And both foreign aid and a complicit press helped make it all possible.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups invaded Israel, murdering 1,182 people, the majority of them civilians, in the most barbaric manner imaginable. Family members were tortured in front of one another, and babies were shot in cribs. The terrorists were proud of their handiwork, with many sharing footage of the massacre on social media. Hundreds were injured, and 251 people, both Israelis and foreign nationals, were kidnapped and taken to Gaza, where many were tortured, raped, starved, and, in many cases, murdered.

Oct. 7 was a paradigm shift in the Middle East and beyond. The assault was the largest invasion and organized mass killing by an Islamist terrorist group against a democracy in modern history. Adjusted for population, the massacre was more than 10 times the number killed by al Qaeda on 9/11. Indeed, it was the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. 

Iran and its proxies have long called for Israel’s destruction. Oct. 7 was but more proof that Tehran means what it says. History is clear: Genocidal dictators should be taken at their word. The massacre also illustrated the dangers of both complacency and wishful thinking. 

In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, which it had held since seizing it from Egypt during the 1967 Six-Day War. The George W. Bush administration, along with much of the West, had encouraged Israel to leave and for elections to be held. Yet, much to the surprise of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others, Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, won the elections, defeating Fatah, the movement that controls the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority, which rules much of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). 

To some, Gaza presented a chance for something that has never existed: a Palestinian Arab state. Since the 1930s, Palestinian Arab rulers have rejected numerous proposals for a state if it meant living in peace next to a Jewish state. Indeed, the 1990s Oslo Peace Process created the PA, only to collapse eventually with then-Fatah leader Yasser Arafat’s rejection of U.S. and Israeli offers for statehood in 2000 and 2001 and the subsequent yearslong campaign of suicide bombing and mass murder known as the Second Intifada. In some respects, Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005 amounted to the Jewish state throwing up its hands and saying, “Here you go; here’s your state.” Arafat, who died in 2004, had negotiated in bad faith — his widow and several advisers would later admit that he planned the Second Intifada while engaged in peace talks. By leaving Gaza, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and his successor Ehud Olmert, had hoped that some way, somehow, subsequent Palestinian leaders would choose peace.

Yet, left to their devices, Palestinians in Gaza voted for Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of Jewry. And Hamas was true to its word. Almost immediately after taking power, Hamas destroyed greenhouses and other infrastructure left by Israel and began launching rockets into the Jewish state, leading to the imposition of a blockade and other security measures designed to reduce the flow of arms to Gaza. Egypt would also initiate a blockade, more stringent on paper if not in practice, on the Gazan border. Hamas would use its new perch to plot and perpetrate attacks, leading to several wars between the terrorist organization and Israel in a little more than a decade.

In the years prior to Oct. 7, the Israeli security establishment pushed for a variety of concessions to Hamas. Some Israeli authorities believed that more work permits for Palestinians in Gaza and a greater inflow of aid and financial assistance would reduce tensions, allowing Israel to focus on Hezbollah, the comparatively larger Iranian proxy that de facto controls Lebanon. Peace and quiet could be bought, even if only temporarily. Not for the first or last time, it was believed that economic incentives could convert, or lessen, the genocidal ambitions of an inherently totalitarian ideology. The mistake was strategic as well.

Many in Israel viewed Gaza to the south as a separate theater of action from Lebanon to the north. Tehran, however, thought differently. Both Hamas and Hezbollah shared the same paymaster: Iran. And the Islamic Republic hoped to use both groups, along with other proxies in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, as a means to envelop Israel, snakelike, destroying it via a war of attrition while Tehran continued its decadeslong pursuit of nuclear weapons. While Hamas and Hezbollah are different groups with different histories, they share the same animating objectives: destroying Israel, toppling Arab monarchies, and ridding the Middle East of American influence.

While Israel, often encouraged by the United States, was taking a conciliatory stance toward Gaza, Hamas was preparing for war. And the terrorist group wasn’t above using foreign aid to fill its war chest.

