Do you chat with a squirrel ? '' Everybody else I talk to agrees the IDF are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.''

Hamas also built its resistance facilities above and mainly beneath the ground, within and beneath residential buildings and community structures that the Gazan population relies on daily and finds refuge in during wartime. This is why the main tunnel facilities are located beneath hospitals, schools, mosques, clinics and UN facilities.

Hamas learned from the IDF operational pattern, which operates within the boundaries of international law, allowing combat and targeting of civilian facilities only if they have a clear military value or use.

Information gleaned from interrogations of captives, Hamas terrorists, and seized documents supplemented the details and refined the information. Until that exposure, the IDF estimated that about 500 kilometers of tunnels of all types were dug throughout the strip, leading to several hundred openings. Today, the IDF knows that there are at least 750 kilometers of tunnels of all types in the strip, perhaps even more than 1,000 kilometers, and the number of openings exceeds 1,500.