Terror tunnels are back, and the world is silent

Last week’s deaths of seven Hamas terrorists in the collapse of a tunnel they were digging coincided with complaints by residents of an Israeli town near Gaza that underground digging has come so close to their homes that they have felt their floors shake.

Speaking on Israel Radio, the head of the Eshkol Regional Council, Gadi Yarkoni, said numerous residents of Moshav Pri Gan, adjacent to the Gaza border, have reported hearing the sounds of underground digging and felt the floors of their homes shaking.

What’s going on here? The Hamas terror tunnels were supposed to have been destroyed in the 2014 Gaza war. The Obama administration promised that safeguards would be in place to ensure that cement entering Gaza would be used for houses that were damaged in the fighting.

Thanks to former State Department official Dennis Ross, we now know what happened to all those U.S. promises. From 2009 to 2011, Ross served as a senior aide to then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton and as Middle East director on the National Security Council. During the 2014 Gaza war, Ross, writing on the op-ed page of the Washington Post in August, revealed some of what went on behind the scenes in the preceding years.

“I argued with Israeli leaders and security officials, telling them they needed to allow more construction materials, including cement, into Gaza so that housing, schools, and basic infrastructure could be built,” Ross disclosed. “They countered that Hamas would misuse it, and they were right.”

Assured by the Obama administration’s insistence that the cement would not be used, Israel allowed it to be imported. The result? Hamas built “a labyrinth of underground tunnels, bunkers, command posts and shelters for its leaders, fighters and rockets,” Ross wrote. They built them with “an estimated 600,000 tons of cement,” some of which was “diverted from construction materials allowed into Gaza.”