According to some reports, Hamas began planning for “Al Aqsa Flood,” the group’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre, nearly a decade before the attack. Sources told the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that Hamas had conceived of the operation years in advance and even trained for it, only to be stymied by several wars between the terrorist organization and Israel Defense Forces during that time period. But it was only after one such conflict, 2021’s Operation Guardian of the Walls, that Hamas decided to go forward with its plans.

Hamas took extensive steps to maintain operational secrecy. Most operatives weren’t initially told of the planned invasion, and the terrorist group instituted several measures, including changes to its command and communications procedures, to prevent its plans from being revealed. Dozens of terrorists received specialized training from Iran in the weeks and months prior to the attack. Mock kibbutzes were constructed for practice, and terrorists were provided with detailed plans of Israeli border communities, including the names and ages of residents. No detail was too small — even pets were reportedly listed. Tragically, some of the targeted towns were filled with Israeli peace activists, including those who advocated more access for Palestinians in Gaza.

Notably, those who plotted “Al Aqsa Flood” knew that the “exceptional attack” would lead to a significant military response from Israel. On Oct. 6, five top Hamas leaders decided on the final date and time. As the Times of Israel reported, “It was only at this stage that many Hamas leaders inside and outside Gaza were briefed on the upcoming operation and told to go into hiding in line with the terror group’s usual security procedures during times of conflict.”

The so-called “Gaza metro” was key to Hamas’s operational plans.

As the New York Times reported, in 2019, the terrorist group even produced a handbook for its operatives, replete with “meticulous details” about “how to navigate in darkness, move stealthily beneath Gaza and fire automatic weapons in confined spaces for maximum lethality.” Hamas commanders were instructed to time “down to the second” how “long it took their fighters to move between various points underground.” 

John Spencer, an urban warfare scholar at the U.S. Military Academy, noted that prior to Oct. 7, it was thought that there were 300 miles of tunnels ranging from 15 feet to over 200 feet below the surface. But, he observed, “the estimates were wrong.”

As Spencer noted for West Point’s Modern War Institute in January 2024: “After three months of close combat and discovering over 1,500 tunnel shafts and underground passages, the IDF has learned enough to require the estimates to be revised. Israeli forces have unearthed massive invasion tunnels two and a half miles long, underground manufacturing plants, luxury tunnels with painted walls, tile floors, ceiling fans, and air conditioning, and a complex, layered labyrinth underneath all areas of Gaza. The new estimates say the network may include between 350 and 450 miles of tunnels, with close to 5,700 separate shafts descending into hell.”

And these estimates have been continually revised — and often only upward. The scope and scale of the tunnel system underneath Gaza defy belief. Hamas spent more than 15 years building the network, with estimated costs exceeding $1 billion. As Spencer observed, the sprawling expanse includes “blast doors, workshops, sleeping quarters, toilets, kitchens, and all the ventilation, electricity, and phone lines to support what amount to underground cities.” In fact, “as much as 6,000 tons of concrete and 1,800 tons of metals have been used in this subterranean construction.” Many of the tunnels are boobytrapped. 

The tunnels were built to house Hamas operatives and transport them, along with key munitions and weaponry, across Gaza and beyond. They were, and are, essential to protecting top terrorists and to hiding hostages. As Spencer noted, each Hamas company, battalion, and brigade had its own network of tunnels that factored into how they would move and fight.

In the 18 months since the attack, Hamas and its minions have murdered many of the hostages. Others have been returned via temporary ceasefire agreements. And some hostages have been rescued by daring IDF operations in Gaza. Notably, some of those rescued were found in aboveground dwellings, including in the homes of United Nations employees, teachers, and other Palestinians in Gaza who were being paid by the terrorist group to hold hostages. In one operation on June 8, 2024, elite Israeli forces rescued four Israeli hostages, three of whom were being held at the home of Abdallah Aljamal, a “reporter” with the Palestine Chronicle, registered in the U.S. as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. After the aboveground rescues, some have surmised that the remaining hostages are now more likely to be held underground in the Gaza tunnels. Getting them out won’t be easy.

