Maj. Gen. Yoav 'Poli' Mordechai, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, warned Thursday night that Hamas operatives were digging terrorist tunnels.
Gen. Mordechai wrote on his Facebook page in Arabic: "All that Hamas' people will find in the tunnels is death. That is what happened to the Hamas activist, 27-year-old Khalil al-Damyati, after a tunnel he was in mysteriously collapsed today in western Gaza City. In the past two years, 27 tunnels have collapsed and at least 30 Hamas operatives have been killed in those collapses in the Gaza Strip."
"It seems that Hamas does not care about its operatives and is sending them to die in the tunnels it digs," Mordechai wrote, "Anyone who enters the Hamas tunnels will have no future or light at the end of the tunnel - only death."
Channel 2 News reported earlier that after Israel further reduced electricity supplies to the Gaza Strip at the request of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas' distress caused the organization to shift large portions of its budget to the civilian infrastructure and to transfer less money to its military wing.
Some of the budget Hamas had initially planned to use to dig tunnels to infiltrate into Israel have been diverted to maintaining electricity in Gaza. The cost of electricity consumption in Gaza is estimated at NIS 40 million a month, and Israel offsets this amount from funds paid by the PA.