There is no place on earth like Gaza. Everywhere you look, there are people.
Traders hawk produce on upturned plastic crates; old men lead donkeys through crowds, shopkeepers brew fresh coffee on iron stoves; and all around are children: running, playing, laughing and screaming.
How is life in Gaza?
Life here is relentless. People bellow at each other from apartment windows, file into mosques, argue in cafes and fire guns into the air when they marry.
Gaza is a strip of coastal land 25 miles long and, at its widest point, 7.5 miles across. It is home to around 2.3 million people, the majority of which are concentrated in small cities.
But beneath Gaza sprawls a 300 mile-long network of tunnels that criss-cross deep underground in all directions.
They form an entire subterranean world that is so vast it has been described as a ‘metro system’ – but one far larger than even the London or Paris undergrounds.
How Gaza tunnel looks like?
The recently released 85-year-old Israeli hostage Yocheved Lifshitz revealed that Hamas had hidden her and other hostages in a tunnel system that ‘looked like a spider web.
When I was last in Gaza in 2016, the influence of the tunnels was everywhere. Thousands of people have found work in them and tens of thousands more, from drivers to shopkeepers have benefitted from the money flowing into the Gazan economy from the work they provided.
But they were of course totally invisible. It is a disconcerting feeling, walking around with the knowledge that beneath your feet, a terrorist army is, smuggling goods, plotting attacks, and burrowing away, day and night.
The Israelis recently uncovered a tunnel exit on a beach in northern Israel – giving Hamas the ability to attack via the sea.
That the Jewish state’s intelligence service is still developing only a rudimentary cartography of the tunnels proves just how extensive, disorientating and complex the network really is.
They are everywhere, and they are lethal: The lifeblood of Hamas’s war against Israel.
The tunnels are a living, breathing force – and they need fuel and oxygen to function. One of the reasons Israel has been so reluctant to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza is its knowledge that Hamas is siphoning off badly-needed supplies to keep the tunnels operational.
