After the attack of 7 Oct, Israel knew they had to destroy Hamas' tunnel network. They took a previous plan to flood the tunnels and decided to try and make it work. The IDF tasked the Israeli Water Authority experts to help with modernizing the plan.  

The IDF then proceeded to start flooding the tunnels without waiting for the experts' input.  Five pumps were situated on the coast, and began to pump and send the water into the network of pipes  and from there to a single-digit number of tunnel.  162nd division was chosen as the contractor of the operation, and infrastructure work was assigned to the fighters of the Shayetet 13 naval commandos.  "For a month and a half the IDF neutralized an entire division," says one of the commanders who took part in the project. "It assigned combat soldiers to plumbing jobs and guarding pipes, throughout the Strip, when it had no idea whether the project had any operational feasibility."

...from the very first attempts to address the problem, professionals cast doubt on the ability to flood the tunnels in a way that would make it difficult for Hamas activists to remain in them, and to cause their deaths. "

"In one discussion," says one knowledgeable source, "someone asked how Hamas had coped all those years with rainwater in the tunnels, how could it be that the tunnels weren't flooded." The answer came after experts conducted studies and also by questioning Hamas members. "It emerged that they built the tunnels on levels, with inclines, with collection tanks for rainy days and blast doors," says the source. "They told us they had ways of directing the water to absorption points."

As a result, the army concluded that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to flood the tunnels or create insufferable conditions for those inside them.

[The IDF] learned quickly how difficult the system was to operate. Soldiers said it was cumbersome and demanding considerable human and other resources.

The officer adds that at a pretty early stage, the army command realized that the pumps would not hold out for long and would quickly become useless.

Lack of knowledge of the hostages and their conditions also complicated the operation.

t was supposed to be the game changer, a new, relatively quick and lethal solution to one of the more complex fronts in the Gaza Strip. Or as the army described it: "A significant engineering and technological breakthrough for dealing with the underground challenge." Behind all these descriptions was "Atlantis," a system that was supposed to take out the Hamas tunnels and to kill senior Hamas officials, by pumping in seawater at high intensity.

But about half a year after this system was revealed to the public, it turns out that Atlantis is lost; it's no longer in use, and nobody in the army can say what benefit, if any, was gained from this expensive project. A Haaretz investigation   based on discussions with a series of different sources, who are closely involved in the development and operation of the system, as well as documents and minutes from closed discussions, in which senior officers and professionals participated   reveals a large number of screw-ups in the way it was handled by the army, and provides a profile of a failure foretold.

For example, it turns out that the system started to operate even before the necessary opinions requested by the army were given; that behind the accelerated activity there was a great deal of pressure imposed from above   by the head of Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman; and that it was activated while possibly endangering Israelis who were alive when abducted to the Strip.

"The system was activated in at least one central Hamas tunnel that was clearly used by the organization during various stages of the war," said a defense source who was deeply involved in project Atlantis. "And it's very likely that there were hostages there who served as a human shield."

The question of how it happened that a project described by the Israel Defense Forces as a "tie breaker" turned into a steadily growing failure has a complex answer. One of the main causes is the backdrop. During the first days of the war, says a defense source, "The achievements on the ground against Hamas officials were insignificant. Most of the Hamas forces, mainly the military arm, entered the tunnels and that created pressure on the senior IDF command."

That's why, says another source who spoke to Haaretz, Finkelman demanded solutions; ways of striking at Hamas activists in the tunnels. "There was frustration because during those stages the forces didn't really think that we'd start to enter all the tunnels," recalls the source. "They also began to realize the dimensions of the tunnels that Military Intelligence didn't know about."

At that time, the IDF was still learning about the tunnels they encountered in the Strip and their scope   hundreds of kilometers. "The army," he adds, "found itself on the ground realizing that Hamas was below the ground and it had no solution for removing them from there."

But furthermore, some members of the Southern Command say that during those days the ground forces had no solution in its existing arsenal to the problem of the tunnels, and therefore the army was eager for any possible idea. And such an idea was provided by an officer from the ground forces: to flood the tunnels with seawater, by means of pumps and pipes that the IDF would deploy in the Strip.

It was actually the renewal of a contingency plan that was proposed in the ground forces years before Finkelstein assumed his position. At the time the purpose was to deal with a different type of tunnel. Its chances of success in dealing with the tunnels that the IDF found in the Strip beginning on October 7 were low. But according to defense sources who spoke to Haaretz, Finkelman gave a green light to taking the old plan and adapting it to the new situation.

