Stories of Wounded Hamas Fighter

Two broken legs and a dead brother are not enough to give Abdullah cause to think twice about his line of work: a fighter in the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas.
A fresh-faced 23-year-old, Abdullah – as he asks to be called – lies on sheets speckled with blood, his two legs stretched before him in casts with pins at Kamal Edwan Hospital, north of Gaza City.

“There is no need for an answer,” Abdullah tells the FT when asked whether he will fight again. “For sure I will fight again. And when I recover, I want to get married and have babies so that they can become Palestinian fighters like me and continue down the same track,” he says, adding that he joined the Brigades when he was still a child.

“We are fighting those people who are occupying our land. We want to send them a message that we will never forget the Al-Aqsa mosque,” he says, referring to the Jerusalem shrine, the third most revered by Muslims. “Those Palestinian women and children who were killed, they were not killed in vain.”

Abdullah is one of the foot soldiers that make up Hamas’s military brigade, believed to contain up to 15,000 fighters. Abdullah was injured while helping Hamas fighters launch rockets – only helping, he insists – from the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, when he was hit by a missile from an Israeli drone.

Another Hamas fighter, who calls himself Abu Mohammad, is similarly defiant. “Israel did not achieve any of its goals. Israel did not weaken the power of Hamas,” he says. “Israel did not hurt Hamas much because most of the people they killed were civilians,” he says.

He explains that he works as a state policeman by day, and as a Hamas fighter by night. After five years of training, he says he knows how to do “everything” from run-of-the mill rocket launching to sniper shooting and organising ambushes.

Admitting that the price is high – his brother and several friends were killed – Abu Mohammad nevertheless says this is the price of Palestine.

“Hamas is an Islamic organisation planning for an Islamic renaissance,” he says, still wearing his police fatigues. “We are raising the flag that there is no god but Allah and that there is one holy land, and it is Hamas that will liberate it.”

Tunnel War History That Inspired Hamas

Afghanistan

Tora Bora Tunnel

Financed by the CIA and created by the mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Tora Bora complex contains miles of tunnels, bunkers and fortified caves. Close to the White Mountain range near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, the complex is where Osama bin Laden is believed to have hidden with 1,000 Taliban fighters. The caves and passages apparently have ventilation and power systems running on electric generators.

Gibraltar

The galleries

Inside the Rock of Gibraltar is a honeycomb of tunnels known as the galleries. The first passages were built during the great siege in 1779-1783, when Spanish troops attacked the Rock. Soldiers from the garrison dug through the stone to a promontory on the north face, which allowed them to fire on the Spanish below. In total, 304m of halls, passages and openings were created. More tunnels were added during the second world war when the British feared Gibraltar would be attacked. The tunnel system was expanded and the rock became a keystone in the defence of shipping routes to the Mediterranean.

Bosnia

Sarajevo tunnel

In 1993, citizens in Sarajevo began constructing a 1.5m high, 800m long underground passage. Their city was under siege from Serbian forces and the tunnel led to the UN-designated neutral area of Sarajevo airport. Bosnian volunteers worked in eight-hour shifts using picks and shovels to create a way for food, aid and weapons to come into the city, and people to escape. The tunnel was most famously used to transport the former Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic in his wheelchair out of the city.


Vietnam

Cu Chi and Vinh Moc tunnels

During the Vietnam war American soldiers came up against the Viet Cong's Cu Chi tunnels. This huge system of underground passages stretched from the Cambodian border in the west to the outskirts of Saigon, running below the jungles of Vietnam. Used to mount surprise attacks against US troops, the tiny tunnels led to subterranean rooms, some of which were big enough to be used as hospitals, arms stores and even theatres. The first passages were built during the 1948 war of independence with France to link villages. Later, the Viet Cong painstakingly expanded them by hand until they covered 250km. To attack the tunnels, the US created a volunteer force made up of soldiers small enough to fit down the passages. After negotiating hidden traps of sharpened bamboo spikes, they had to fight their enemy in the tunnels. The complex has now become a war memorial park.
Under the former demilitarised zone that ran between the communist north and capitalist south, lie the Vinh Moc tunnels. They were built to shelter people from the intense bombing of the area and included wells, kitchens, rooms for each family and spaces for healthcare. Around 60 families lived in them - and as many as 17 children were born inside.

Jersey

War tunnels

Created during the German occupation of the island in the second world war, these tunnels were built by more than 5,000 slave labourers brought to Jersey. Many of the Russians, Poles, Frenchmen and Spaniards died of malnutrition or disease. Originally constructed as an ammunition store and artillery barracks, the tunnels were later converted to a casualty clearing station as D-Day drew nearer.

Poland

Stalag Luft III

Immortalised in the film the Great Escape, Tom, Dick and Harry were the tunnels created by the prisoners of the Stalag Luft III camp in Poland. Work on the tunnels began in 1942 and during the night of March 24, 1944, 76 inmates managed to escape down a 101m tunnel. All but three of the men were recaptured; the Gestapo shot 50 and returned the remainder to captivity.

France

Catacombs

Organised in a section of Paris's vast network of subterranean tunnels, the catacombs were a tourist attraction in the early 19th century. This cemetery covers a portion of Paris' former mines near the Left Bank's Place Denfert-Rochereau. During the second world war, both Parisian members of the French resistance and German soldiers used the tunnels.

full article in guardian.co.uk images from tripandom.com