Army building underground border barrier
The Israeli army has started work on an underground wall along the Gaza border to stop Hamas militants from launching attacks through tunnels.
The US$600 million (NZ$820m) project, which will cover the entire 60km border, will take years to complete.
The first section is being built along northern Gaza, near a cluster of Israeli villages where cranes and other construction equipment were visible over the weekend.
General Gadi Eizenkot, the Israeli army chief, said it was the largest project ever carried out by the engineering corps.
An above-ground barrier of concrete walls and barbed-wire fences already covers most of the frontier. Dozens of young Palestinians have managed to scramble over the fence this year, many looking for work, but the barrier has largely deterred Hamas from sending militants to the border during the three wars it has waged with Israel since 2009.
The group, which took control of Gaza in 2007, has instead relied on a network of underground tunnels.
It attempted several attacks through the tunnels during the 2014 war, including a raid on an army post that killed five Israeli soldiers.
Israel blew up dozens of the passages, but Hamas has dug new ones, viewing them as its most important strategic asset.
The Israeli army believes that Hamas is constructing them at a rate of up to 10km per month in a territory that is just 6.4km wide in places.
Ismail Radwan, a senior member of Hamas, called the underground wall a sign of Israel’s ‘‘failure to deal with the tunnels’’.
At least five tunnels mysteriously collapsed earlier this year while under construction. Israel would not say whether it was involved. The army did announce that it found two new tunnels this spring, both dug since the end of the war. The discovery of the second passage, in May, led to the worst cross-border exchange of fire in nearly two years.
The Israeli defence ministry said that the underground wall would be ‘‘tens of metres’’ deep. The first tunnel, discovered in April, was more than 30m below ground.
The tunnels have become a political issue for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Cabinet members have been rowing about whether the government took them seriously before the 2014 war – a seven-week conflict in which more than 2,200 Palestinians and 72 Israelis were killed.
The state comptroller, the Israeli government’s top auditor, will release a report into the tunnels later this year; a draft leaked in May suggests that it will blame Netanyahu and other senior ministers for failing to respond to the threat.
Netanyahu has spoken of his plan to ‘‘surround Israel with walls’’. In July the defence ministry signed off on a new barrier along the northeastern border with Jordan, one of the last stretches that is not sealed off.
Israel is also building a new fence along the most southerly stretch of that border, while a barrier reaching along the Egyptian border was completed in 2013.