Israel warned Gaza's Hamas rulers on Thursday not to try to foil its
construction of a border wall designed to stop tunnels between the two
sides.
It said it had mapped militant emplacements hidden under civilian sites in
the Palestinian enclave that may be attacked in any new war.
The unusually detailed threat followed a rocket launch on Tuesday which
caused no damage in Israel and went unclaimed by Gazan groups. Israel responded
with an air strike on a Hamas facility on Wednesday that medics said wounded
seven people.
Such flare-ups have been relatively rare since the last Gaza war, in 2014,
with Hamas mostly holding fire and reining in smaller militant factions.
But with Gaza's poverty and political drift deepening, both sides worry
another conflict could erupt.
In September, Israel went public with a sensor-equipped underground wall
being planted on its side of the 37 mile- (60 km) long border, a counter-measure
developed after Hamas fighters used tunnels to blindside its troops during the
war.
Israeli media published new disclosures by the military on Thursday about the
project, costing $1.1 billion and to be completed within two years under an
accelerated schedule.
Israel has described it as a territorial counterpart to its Iron Dome
short-range rocket interceptor, capable of blunting Hamas's limited means of
challenging its superior armed forces.
"I think the other side will have to re-evaluate the situation in view of the
barrier's construction," Haaretz newspaper quoted the chief of Israel's southern
command, Major-General Eyal Zamir, as saying in the media briefing.
"If Hamas chooses to go to war over the barrier, it will be a worthy reason
(for Israel) to go to war over. But the barrier will be built."
The military also published aerial photographs and coordinates of two Gaza
buildings that it said Hamas was using as cover for tunnel networks. One of
these, it said, is a Hamas member's family home, linked to a mosque by a secret
passage.
"These two targets, as far as I'm concerned, are legitimate military targets,
and in the event that a new war begins, anybody in them is endangering himself,
his family, and the responsibility (for their wellbeing) will fall on Hamas,"
Zamir said in a separate briefing to foreign journalists.
Hamas did not immediately comment on the Israeli statements.
The Gaza border barrier will cut off any existing tunnels and, with its
sensors, detect any fresh digs, Israeli media said.
A new buffer zone within Israel's territory, dozens of meters (yards) in
width, will afford it extra time to respond by depriving Hamas tunnelers of
targets on the frontier.
Israeli media said on Thursday that the military also planned to build an
underwater barrier in the Mediterranean to prevent infiltration from Gaza by
sea. Hamas frogmen swam out to raid an Israeli army base up the coast during the
2014 war.
(REUTERS)