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.
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.