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Day 12: 4 Soldiers, One Civilian Killed, Destroying Tunnels, Diplomatic Maneuvers

by TheTower.org Staff |

The twelfth day of Operation Protective Edge is over.

Two soldiers were killed in Israel by terrorists who entered through a tunnel. Israel reported that it has “it had severely diminished the arsenal of Hamas” and has discovered 13 tunnels.

Two Israeli soldiers — Major (res.) Amotz Greenberg, 45, and Sgt. Adar Barsano, 20 — were killed by Hamas gunmen who infiltrated via a border tunnel on Saturday morning. Military sources said the attackers had planned to kill and kidnap Israeli soldiers and civilians. The IDF deployed additional troops on the Israeli border to prevent further such attacks, and intensified its search for more tunnels. …

In Israel, a Gaza rocket killed a 30-year-old Bedouin man near the southern city of Dimona and injured four others, said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld, marking the second Israeli civilian casualty from the latest round of fighting. Two women and two children were injured in the attack. An Israeli soldier was killed after the start of the ground operation overnight Thursday-Friday, likely from friendly fire.

Later in the day two more soldiers were killed in separate incidents.

Staff Sergeant Bania Roval, a 20-year-old soldier from Holon, serving in the Paratroopers 101st Battalion, was shot dead by a terrorist in Gaza who emerged from a tunnel shaft and opened fire at soldiers. The terrorist was shot dead in return fire.

“Controlling tunnel shafts doesn’t give us full control of the entire tunnel,” a senior military source said.

The second soldier, 2nd-Lt. Bar Rahav, 21, from Ramat Yishai, from the Engineering Corps, was killed as a result of the activation of the Trophy missile defense system in a nearby tank. The system successfully blocked an anti-tank missile fired at the vehicle, but the soldier was killed in the process. The IDF is investigating.

The Times of Israel explains how the tunnels can be destroyed. First robots and bomb sniffing dogs are sent in.

Only then are the troops lowered into the darkness. Some of the recently discovered tunnels have been more than 60-feet-deep and over a mile long. Many have branched out near the border, with multiple exits, so as to enable a more complex attack. The army has discovered at least eight and reportedly as many as 30 offensive tunnels, thus far, and the channels are now, the army says, “under comprehensive investigation. ”

Once the tunnel is secured it can be destroyed.

The tunnels can be struck from above. Brig. Gen. (res) Asaf Agmon, the head of the Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies and a former air force pilot and commander, said the concrete-reinforced tunnels are readily penetrated by a standard one-ton bomb dropped from a plane. The fuse on the bombs, he said, simply needs to be set further back so that the bombs detonate only after penetrating into the void of the tunnel. “Bunker-busters are not necessary,” he said.

A former commander of the combat engineering corps, though, said that the destruction inflicted by air force ordnance was very “local” and did not cause dramatic damage. In order to completely dismantle a tunnel system, heavy drilling equipment has to be brought to the tunnel and many hundreds of pounds of explosives have to be inserted into the channel all along its length, he asserted.

Ha’aretz reports that Netanyahu has successfully cultivated international support for Israel’s self defense.

In the past two weeks the attitude to Netanyahu has turned around. The world’s leaders are showing him empathy and understanding. They know that when he tells them that he went into this operation through lack of choice he is not lying. They saw how he dealt with the internal political pressures, how he delayed action for several days and even accepted the Egyptian cease-fire plan. They are convinced that this is not some trick to provide international legitimacy for a re-occupation of Gaza, but rather his authentic desire to avoid escalation.

[Photo: Wall Street Journal / YouTube ]

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