The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) revealed videos and photos Thursday of an underground weapons manufacturing complex that Hamas had built underneath the main humanitarian corridor in the Gaza Strip.
Earlier this month, as Breitbart News reported, the IDF discovered a factory for producing rockets underneath the Salah Al-Din Road in central Gaza. The IDF explored the complex further and discovered a massive maze of tunnels, workshops, and shafts, lined to humanitarian infrastructure in the area.
In a statement, the IDF said:
The 36th Division, in cooperation with soldiers of the Yahalom and Shaldag units, exposed and destroyed the heart of Hamas’ weapons manufacturing industry near the Salah Al-Din Road in the Gaza Strip. The area consists of weapons factories and lathes, both above and below ground, that were used to produce ammunition and weapons for Hamas operatives.
The soldiers located dozens of tunnel shafts connected to a tunnel route hundreds of kilometers long, including a tunnel shaft in the residence of a senior official in Hamas’ weapons production unit. The tunnels were divided into areas used for the production of rockets and weapons. Using the tunnel network, weapons were transported throughout the Gaza Strip.
In Maghazi, near and inside civilian buildings, soldiers of the Golani Brigade exposed dozens of workshops for the production of weapons and tunnel shafts, including large quantities of weaponry and equipment. Between Nuseirat and Bureij, soldiers of the 188th Brigade located machines and containers for the production of chemical substances, along with hundreds of long-range rockets. In addition, the ‘Yiftah’ Brigade combat team conducted operational activity against terrorist infrastructure of Hamas’ Bureij Battalion. The Hamas terrorists embedded this infrastructure in and near civilian buildings and government institutions, further proving Hamas’ cynical use of the civilian population. The soldiers located terrorist funds in safes, propaganda materials, maps and weapons in the area.
The IDF has largely destroyed Hamas’s infrastructure in the northern and central areas of the Gaza Strip. Fighting is still intense in southern Gaza, where Hamas leaders have retreated into underground tunnels, taking Israeli hostages with them and hoping that international pressure will stop the Israeli assault — at least for long enough for them to escape through tunnels to Egypt and beyond.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.