BICOM

Three Palestinians were reportedly killed in the Gaza Strip after Egypt flooded a Hamas smuggling tunnel beneath its border.

The Hamas-run Al-Aksa Radio announced yesterday that three bodies had been discovered, and a fourth body was yet to be recovered, after Egypt ordered the flooding of a tunnel underneath its border with the Gaza Strip.

Egypt has a long-standing policy of destroying tunnels under the Gaza border into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Cairo accuses Hamas of using the tunnels to smuggle weapons and arms into Sinai for use by the ISIS-affiliated Sinai Province terror group, which has waged a long-standing armed campaign against President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s regime.

Dozens of Hamas activists have been killed in tunnel collapses in recent months, as Hamas is openly reconstructing the subterranean network of tunnels which was largely destroyed by Israeli forces during Operation Protective Edge in summer 2014. Hamas  used the tunnels to attack Israeli targets during the conflict and fresh tunnels have since been discovered which have reached far into Israeli territory.

Also yesterday, Hamas held a large-scale military drill in the Gaza Strip. Hamas’s Interior Ministry announced that sounds of explosions and gunfire would be heard throughout Gaza beginning at 10am yesterday. During the drill, police headquarters and some Gaza security forces were evacuated and deployed in the field.

The Jerusalem Post reported that Hamas fired missiles into the Mediterranean Sea yesterday morning as part of the exercise.

Although the drill  appeared to be some form of preparation for a future conflict with Israel, some commentators have suggested that it could have been designed in order to prepare for large-scale internal strife within Gaza, with Hamas facing opposition from other armed Islamist groups.