After the plan received the necessary permits (an activity of this type requires the approval of the Chief of Staff and the Military Advocate General, among others), the IDF turned to the Israel Water Authority for assistance. The authority hastened to mobilize for the mission and formed two groups of civilian experts in several fields. One group was placed in charge of pumping the water into the tunnels, the second was asked to study the subject of water loss through the walls of a tunnel. Both groups got started.

But the IDF didn't wait for the conclusions, and already at this point they embarked on the next stage. The Southern Command's 162nd division was chosen as the contractor of the operation, and infrastructure work was assigned to the fighters of the Shayetet 13 naval commandos, which for several weeks became a pipeline unit. The main goal: joining pipes and deploying them in the combat area. "For a month and a half the IDF neutralized an entire division," says one of the commanders who took part in the project. "It assigned combat soldiers to plumbing jobs and guarding pipes, throughout the Strip, when it had no idea whether the project had any operational feasibility."

He said "The IDF had no way of knowing whether the system was working, what had happened in the tunnels, what the situation was of the terrorists inside and whether there were hostages who were harmed as a result of the water. To this moment it isn't clear what damage was caused in the tunnels, if any. They simply don't know anything."

And in fact, at that time, say professionals, the IDF lacked the requisite information and data about the tunnels, certainly not how to flood them in a way that would harm those inside or cause them to flee to the surface. In the course of the project, the Water Authority investigators had a chance to be exposed to the study prepared by a Hamas activist who served in the tunnel system in the past 10 years. Along with his statement that the tunnels became the main system prepared by the organization for a military confrontation with Israel ("We knew that the IDF would enter the Strip"), he described how they were constructed and the logic behind them.

For example, he told his interrogators that the tunnel shafts underwent a change. If in the past they were built upward, with the entrance to them by means of more or less improvised ladders, now the entire structure has changed. "The shafts are built in the form of steps or a small ladder of one or two meters, and from there there are steps or an incline leading into the tunnel. That was designed to make things easier for the excavators and to create a narrow opening at the entrance to the tunnels." Therefore, he said, "If the soldiers enter, it will be hard for them to pass through with a lot of equipment on them."

But there were other details that were discovered. For example, that the distance between the shafts, which are visible from above, can be deceptive. That's because the entrance from the shafts is on an incline, which can be as long as dozens of meters. In effect, the tunnel itself is much shorter   and damaging the narrow shafts will lead to only limited achievements. Another detail that can't be seen from above is the passages between the tunnels, which have no exit shafts.

But while the researchers were doing their work, learning what had changed in the Strip and considering the possibility of flooding, the IDF didn't wait before acting. The army started deploying and activating the new infrastructure before receiving the insights and decisions of the research teams. Five pumps were situated on the coast, and began to pump and send the water into the network of pipes   and from there to a single-digit number of tunnels. The Water Authority's Hydrological Service reacted angrily.

"The activation wasn't carried out according to the recommendations of the professionals," according to a document issued by the experts on the subject, about three weeks after Atlantis began to operate. "The pumping wasn't done according to the combat theory that was developed, no findings were gathered and they didn't take the measurements that were described." The experts were angry that throughout the period "There was a disconnect between the sources in the field and the accompanying unit on the one hand and the experts who planned the method of operation on the other."

However, the experts determined that the IDF began to flood the tunnels without having a mechanism to assess the resulting operational achievement. "In effect," they summed up, "we don't know with what degree of success the process was carried out."

And maybe what's written in the document is putting it mildly. Haaretz learned that from the very first attempts to address the problem, professionals cast doubt on the ability to flood the tunnels in a way that would make it difficult for Hamas activists to remain in them, and to cause their deaths. "Finkelman wanted to enter and operate in the tunnels as fast as possible," explains a defense source involved in the details of the plan. "Every capability practiced in the IDF until the war was unrelated to the situation that the forces encountered in the field. The IDF thought that they could reinvent the wheel within days or weeks without any in-depth study of the subject and its consequences."

What about the hostages?
One of the issues that they didn't deal with at all was the hostages. "It wasn't taken into account, and anyone who tells you otherwise isn't being accurate," says a professional source who was involved in the project. "When we asked for information about the possibility that there were hostages in the tunnels; how they were being held; whether they were locked into rooms from which there was no escape; or other questions related to the issue   we soon realized that that was out of our field of expertise, that it's information to which only a few people are exposed." The same source adds that the army said that there are areas where there was a likelihood that hostages were present, but from what we understood, that was less relevant to the tunnels."

