BICOM

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced yesterday that it destroyed a Hamas tunnel intended for use by the terror organisation’s elite Nukhba naval commandos to carry out attacks against Israel.

The entrance to the tunnel was in a Hamas military post in the northern Gaza Strip. The tunnel continued until it reached the coast and from there it went into the water so that Hamas’s divers could go out to sea without being spotted by IDF observers.

The IDF said that Hamas had invested a great deal of resources into building this tunnel that leads from the surface to the sea. The IDF said Hamas had equipped a large number of commandos with specialist scuba diving equipment.

On Friday, 10,000 Palestinians protested along the Gaza border in the culmination of the “Great March of Return”. Four Palestinians were reportedly killed and more than 600 were injured. The IDF used non-lethal crowd control measures to keep most of the demonstrators away from the fence. The military also said that live sniper fire was used against those who came up close to the fence, as well as the “chief instigators” of violence.

Several fires was caused by Palestinian sending flying firebombs over the border into Israeli territory during the protests. Kites, which carry the firebombs, were also used to carry explosives on at least three occasions. On Saturday the Israeli Air Force (IAF) fired warning shots at a group of Palestinians who were assembling kites fitted with explosives in the northern Gaza Strip.

The IDF remains on heightened deployment around the Gaza Strip as the military are concerned that clashes along the border will continue. Israeli security officials described the relatively low turnout for Friday’s protests as a failure for Hamas. They also note that if and when the protests diminish and Hamas removes its fighters, the threat of attacks by Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Islamist groups remains highly possible.