Israeli troops uncovered what they said was another Hamas tunnel under a cemetery in the southern Gaza City of Khan Younis last weekend, and then gave journalists a tour of the destroyed burial grounds.
The reporters who went on the tour said they saw a neighborhood obliterated in the search for tunnels — so far more than 300 miles of underground passages have been found — and a vast pit where the cemetery once sat, alongside a collapsed mosque. A single, toothless skull sat upon a mound of dirt, an Associated Press reporter said.
As Israel’s campaign to eradicate Hamas in Gaza advances with much of the Palestinian territory reduced to wastelands of concrete rubble, the destruction of holy sites has drawn criticism from Palestinians and rights groups, who say Israel is waging an assault on cultural heritage. Cemeteries and religious sites receive special protection under international law, and destroying them can be a war crime.
Israel argues that Hamas uses cultural sites as military cover, which costs the sites these legal protections, and it says it can’t find the tunnels without unavoidable collateral damage to churches, mosques, and other cultural sites.
“We’re not naive anymore,” said Israeli Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus, who led journalists around the site Saturday.
Israel has made similar arguments in operations in and around Gaza hospitals and has previously acknowledged digging up some cemeteries, looking for the bodies of Israeli hostages. At least two dozen hostages are believed to have died in captivity in Gaza, and Israeli authorities said they had returned the bodies that were not Israelis.
“We try to move them aside as much as possible,” Goldfus said when asked about the excavated bodies. “But remember, when we are fighting in this place, and your enemy is flanking you again and again and again, and using these compounds to hide in, there’s not much you can do.”
Goldfus brought journalists inside a tunnel shaft he said stretched underneath the mosque and the cemetery. The journalists walked down a long concrete tunnel that branched in several directions and arrived at a collection of rooms soldiers said were used by Hamas as a command and control center.
It included three domed rooms — one with four chairs, one with a desk, and a kitchen with empty cans of beans and a spice rack. A military commander said the tunnel, which contained a power transformer, fans, piping with wires, and light switches, stretched some 900 yards and was connected to a larger tunnel network in southern Gaza.
Israel has struck other churches, mosques, schools, and hospitals which it said Hamas had used to fire at its troops or to launch missiles at Israel. On Tuesday, Israeli soldiers raided a West Bank hospital disguised as doctors and patients, assassinating three Palestinians it said were preparing a second Oct. 7-style attack in the city of Jenin.