IDF took journalists on an alleged tour of the “tunnels under UNRWA”. This thread by Michael Kobs breaks it down for us and exposes why this is a lie.
In an elaborate campaign, the IDF presented its evidence that a HAMAS data center was found just below UNRWA HQ in Gaza City. They released a series of videos, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry wished good luck refuting this unbeatable evidence.
After the UNRWA HQ has been besieged for weeks, this new discovery is indeed somewhat surprising, especially since plenty of time has passed to prepare everything thoroughly. Finally, the IDF organized a tour for selected journalists to UNRWA HQ (31.512505° 34.444301°).
What they were presented with there in the courtyard was a hole. The IDF had drilled this hole to prove that a HAMAS data center was located just below UNRWA HQ. Drilled? So there was no entrance or exit through which one could have entered the tunnel from UNRWA HQ.
Journalists were also not allowed to enter the HAMAS data center through this hole. Instead, the journalists were shown a video and allowed to film the reflective screen of the Solo-Pro Mini-Cam with their mobile phones.
(Of course, everything had to be submitted to and approved by the Israeli military before any of it could be published.) Allegedly, a drone was lowered into the drilled hole. In fact, the SoloPro-MiniReel is a sanitary camera on a cable. So the camera wasn’t guided…
…through the data center by a drone, but by the hand of a soldier. Likely the unsuspecting journalists on the genocide PR tour were shown a video that had been recorded beforehand. And this video on a small reflective screen probably did not contain …
…the crucial transition from the drilled hole to the data center, nor did any of the videos released by Israel. These videos cut from a battery room directly to the interior view of the pipe without transition.
Of course, you also have to wonder how a several meters long steel pipe keeps its own weight floating in the air without touching the ground, so that a soldier can go somewhere from inside the pipe with the toilet camera. However…
It should be noted that so far there is no evidence that the hole drilled by the IDF leads anywhere except into the depths, and that the journalists were apparently only shown a prepared video.
From this video screening, the PR tour drove the journalists 350 meters north. There, the IDF had excavated a tremendous crater about 20 meters deep, at the bottom of which the entrance to a tunnel was found.
According to the IDF map, this entrance is located in the northern corner of the schoolyard of the UNRWA Al-Rimal school. The satellite image generously outlines an entire neighborhood as a school, while…
… GoogleEarth refers to the special school complex as “Al-Zaytoun Preparatory Boys School” (31.514629° 34.442629°). The Al Rimal School is adjacent to the northeast of it.
The crater is also not on the school grounds, but on a traffic island northwest of it, while the tunnel runs almost parallel to the school. The camera in the photo is looking in the direction of the UNRWA compound and it is obvious that the tunnel does not run in that direction. How the IDF knew that there was a tunnel 20m below the traffic island is a moot point. Why they had to dig an immense crater in weeks of preparation for the PR tour is just as much a mystery. Crucially, the tunnel does not lead towards the school and not towards UNRWA HQ.
Nor is there a straight line between the drilled hole and this traffic island that leads under the UNRWA HQ building.
In this context, it is interesting to listen to the exact wording of the German ARD Tagesschau (the major News program in Germany): https://tagesschau.de/newsticker/liveblog-nahost-samstag-106.html
In short, Sophie von der Tann (ARD Tagesschau) says the following:
1. the entrance was not on the school grounds
2. the IDF claims to be below the school
3. IDF claims Hamas uses schoolchildren as human shields
4. the IDF claims that there is a Hamas intelligence headquarters under UNRWA HQ
5. the ARD cannot verify it
6. UNRWA cannot comment on this, saying that they do not know anything about the tunnel. However, indications of tunnels have always been investigated.
Points 4 and 5 say that those PR tours for journalists apparently did not go through the tunnel to the alleged intelligence headquarters, but had to rely on the information provided by the IDF, as well as on the video from the toilet camera.
But where are they here, if not in the Hamas data center? We’ll get to that in a moment.
Point 3 is extremely questionable, since Hamas would only be endangered under the most severe war conditions at a depth of 20 meters, if at all. There will be no children in school during these times, so the human shield will not work if the worst comes to the worst.
So the IDF argument takes itself to the point of absurdity. Point 2 is an outright lie, as we noted above. And point 1 confirms that the satellite map published by the IDF is, to put it nicely, misleading.
The bright room with the cables on the right is probability just this fork in the road, which leads to the left into a closed room and to the right into a further tunnel.
If you try to find out where the 20-meter-deep tunnel entrance leads, the videos released by the IDF usually show a soldier climbing through a welded protective door. But that door isn’t there.
If you try to find out where the 20-meter-deep tunnel entrance leads, the videos released by the IDF usually show a soldier climbing through a welded protective door. But that door isn’t there.
In variant 3, another journalist climbs into the tunnel, follows it straight ahead and also arrives at a brighter place, but without cables on the right wall. And he didn’t have to climb through a protective door either.
After a cut in which the wall changes from the rough vertical pattern of the Hamas tunnel concrete elements into narrow horizontal lines, he suddenly finds himself in the battery room.
And this is the same battery room that the IDF allegedly entered through the drilled hole with the toilet camera, even in the same direction.
