Did Israel really find a tunnel under al-Shifa hospital? With Jon Elmer and Ali Abunimah

first of all I just want to point out if we can go back to the map the the blue areas represent areas the Israelis have entered and on on paper which is what we're looking at that looks like a lot but I think I just want to emphasize the point I think I heard you making which is that just because the israelies are in those areas does not mean that they have secure control over them and from the perspective of the resistance they're not going to try to establish you know a traditional front line with trenches and say we're going to hold the Israelis here in a Guerilla War you you can't you actually can't stop the large conventional Army from invading and entering your territory nor would you try but then what you do is you harass them you Ambush them you come back behind behind them you come up behind their lines and you make it so that they can never relax for even a moment because they never know where the resistance is and some of the videos you talked about which again I I apologize to our audience that we're not showing them uh because of the censorship on this platform where when we have shown them on a previous occasion our entire episode was deleted afterwards and we want to keep it up for people to see but John you on your on your Twitter account you do post some of these videos is that correct so people can find them maybe we can put John's Twitter account up on the on the scroll at the bottom so that people can find them there and some of the videos we've seen just in the last few days include uh the on those occasions as we've been saying now for a couple of weeks the Israelis rarely if ever dare to get out of their tanks or armored vehicles but what we saw is that on occasions when they have they have been targeted very precisely and very lethally by either by Palestinian snipers marksmen using High powerered rifles at a distance and there was one video where an Israeli at least one Israeli soldier was clearly killed in in such a an operation and others where they have fired these thermobaric grenades that into buildings that destroy an entire room so that's one thing but now I think you're being very unfair to the Israelis John and I I need to push back a little bit because you said as usual yeah as usual John but you said that they've achieved nothing well uh ofir gendelman the Arabic language spokesperson for uh Benjamin Netanyahu put out a video I think also the Israeli Army put out the same video or or a version of it that that we're going to take a look at now and they're claiming uh that this is a tunnel near alifa hospital now remember of course that they claim that they uh that they claimed that there was this James Bond like multi-level command bunker under Al shifa which and they did this this this IM very imaginative animation of it uh at the end of October but let's look at what they say they found are we I think we're able to run that video might take a second here we go yeah so what we're seeing here I'm going to narrate it but tell me can you pause just for one sec before it goes down down the hole okay yeah so did you see the soldiers if we could go back you see the soldiers look to the left and watch the soldiers sitting there so this is tunnel this is tunnel exploration for the Israelis so there's four of them there playing on a joystick right driving drone so this is clearly a drone because people don't tend to fly like this so we can see because we're coming in from above like this from the that this is a drone and so let's let the video run and we're and we're going to go down we're going down this mysterious shaft we don't know what it is of course Israel say it's a resistance tunnel but as we know there's underground infrastructure in Gaza City just like in any other uh City so we've seen uh manholes and cable shafts and uh fuel tanks but this seems to be some kind of shaft going to the bottom and then so the Drone gets down it's got a light on it and then something mysterious is going to happen in a few seconds uh when we when we see uh the the Drone is looking around it's flying around it's looking up the shaft you know that seems like it's a spiral staircase or something not exactly sure uh but let's let's keep watching and then yeah it's looking around so far I don't see any I don't see or muhamed down there don't see uh too much going on down there but keep you know keep with it the suspense is very oh see what happened there uh Tamara can you go back a few seconds just a few seconds all right yeah watch this observe oh the video was edited and then let's let it run what happens let's keep going the video quality is now very different it's it's a sort of a little grinia but look suddenly this drone that we saw flying in has grown legs because you can clearly see that this is now a handheld camera uh and you can see that as the video runs uh it's moving from side to side as this drone magically grew legs and started walking through this tunnel so I think that's and then I think it gets to the end of the tunnel and they call that a blast door that's what the Israelis have put on there but and a firing hole that sounds very scary we don't know what it is uh and we don't know where this video is from what we can say is that it was that this video tweeted by offer gendleman is two pieces of video that have been edited together and in the first one it's very clear that it's taken from a drone Which flies and the second part is uh something that has legs whether it's the uh Yeti that you have up in Canada is that where the yeti lives or uh uh perhaps a dog that has been trained to walk on its hind legs or well they have they have dogs they send dogs we we did the fake dog video a couple of we also treated by offer gendleman but this didn't look like a dog a dog seems to me like it would have moved more rapidly but the point is this is this is what they are putting out as their evidence and uh so isn't that impressive to you John doesn't that look like an underground Disney Castle full of uh Hamas commanders and Rockets were you were you not the thing the thing that I noticed is that that's not underneath shifa so they they made it sound like there was a command center as if people were all going into shifa down into this layer and then all of a sudden they've cut out um on the far corner of the campus um something we we know the Israelis say that there's 1300 tunnels if you dig down in various spots in downtown um Gaza City you're presumably going to find a tunnel I think the thing that's interesting to me whether that video is fake or not um the the the things that stood out to me were that that's only 10 meters down and they lost control of whatever that was whether it was a robot the whether the Drone had the ability to have legs that could move because they do have robots that go down into these tunnels but they do not have flying robots that that then Sprout legs and walk through the that they definitely don't have we haven't seen those for sure seen those uh but just to emphasize one point that you you've we we've made previously and you've emphasized which is that they do not go down the tunnels they they have a standing order not to go down the tunnels and we saw in the first part of