During that period, say defense sources who spoke with Haaretz, everything was conducted in a positive atmosphere in which the army brass and political leadership wanted a creative and effective solution to the Hamas tunnels. Thus, any question or problem raised by officials was regarded as putting spokes into the IDF's wheel

"In one discussion," says one knowledgeable source, "someone asked how Hamas had coped all those years with rainwater in the tunnels, how could it be that the tunnels weren't flooded." The answer came after experts conducted studies and also by questioning Hamas members. "It emerged that they built the tunnels on levels, with inclines, with collection tanks for rainy days and blast doors," says the source. "They told us they had ways of directing the water to absorption points."

As a result, the army concluded that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to flood the tunnels or create insufferable conditions for those inside them. But others pointed to the Egyptians and how after Abdel Fattah al-Sissi was elected president, the Egyptians flooded the Hamas tunnels with sewage, prompting Hamas to address the challenge way back then. "That, however, didn't interest anyone," adds the source. "It wasn't possible to speak with logic."

Over the next few weeks, the experts continued their studies while the IDF began acting on recommendations that had never been made. The operation was quite costly, for example acquiring special pumps that could handle large amounts of seawater over long distances. The system that was chosen had never been used by the IDF, but facing pressure to get results, it went ahead with one small trial. The idea, some of the experts now say doubtfully, was that the soldiers would learn to pump the seawater into the tunnels on the fly.

As they went ahead with the plan, the IDF leadership got little information about how it was going in the field and what results it was producing. What did very quickly emerge was how difficult the system was to operate. Soldiers said it was cumbersome and demanding considerable human and other resources.

The investment in the seawater project was coming at the expense of deploying combat troops to fight the terrorists. "The brass' view was that if the terrorists die in the tunnels, great, and if they get out, the IDF will kill them in firefights," says a senior officer who played a significant part in the fighting. "In practice, neither happened."

The officer adds that at a pretty early stage, the army command realized that the pumps would not hold out for long and would quickly become useless. They used them one last time. "News stories started to appear, and journalists came to film the system," he recalls. "Between the lines, as I understand it, the idea was to scare the terrorists into leaving [the tunnels]. In the area where I was, at least, it didn't work as hoped."

Under wraps
From the first days of the war, and in fact for weeks, the IDF tried to keep its operation under wraps, even though it was an open secret among the troops and the media, which refrained from reporting on it. Defense officials who spoke with Haaretz said the army understood from the get-go that flooding the tunnels where Israeli hostages might be held would subject it to severe criticism from the hostage families and the public in general.

The first report in the media of the flooding plan only came on December 5, 2023, and it was not in the Israel media but in The Wall Street Journal. In a long article that included interviews with top defense officials the Journal said that when Israel had shared the plan's details with the Americans the latter expressed concern about the hostages' lives. U.S. President Joe Biden was even quoted as saying that he didn't know for sure that there were no hostages being held in the tunnels, as Israel claimed at the time.

In any case, the Israeli media were more interested in something else: the IDF confirmed that seven soldiers had died in fighting in Gaza in just one day.

However, 10 days later, Biden's doubts were confirmed. The bodies of Corp. Nik Beizer and Sgt. Ron Sherman, who were kidnapped from their base October 7, and Elia Toledano, who was taken at the Nova party, were found in a network of tunnels where Hamas' North Gaza commander, Ahmed Randour, had been killed weeks earlier. An investigation determined that there is a high probability that the three, who had been confirmed as being taken alive to Gaza, were killed in IDF strikes. That showed that the IDF did not, in fact, know where the hostages were being held.

Twelve hours later another tragedy occurred. IDF troops accidentally killed three hostages   Yotam Haim, Samer Fuad El-Talalka and Alon Shamriz. "These two incidents fundamentally changed how the IDF related to hostages being held in Gaza," recalls a knowledgeable defense official. "Until then, they were regarded as the responsibility of Nitzan Alon, the army's pointman for missing people and prisoners, not that of division commanders, who wanted to move forward in battle quickly."

A senior officer, who was one of the project leaders, told Haaretz that there was cooperation with the authority overseeing the hostages, including information sharing. He said intelligence didn't have concrete information about the location of hostages in those tunnels. However, in retrospect it turned out that this puzzle had missing pieces.