The bright room with the cables on the right is probability just this fork in the road, which leads to the left into a closed room and to the right into a further tunnel.
This means that this further tunnel probably runs under the road to the southwest and not at all to UNRWA HQ to the southeast.
Back to the question of where the journalist of the ARD Tagesschau apparently ended up because, as she says in the commentary, she did not see the alleged intelligence headquarters at the other end of the tunnel. So, where is she?
An impressive feature of the Hamas Intelligence Center is that there is no underground computer workstation. The only identifiable devices are a PC with a floppy drive and a Cisco 800 ISDN router from 2003. Also an empty CDR spindle and completely rusted keys in the “cleared out” safe. Is it possible that this safe was cleared out before 2005 during the age of floppy disks and ISDN?
On the other hand we have NAS storage devices that look like some older QNAP model and supports 4 to 6 hard drives. The QNAP company was only founded in 2004, which is why these devices are likely not there since the IDF withdraw from Gaza. So in the tunnel rooms we don’t have a usable desk with a computer, but we do have stuff from a different era, and on the other side we have solar converters and not-so-old storage devices.
In the same room, a bundle of three-phase cables as thick as a leg breaks through the ceiling. What should Hamas do with all that solar battery-backed three-phase power 20 meters underground? Running six server cabinets and a floppy computer? Isn’t it more likely that the surface is supplied with energy from here? Otherwise, UNRWA would need its own battery room (with solar converters if they had solar panels) to buffer their own servers. But we are led to believe that the UNRWA servers were in that room and have completely disappeared.
Is it the same hole or did the IDF drill two holes? Who knows? This doesn’t make the map around the school any more accurate. The fact is that all of the Hamas Intelligence Team apparently never drank coffee.
And it makes no sense to dig a “400 meter” tunnel only to meet a pipe with a few cables at the other end – a feat of engineering – while the “intelligence team” sits in the building above, so naturally that they have rusty weapons lying on the shelf there. But in the event of war, right now, for which all this was obviously built, no one uses the tunnels, the servers, the data, the underground café, the immense energy, not even the hidden weapons. Nothing makes any coherent sense.
Is the “data center” related to the battery room? Apparently not so narrow that both were flooded with mud, but they both have those somewhat old-fashioned dark doors.
Is that a cellar in front of the old-fashioned metal door or a typical Hamas tunnel? No, the metal door sits behind a 2 meter long arch way and then leads into a cross aisle with a higher ceiling. Similar to the coffee room? Maybe. Strangely, several people filmed the entrance to the coffee room but no one filmed the entrances to the data center and battery room. This is the furthest view I could find.
Are there other comparable things? Yes, namely aluminum doors on which the manufacturer’s protective film is still stuck, as if they were installed yesterday but not yet put into regular use. We saw that under Al Shifa as well. How does it fit floppy disks?
Also, we have the same (uninstalled) air conditioning in the 2 bed 2 toilet Tora Bora under Al Shifa and Aric Toler (NYT/Bellingcat) didn’t find out anything with all the “confidential material provided” that was not already known. He just left the end of the tunnel open, .where it definitely ends. (I consider it the good old Bellingcat style. Maybe the Tora Bora is behind all that sand? Maybe some Russians too?)
However, we find the same air conditioning units in the supposedly emptied UNRWA server room, as well as in the not emptied “HAMAS intelligence center” somewhere between UNRWA and Islamic University. And we find it in the mysterious video from another “Hamas data center”. What is absolutely astonishing, however, is the fact that no one is talking about this twin and the low-resolution video released on February 6th. https://datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/israels-idf-video-purports-to-show-underground-hamas-server-room/
It’s not the same data center because where you enter the low-res twin through a tunnel, there’s a wall in the other data center. And where the old-fashioned aluminum door is, there are what looks like two server cabinets on the wall in the low-res twin.
The low-res data center has 11-13 server cabinets, white and black, the other has 6-7 black ones. However, only one 10TB hard drive was found in the low-res data center and it was found as accurately as a hand grenade in an incubator or a mortar grenade on the office shelf. The wall color is different and the pattern of the ceiling tiles. But why the silence? Why no press tour? Why no excavated crater and no drilled holes? And why doesn’t Hamas use and defend all this deeply hidden stuff? Why are there no free entrances and emergency exits, no weapons, no gas masks, no blood, no dead or wounded soldiers in a heroic battle to take a tunnel inch by inch? IMO, because it is a genocidal hoax using those tunnels the IDF knows about since 2005 and sealed them back then.
How do solar converters fit into this? That probably doesn’t matter at all, because there’s nothing down there that suggests military use except scooters for the disabled in front of hastily pasted Hamas posters.
Take a coffee break in the kittchen room and think again instead of staring at the cables! Ask yourself why the IDF predicts a huge could of smoke next to the Islamic University and btw another one north of the boys school.
Conclusion:
1. Toilet camera shows a hole in UNRWA building that goes nowhere
2. Actual tunnel shown to press goes in a different direction from UNRWA
3. Video of data center is just UNRWA’s
4. Hamas “HQ” is basically edited footage from different place and time