MARTIN: There’s a report that the military was using artificial intelligence to try to map these tunnels. Do you have any sense of how that would work?

AL-SIRHID: I mean, I know that they’re using AI to make their bombing maps. That’s what I read about. I am skeptical of any claim of technology being developed to find tunnels. Because, listen, tunnels have been everywhere. There’s tunnels at the U.S.-Mexico border. There’s no technology to detect them. There’s tunnels at the DMZ between North and South Korea. Tunnels were used in the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam during the American war.

I’ve had a Google alert for over 10 years for any time tunnels come in the news, and every couple of months or so, a new city discovers tunnels underneath them. So all this to say that tunnels are literally underground and secretive. Anybody who claims to have any accurate information about the current tunnel system will be not telling you the truth. I don’t know where they are. Ordinary Gazans don’t know where they are. So the tunnels that are being used now as combat tunnels are deeply, deeply secretive.

MARTIN: That was the Palestinian American scholar and writer who publishes under the pen name Bint al-Sirhid.

  • mkulima@baraza.africa
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    11 months ago

    The internet sees censorship as failure and routes around it. People treat censorship and surveillance as failure and tunnel around them.

  • Doorbook@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I hate the timing of these news. These news to some degree justify the attack the Israeli doing. Similar to “who bomb the hospital” which is a discussion with no value …

    There is a crisis in Gaza, kids dying for lack of food, people cannot sleep, rain and cold temperatures is creeping in, no homes nor shelter, no clean water, more hospital getting bombed and the continues killing, arrest, humiliating which is bluntly consider war crimes …

    News should focus on casefire protest and pressing leaders of why the are afraid to say it loudly when they were breaching the world against Putin…

    • Mwalimu@baraza.africaOP
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      11 months ago

      The article itself focuses on a Palestinian who has gon ethrough the whole wringer for decades. It is not a distraction, at least that is not the intention. It is a deeper look into history to locate what today feels like new stuff for the world yet this is how “Gaza breathes”, away from Hamas and ISIS and Israel.

    • NoneOfUrBusiness@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      These news to some degree justify the attack the Israeli doing.

      How so? It explains the role of the tunnels in Gazans’ lives, which I think counters the popular idea that they’re a malicious tool for terrorism.

  • beatensoup@baraza.africa
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    11 months ago

    I wonder how tough or easy it was for Egypt to destroy the tunnels. Or how fast they started breathing again. How do the people create anti-flooding systems in there? Complex but very interesting topic.

    • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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      11 months ago

      At 550mm annual precipitation, they probably don’t need to worry about flood. It’s barely twice the max amount of precipitation a desert could get.