Exclusive: Hamas 'spent months cutting through Gaza wall in secret operation'

The wall had already been sliced through before the explosions brought it down

The Times

An Update:

Some questions have been raised about the veracity of this story and the motivations behind publishing it in a Murdoch publication, and why was the Israeli intelligence blind to the prior cutting operation. I am a structural engineer, and looking at the photo of that steel wall lying down on its side with the bottom being a neat straight line, tells me that the failure was not a product of the explosions alone. I believe that large sections of it were cut (by a torch along a straight line) to weaken it. The explosions generated the pressure waves to knock the wall down.

In fact if you look closely at the fifth and sixth photos (from the top) in the post titled, Power of the People, you can clearly see that the steel wall was cut by a torch at about knee-height.

Bottom line: I think that the story is true. Why have the Israelis not detected the cutting operations? Just as VS said in his post, the Israeli intelligence has been way overrated.

"As tens of thousands of Palestinians clambered back and forth between the Gaza strip and Egypt today, details emerged of the audacious operation that brought down a hated border wall and handed the Islamist group Hamas what might be its greatest propaganda coup.

Hamas, which took control of the coastal territory last June after a stand-off with Fatah, has denied that its men set off the explosions that brought down as much as two-thirds of the 12-km wall in the early hours.

But a Hamas border guard interviewed by The Times at the border today admitted that the Islamist group was responsible and had been involved for months in slicing through the heavy metal wall using oxy-acetylene cutting torches.

That meant that when the explosive charges were set off in 17 different locations after midnight last night the 40ft wall came tumbling down, leaving it lying like a broken concertina down the middle of no-man's land as an estimated 350,000 Gazans flooded into Egypt......"