Only a few hours after the IDF Spokesperson and the Sderot Municipality had announced that no tunnel digging activity leading from the Gaza Strip to the Negev community of Sderot, residents of Sderot on Thursday reported the noises of digging and clicking underground were back.
“It’s like a kind of echo, you feel that it’s distant, but you hear a hammer knocking,” a resident of Sderot described the phenomenon earlier in the week. “I’m really scared, I’m trying to believe it’s not really it, but it’s really scary.”
The IDF Spokesperson’s Office said in response to the new complaints: “After an investigation, no evidence were found indicating a tunnel near the city of Sderot. Every claim is being seriously investigated.”
Earlier on Thursday, the Sderot municipality announced that the army’s exploration of possible attack tunnels from the Gaza Strip to the city had yielded nothing.
“We reiterate that we thank the residents for their vigilance and that any inquiry on this issue is immediately passed on to the army and the police which investigate the allegations,” the municipality said in a statement.
“The IDF has completed erecting the barrier in front of Sderot, whose purpose is to identify the digging of tunnels toward the city, and therefore there is a high probability that had a tunnel been dug, the IDF’s technological means would have identified it,” the municipality said.
“It is important to note that five new residential neighborhoods are currently being built in Sderot, some of which are not far from the neighborhood where the residents who reported the noise are located,” the municipality added.
Sderot resident Chen Edri told Channel 2 News that “it sounds like a joke, it’s not possible that foreign workers would be working on Friday and Saturday nights, and for 40-minute periods and that’s it.”
She said she was very restless and cannot sleep well at night. “I am a mother of a two-year-old child and I have anxieties like all the other residents,” she continued. “The answers we received do not satisfy me and I don’t think it will satisfy any of the other residents.”
“I demand an in-depth examination that would provide a 100 percent complete answer as to where these noises are coming from,” Edri insisted.
“The municipality wrote us that these noises are caused by construction, but this is a hallucinatory explanation, and it makes no sense that the noise is heard both on Friday and Saturday and also in the middle of the night,” said Sderot resident Zohar Suissa Mordechai. “I really hope that they checked properly and didn’t just put down a check mark,” he said. “It’s very troubling and we hope they will verify there’s no danger and offer an explanation as to what’s causing it. Construction is not an acceptable explanation.”
Sderot resident Nir Vaknin told Channel 2 News: “I was not surprised by the IDF Spokesperson’s announcement that there were no tunnels and that there had been a ‘thorough investigation.’ It is delusional that the IDF treats the complaints of residents who hear the noise of digging by sending two scouts with flashlights to check whether there are tunnels in their area,” Vaknin said.
According to Vaknin, local residents find it hard to trust the IDF Spokesperson, Brigadier General Ronen Manelis, who has been “feeding the residents of Israel with nonsense every time, since taking office a year and a half ago. Just like the recent statements that the IDF would intensify the attacks on Gaza and an hour later there’s a cease-fire.”
“Here again, a few hours after we were told that there were no tunnels, the residents of the neighborhood again hear the sounds of digging and the pounding of a hammer,” Vaknin said.
Vaknin noted that “for three years, residents of the north have been warning about digging and the IDF depicted them in the media as hallucinating. Suddenly, after three years, those hallucinations turned out to be dozens of tunnels beneath their feet.”
Since the 2014 Gaza War, the IDF has located 15 Hamas tunnels that had been dug into Israeli territory. The residents of Israeli communities along the border had complained about digging noises and had been ignored by the IDF – which eventually discovered more than 30 tunnels.
Sderot has been the main target of the Hamas attack tunnel strategy, which envisioned a terrorist attack that would capture Israeli civilians as hostages, for negotiations of a prisoners’ exchange.