The Atlantis system was revealed to the Israeli public, though not by name, on January 30. "It's a great idea," Chief of Staff Hertzl Halevi said at the time. The IDF spokesman's announcement was also replete with superlatives. "The system was put into use after professional and comprehensive staff work," it said, adding that it had been declared operational only after "battlefield testing, an accelerated force building effort was completed and troops were trained in the technology."

However, a paper prepared by a team of experts from the Water Authority casts doubt on those assertions. "In the meetings that took place with the army's Southern Command, it became apparent that no information had been collected that could be analyzed in order to reach any conclusions and insights," noted the experts, who were only later given the IDF findings. "As the project was being undertaken, it was reported that many sinkholes were created near the shafts where the discharge was being carried out."

In conclusion, the experts determined that "the operation was not carried out according to expert recommendations" and that they didn't know "how successfully the work was carried out."

In their paper, the Water Authority experts did cite some operational insights. Because the tunnels are so long, they wrote, the effect would be maximized by coordinating flooding operations with bombing runs. That, they said, is because heavy bombing before flooding could shift the ground and cause water loss. "The destructive effect is much greater in areas of highly saturated soil," they wrote.

However, the paper concluded that "the way the work was carried out and the failure to measure the results have not enabled us to assess the system's efficiency and limits our ability to reach conclusions about it." In the meantime, the army has nevertheless accepted the paper's conclusions and has ceased deploying Atlantic. The army may never know how effective it was, if at all, nor what damage it caused and to whom.

IDF response
In a written response, the IDF Spokesperson's Unit said: "The IDF and the defense establishment have invested great effort over the years in locating and developing tools to deal with Hamas' underground infrastructure. In the face of the challenge IDF forces encountered during operations in Gaza, the Atlantis program was developed, to flood tunnels by channeling water into them to neutralize them from use. Before the project became operational, test were conducted and all of the forces underwent specialized training.

The claim that there is a high probability that hostages were in the area where the Alantis program operated is incorrect. There are no indications that hostages were harmed during the operation; furthermore, the IDF does not attack in areas where there are indications of hostages being present. The accomplishment of the Atlantis program and the results of the activity cannot be made public. Even now, the IDF and the defense industries are acting to develop additional tools to address the underground site and to create additional solutions for accelerating the pace of operations in this area."

Quoted:
Unleash the bees.

Quoted:
Should have filled them with flammable gas and ignited them

Quoted:

Or at least a couple thousand of these--I got bit by one as a kid, they are no joke.  They'll get anyone who survives the bees.

https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/501718/800px-Belostomatidae_HuntingtonVT_jpg-3277833.JPG

Quoted:
Unleash the bees.

Quoted:
Wierd. I was assured multiple times this was the way.

Quoted:
I guess Zyklon B would be out of the question.  Bayer would be a good source to exactly it was made.

Quoted:
Can some tldr this for some of us.

Quoted:
Should have filled them with flammable gas and ignited them

Quoted:The fuck is that ?

Quoted:

Or at least a couple thousand of these--I got bit by one as a kid, they are no joke.  They'll get anyone who survives the bees.

https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/501718/800px-Belostomatidae_HuntingtonVT_jpg-3277833.JPG

Quoted:
Or red ants.  Better yet gas.

Quoted:
Wierd. I was assured multiple times this was the way.

Quoted:
It worked for the Egyptians flooding tunnels.  

The tunnel design changed

Quoted:
They say something like 300 miles of tunnels. That's a lot of volume to fill with gas or flood.

Quoted:
I keep wondering why the IDF just didn't dig a deep trench from the Mediterranean to one or more tunnel Exits/Entrances.

Quoted:

I don’t know shit about tunnels, but some thoughts considering the “hundreds of kilometers of tunnels”:

1) If you write off the hostages, then that gives you some flexibility.  Since they thought the tunnels could be filled with water and drown everyone, it seems they had already written the hostages off.

2) Even if water could fill the tunnels and drown everyone inside, that seems like a lot of heavy lifting versus using a gas.

3) What gas is lethal in small concentrations and can be manufactured on site?  My understanding is that diesel engines run rich can produce up to 6% carbon monoxide.  So estimate the volume of diesel exhaust needed to get a lethal concentration of carbon monoxide.

Quoted:
I keep wondering why the IDF just didn't dig a deep trench from the Mediterranean to one or more tunnel Exits/Entrances.

Quoted:
Unleash the bees.