Israel building ‘Underground Iron Dome’ to tackle Gaza tunnel

Israel is developing an “Underground Iron Dome” system to detect and destroy cross-border tunnels, Foreign Policy reported yesterday.

The site quoted Israeli Channel 2 as saying that the local government has spent more than $250 million since 2004 in its efforts to thwart tunnel construction under the Gaza border.

The United States has already set aside $40 million for the project in the 2016 financial year, in order “to establish anti-tunnel capabilities to detect, map, and neutralise underground tunnels that threaten the US or Israel,” said US Defence Department spokesman Christopher Sherwood. While the majority of the work in 2016 will be done in Israel, Sherwood added: “The US will receive prototypes, access to test sites, and the rights to any intellectual property.”

Among the Israeli companies working to develop the new anti-tunnel mechanism are Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the same company that developed the Iron Dome rocket defence system.

According to intelligence sources who spoke with Foreign Policy on the condition of anonymity, the system involves seismic sensors that can monitor underground vibrations.

Since the beginning of 2016, nearly a dozen Hamas tunnels have collapsed on the Palestinians who were building them, killing at least 10 of the group’s members. While winter rains have been blamed as the culprit, the wave of collapses has led many here to wonder if Israel’s new secret weapon is already at work.

Asked by the Palestinian Ma’an news agency in February about whether Israel was behind recent tunnel collapses, the coordinator of government activities in the Palestinian territories, Israeli army Major General Yoav Mordechai, responded: “God knows.”