Hamas’s tunnel holdings are considerable, representing something unseen in recent history. As Spencer noted, “The sheer size of Hamas’s underground networks may, once fully discovered, be beyond anything a modern military has ever faced.” Further, this might be the first war “in which a combatant has made its vast underground network a defining centerpiece of its overall political-military strategy.” Tunnels, he noted, were used extensively in the Vietnam War. And present-day China is believed to have an extensive underground network. However, these tunnels were built for a military advantage. By contrast, “for the first time in the history of tunnel warfare … Hamas has built a tunnel network to gain not just a military advantage, but a political advantage, as well.” 

Hamas has intentionally woven its vast tunnel network into the society on the surface. “Destroying the tunnels,” Spencer pointed out, “is virtually impossible without adversely impacting the population living in Gaza.” This is in keeping with Hamas’s strategic doctrine of weaponizing its own civilian population, callously using them as human shields. Hamas has employed this strategy to great effect. In both this conflict and in prior ones, the terrorist group has used hospitals, schools, and other civilian population centers to plot and launch attacks, often at other civilians — a double war crime. This provides the group with cover, literally and otherwise. 

Indeed, this tactic even predates Israel’s 1948 creation. In the 1930s, the Palestinian Arab leader Amin al Husseini, a future Nazi collaborator who launched a bloody uprising that targeted Jews and ruling British authorities, hid in Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to avoid arrest. Husseini and his henchmen also used mosques and schools to hide munitions. That mosque is what inspired the name of Hamas’s Oct. 7 operation.

As Douglas Feith, a former U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, observed at the war’s onset, Hamas has embarked upon a strategy of “human sacrifice.” In war, Feith noted, it is “unprecedented for a party to adopt a strategy to maximize civilian deaths on its own side.” Dead civilians are a win for Hamas, as they give the group leverage in the court of public opinion, constraining Israel’s response and allowing Hamas to live and fight another day. Indeed, this is precisely what Hamas has done. The Gaza metro is but an extension of this tactic. And it has impeded an Israeli victory, as the Jewish state has worked diligently to reduce civilian casualties against a foe that openly seeks a bloodbath, both of its own people and those it has targeted for genocide.

In January 2025, Yoni Ben-Menachem of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs said there was “an estimated 40% of the tunnels still remaining, hundreds of kilometers of tunnels that Israeli intelligence was [previously] not aware of.” He added: “There are still very long tunnels that Israel has yet to have located, some of them with hostages inside. This requires a very big operation and a massive amount of explosives that Israel currently does not possess.”

The IDF has tried a variety of methods to destroy the tunnels, including flooding portions of them with seawater. The results have been mixed. Liquid TNT, sewage, and liquid cement are also options albeit with their own drawbacks. The Israeli military also has a special unit of engineers, the Yahalom Unit, which has spent decades trying to develop tactics and technology to address the problem. 

Israel has decimated Hamas, taking out key operatives and command centers. To the extent that Hamas has survived, it is because of both the tunnels and the terrorist group’s extensive propaganda efforts, which have been well received on college campuses and in many newsrooms.

The Gaza metro has been essential to not only the Oct. 7 massacre but also Hamas’s ability to continue murdering Israelis and its own people. And not only was it years in the making, but foreign aid — often earmarked for developing Gaza, not Hamas — made it happen. 

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were Hamas’s terrorist tunnels.

After the 2012 and 2014 wars against Israel, Hamas diverted aid meant to rebuild Gaza to building the Gaza metro. In 2014, the Times of Israel noted that “some of the cement and other materials being delivered to the coastal Palestinian territory, as part of an international rebuilding effort, has been diverted to the tunnels.” 

HOW HAMAS INVENTED A NEW WAR CRIME 

Some Israeli officials raised alarms. But the U.S. and others in the international community pushed for unfettered aid, often bristling at restrictions. As longtime U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross noted in an August 2014 op-ed: “At times, 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. They countered that Hamas would misuse it, and they were right.”

Many news outlets, then and now, portrayed these legitimate Israeli concerns as purely punitive in nature or the result of paranoia. They were wrong. In Gaza, real-life monsters lurked beneath, while much of the world was either complacent or complicit. Gaza’s metro shows the tremendous lengths to which antisemites will go to murder Jews, burrowing under and subverting their societies in the process. 

Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.