that video the soldiers sitting there on what looked like a picnic mat posing for the uh yeah playing with a joystick right playing with the joystick so that suggests to me that whatever that tunnel was with the mysterious creature on legs walking through it it it was from what we know where they haven't even said they've gone down tunnels like even the Israeli Army as far as I I've seen in their briefings have never said we sent people down a tunnel so this is again very I mean to me based on what we know and based on the fact that offer gendelman has lied so often is another fake and and as you say even if this was a tunnel it's not under the hospital and not a major Command Center at least you know anything and they're not going down into it so if that's where they're saying their people are okay so here's the things that I would see in that video we we without saying it's fake the things that are in that video that are significant to me that would be significant to all the 1300 tunnels that span 500 kilometers apparently under Gaza is that door that they showed with that thick heavy metal door with what they identified as a firing hole that's very much true there's doors all through the tunnel Network that are so thick that you have to breach them with significant Munitions and they also have firing positions which means like so imagine this view imagine this is you and then you show up on the door they pop open that firing hole and shoot you or or they rig the door so that when you try to blast it it blasts backwards on top of you and buries you so the Israelis have to first go down into the tunnel which they're not doing but then once they're down in the tunnel they have this extraordinary task of being in that tiny space that's barely wide enough for one person um and then they have to bring all their Munitions down there and we can see with whatever robot that is that they've sent down there at the end of this clip you can see it drops off the the footage drops off because they lose connection with that device see it it loses connection which makes sense because they can't just send their drones uh an unlimited number of meters down so when they see that firing hole Palestinians can defend themselves through that hole and then the Israelis have to figure out how they're going to breach that door that thick heavy metal door and they have to breach that door in such a way that they don't alert the fighters on the other side that they're coming that they don't blow it up too much that they blow up everything on top of them they can't really leave the tunnel to blow up the door because once they do that they've just cleared a path for the Palestinians to attack them and at each um I mean we don't know we haven't been in the tunnels but um you can imagine that they have those big heavy doors uh very often that that's a very important part of the defense of the tunnels is to have those thick doors which would also uh make it more complicated even more complicated if not impossible uh going back to a discussion we had a few weeks ago or what seems like a few weeks ago it may have been last week given how time stretches in this situation but uh about the idea of flooding or or flooding the tunnels with gas that yeah that it would be very hard even if those doors aren't airtight which I assume they're not it would still be very hard to get um significant volumes of whatever it is you wanted to pump down there uh and tunnels were built with that in mind right so when they're building the tunnel they're imagining somebody coming down in the tunnel what happens when they get here what happens when they get to XY Z place and they have preparations for each of those and so this idea that you're going to root out every fighter in Hamas and this is what you're saying up on the above ground level where you're massacring tens of thousands of civilians to actually fight them on the Underground Level it's a very very difficult task um it's possible that that was a dog that we saw but even sending dogs down they because the dogs need H Air at some point going down so then you have to put masks on the dogs and then they can't sniff as well and so the dogs aren't even a good solution all of your the Drone dropping out or whatever that was dropping out gives you a clue about how difficult Communications are they can't use their normal radios they can't use their normal uh communication tools but Kasam can because they have an internally wired system under there so they can communicate through the tunnels in the tunnels and the Israelis can't then the Israelis have to get enough people down there and enough explosives down there to explode that thick heavy door but not collapse the tunnel on top of themselves or trip a booby trap um which is another video that we saw last week we saw the Israelis tripping a booby trap um in B hananon that killed four of them because the tunnel entrances can be booby trapped and then ultimately when you get down to the final boss you know like in in the battle to to to get Yahya sinir um the the people in the tunnel have the capacity to just blow the tunnel up as a mass casualty situation and just take every Israeli with them and so there's a lot of very compelling military reasons why the Israelis are not going down into the tunnels and why because of that there can be no military success that doesn't that goes beyond killing um people and and evacuating a hospital and making people you know like Ahmed and and Yousef decide whether they their sick uh you know family members should go on the 10 kilometer um Death March those are the only successes that Israel can come up with because the fighters are under the ground in these tunnels that have been built for this fight that's what they're built for and the Israelis are up on the top sitting on the edge of the tunnel flying I mean I'll give them that that the Drone is impressive you could see the Drone hit hit the walls and not drop so it's some kind of uh it's not not a quadcopter it's not your regular drone or it would have crashed so they have fancy tools but once it gets to 10 meters they lost communication with that and the Israelis themselves say the tunnels are 65 meters deep and so it's just it's like it's not even close it's not even like they're almost there and that's why ofer gendleman putting out that video of the dog down there like it's just such a joke when you saw that fake video from a couple weeks ago and then you compare it to those soldiers you know sitting in a circle yeah looking like they're on a picnic mat but they also had four guys pointing their guns around to make sure that they weren't ambushed because it's it's resource intensive to carry out these operations around the tunnel you have to bring troops in you have to bring explosives in well it seems that they feel pretty safe around elifa hospital because the only people shooting guns around the hospital the Israeli themselves thanks for watching this video please subscribe to our YouTube channel hit like leave a comment these engagements help us with the YouTube algorithm and it helps us to get around Silicon Valley censorship as much as possible it does make a difference you can also support our journalism by going to electronic in.net and clicking on donate now thank you