have genocide, you have to prove intent, and you can’t take politicians’ comments in press conferences as intent, he said. “Armies don’t take orders from press conferences, they take orders from war cabinets and the chain of orders”.

Regarding the issue of humanitarian aid, it’s Fox and the HLMG’s assessment that Israel has gone beyond the requirements under international law – building roads, and more calories per person are going into Gaza than before the war. Israel has also facilitated polio vaccines, and repaired water pipes, and electricity supplies destroyed by Hamas on 7 October. There have been 16 000 aid co-ordinations in Gaza between the IDF and aid agencies. “There have been thousands more on top of that,” Fox said.

In recent weeks, the British government announced that it would retract its objection to ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. This change in attitude towards its ally was followed by Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s announcement to suspend 30 out of 350 arms export licenses. The timing couldn’t have been worse as Israelis reeled with grief following the execution of six hostages.

Fox opines on this decision, “The double insult is performative,” he said. “The weapons won’t make a difference at all to the war in Gaza. None of the thresholds of international humanitarian law were remotely breached. This is just performative spite.”

Fox weighed in on the information battlefield. It’s not just on the kinetic battlefield where wars are fought, he said, but in the media, and over the past 11 months, the statistics are staggering.

“The media have platformed Hamas. I’ve seen a study that looks at five key media platforms including Sky News, CNN, and the BBC. One hundred percent of the time, they cited Hamas’s fatality statistics. Seventy-five percent of the time, they mentioned that they were from Hamas but not always, and 4% of the time they cited IDF statistics. That’s the scale of the imbalance. I’m trying to tell the truth as I see it, and I have a better idea because I’ve been to Israel multiple times, I’ve been on the ground in Rafah, I’ve spoken to the IDF at every level,” said Fox. “I know it to be true; I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

This past Sunday, 8 September, The Telegraph published a damning exposé showing the BBC’s bias and violation of its own impartiality clause.

In Fox’s opinion, three things need to be understood in order to have a better understanding of this war and Israel’s response: 7 October, the taking of hostages, and the tunnels.

One area where the IDF could improve is in running its information campaign in parallel with its military campaign. This is a lesson for all Western militaries.

There are many other lessons that militaries can learn from Operation Swords of Iron and the IDF’s conduct. Fox believes this war will be studied hard and other militaries can learn from the IDF about urban manoeuvrability. Militaries will have to look at urban warfare above and below ground at the same time, how to integrate air power, how to integrate drones, co-ordination, and other elements that have never been done before. “The Israelis have had to learn it on the job,” he said. “The IDF can clear the tunnels out much more rapidly now than in the beginning.”