Hamas's Underground Tunnel

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

The Palestinian self-rule Authority announced that it had discovered a Hamas tunnel in the village of Awarta, south of Nablus — a village that constantly suffers from the dominance and the assaults of the settlers of the Yitzhar settlement. The Authority published photographs of this tunnel, and said it had been prepared for a coup against the Authority, in order to establish Sharon’s plan on the land occupied in 1967, in place of the national project.

I examined the photographs closely, and tried to understand how Hamas could possibly use this tunnel — located in a village near a settlement and near Zionist army camps — to carry out a coup in Ramallah. I studied it at length, and tried to draw on the intelligence of others to uncover the secret of the coup, and I found none. My conclusion was that there are people within the Authority working to make fools of people, to treat them like donkeys, or to exploit their credulity, so that they will believe this story.

…the Palestinian national [project], unaware that whoever believed him some twenty years ago has since washed his hands of every word and claim he made, and that the saying itself has become an object of ridicule.

My assessment, quite simply, is that if the story about the tunnel is true, and a group from Hamas has indeed confessed to digging and preparing it, then it cannot possibly be part of a coup attempt. It is quite likely that Hamas is preparing a place like this to abduct soldiers or settlers for the purpose of a prisoner exchange, and a place of this kind is well suited to such an operation given the security conditions in the West Bank. To my knowledge, the Palestinian Authority had previously destroyed a tunnel prepared for a similar purpose in the al-Joura area of Hebron.

My conviction is that the matter has to do with the Oslo Accords and everything derived from them, and with the Zionist security requirements set out in those agreements — nothing more. And I say from the outset: there is no trusting whatever you publish about the interrogation of the group’s members, nor what any of them says on television. You are simply meeting Israel’s security requirements at the expense of the Palestinian people.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “سرداب حماس” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.