Story here.
WTF?! Why a tunnel? The Palestinians are not plague carriers. Why not just a road, and a treaty guaranteeing Palestinians free passage across it?
You can shoot rockets and mortars off a road. You can also slip off it to carry out suicide bombings.
I think it’s an interesting idea, albeit probably unworkable. Just in case, I hereby dub it the “Palestunnel.”
Presumably because it’s a lot harder to keep people from leaving/sneaking onto a road and crossing into Israel. Hard to smuggle stuff out along the length of a tunnel.
“Good fences make good neighbors”?
For all the reasons mentioned above a road would come with many security measures built in. Check points, Israeli control.
It’s a long way to the trust needed to not have that.
Isn’t the current set of problems vaguely related to the fact that Hamas is digging tunnels already? Maybe their engineers have poor directional skills and the tunnels are really meant to be headed to the West Bank…
Maybe a series of tubes would be better ?
Why am I picturing a Bugs Bunny cartoon? Is there an Albuquerque in Gaza?
Barak’s proposal of a tunnel is part of his conception of a two-state solution. If that were achieved, wouldn’t the threat of terrorist violence by Palestinians be, if not eliminated, significantly reduced? So why a tunnel and not a road?
Two state solution or not, the Israelis have a 60-year history of their neighbours trying to kill them and blowing up their children in pizzerias. I think it’s understandable that any solution that will be politically viable in Israel will have to include security measures.
Unilateral backdown by Israel has not worked in the past.
BG, you seem to be working under the assumption that Palestinian statehood would end Palestinian aggression. No-one here believes that any more.
Well, I did see an elucidator post a while back in which he references a village (not sure if it’s in Gaza) called Al Buqurqah.
'Course, it was luci, so you never know.
Aside from the aforementioned security (no small matter), there would be logistical headaches avoided with a tunnel. What would happen where a road would meet existing Israeli roads and towns?
A road would also involve essentially giving more Israeli land (land not currently disputed) to Palestinians, as wherever the road was laid obviously wouldn’t be useful to Israel any more, and this would raise a lot of objections from the start.
then of course there is the whole issue of “pork barrel project politics”, which neither side wants to address
And you think Israelis would build above the Palestinian tunnel? What happens when militants decide to set off a huge bomb in the tunnel, directly beneath someone’s home/school/business/etc.?
I think both the idea and the name are unworkable. The first time a suicide bomber blows themselves up while in transit you’ll end up with a Palestunnel-in.
Enjoy,
Steven
Glancing at google maps, it doesn’t look like it would be that hard to find a route that would be fairly short (under 20 miles) and would mainly cut under farmland. And the length is fairly comparable to other long tunnels, and most of those go under water or mountains, and thus were presumably much harder to build.
Honestly it seems like a much more workable plan then giving the Palestinians a strip of the Nagev desert to build a road on or not letting them connect the territories at all, which are probably the only other two options.