Terror Tunnels The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas by Alan Dershowitz

determine the route of the tunnels and their exit points since they are deep underground and not subject to detection from the air.
    The event that immediately provoked this ground incursion was the discovery by Israel of yet another tunnel—in addition to the one I was in during June of 2014—whose exit was near a civilian kibbutz. This discovery almost came too late to prevent a mass casualty disaster. The terrorists had already emerged from the tunnel with grenade launchers, bazookas, machine guns and other weapons capable of mass murder ( http://www.haaretz.com/news/video/1.605650 ). Several of the terrorists were killed while others apparently escaped back through the tunnel before the Israelis could disable it.
    This attempted mass casualty attack was planned and implemented while Israel and Egypt were trying to arrange a cease-fire. Israeli intelligence estimates that there are dozens of other terror tunnels that they still cannot find although they know where some of the entrance points in Gaza are located. It is these tunnels that are the primary object of Israel’s risky ground incursion.
    There are other tunnels as well on the west side of Gaza, underneath its border with Egypt. These are the smuggling tunnels through which Hamas imports the rockets that it uses to terrorize Israeli civilians. It also uses these tunnels to enrich its leaders, who take a percentage of the profits earned by the commerce that goes through these tunnels on a daily basis. These smuggling tunnels too pose a direct threat to Israel’s security and are a secondary object of Israel’s ground incursion.
    The end result of Israel’s military operation should be twofold: First, to stop the security threat currently posed by Hamas terrorism—rocket fire, kidnappings, and terrorist incursions into Israel—by shutting down the tunnels and imposing a strict quarantine against the importation of rockets and against the exportation of terrorists through tunnels; and second, to restore the flow of innocent commerce into Gaza so that its citizens can live lives as normal as possible while they remain under the thumb of the violent theocracy and kleptocracy of Hamas.
    The Israeli government did not want to send troops into Gaza. Its leaders well understand the risks to their own soldiers as well as to Palestinian civilians. But they also understand the risks to Israeli civilians of allowing these terrorist tunnels to continue to operate underneath its border. The decision to send in troops was a difficult one, made on the basis of a calculation of the risks of action versus the risks of inaction.
    Shortly after I went into the tunnel underneath the Gaza-Israel border, I had a private dinner with Prime Minister Netanyahu. It was clear to me how reluctant Netanyahu was to send troops into Gaza. He had never before committed ground troops into an enemy war zone. As is well known, his own brother was killed defending Israel against terrorism. He knows the price of action as well as inaction. He is a reluctant warrior, but Hamas forced his hand by repeatedly turning down negotiated cease-fires and continuing to fire rockets at Israeli cities and to send terrorists into Israeli kibbutzim. No democracy would have acted differently in the face of such dangers.

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    Gazans’ Real Enemy Is Hamas, Not Israel
    July 20, 2014
    When Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, it left behind farm equipment and other material capable of feeding the population. Donor countries promised support, financial and political, if Gaza would live up to its potential as a Singapore on the Mediterranean. But instead the leaders of Gaza enriched themselves and used the remaining resources to build rockets instead of ploughshares. They fired these rockets at Israeli civilians and devised a strategy of using their own innocent civilians as human shields against Israel’s anticipated responses to the rocket fire. Only after Hamas started firing rockets at Israeli civilians