Israeli officials say the country's deadly ground offensive the militants use to try to attack Jewish communities outside the Gaza Strip.
when explosives detonated as they uncovered one of those tunnels. That came hours after Hamas released a graphic video claiming to show another deadly tunnel-generated attack inside Israel earlier in the week.
Such incidents have many Israelis asking why their forces didn't stop Hamas from building the elaborate tunnels in the first place. And in Israel, calls are mounting for an investigation into how authorities have handled the tunnel threat.
In the grainy video released by Hamas Wednesday, black-clad militants shove their weapons through a tunnel entrance, then climb out and run toward what looks like an army post inside Israel.
Five Israeli soldiers were killed in the attack Tuesday — which the video purportedly shows — as were a handful of Hamas fighters.
Such revelations are rattling Israelis more than the 2,000-plus rockets Hamas has fired into their country since the war began earlier this month, says Smadar Perry, who writes about the tunnels for Israel's largest daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.
But she and other journalists say Israeli authorities will likely have to answer for how Hamas was able to build enough tunnels to allow militants to infiltrate Israel six times since the Gaza offensive began three weeks ago.
The presence of the tunnel network has long been known to Israel; one was used to stage the 2006 attack that resulted in the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. He was held captive in Gaza for five years before being freed in a massive prisoner exchange.
But the underground grid's scope, scale and sophistication, which has become clear over the course of the current offensive, has caught many by surprise. Concrete-lined, with electricity and metal tracks for transport, the carefully ventilated passageways appear to have been designed as the conduit for both large-scale assaults and clandestine abductions. Israel says it has found "kidnap kits" consisting of handcuffs and tranquilizers in some of the tunnels.
In the heated rhetoric surrounding the fighting in Gaza, which has killed more than 1,200 Palestinians, many of them women and children, the tunnels have emerged as the key Israeli rationale for keeping up the fight rather than agreeing to a cease-fire lasting for longer than a matter of hours. The tunnels are also cited as the principal reason for military operations taking place in the heart of jam-packed Palestinian residential neighborhoods, which have exacted a heavy civilian toll.
Fueling the anxiety among Israelis, the Maariv newspaper cited intelligence sources as saying that Palestinian militants had planned to use the tunnels to infiltrate Israel with a force consisting of hundreds of fighters disguised as Israeli soldiers, in an assault timed to the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, in late September.
Under heavy international pressure as the bloodletting mounts in Gaza, Israel appears to be trying to buy time to continue destroying the tunnel network.
"We are only a few days away from destroying the attack tunnels," said Maj. Gen. Sami Turjeman, the head of Israel's southern command, said in a televised briefing Wednesday night. He sounded a note often echoed by Israeli officialdom: Hamas could have built "two hospitals, 20 schools, 20 clinics and 100 kindergartens" with the cement and other materials used to construct the tunnels.
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