The IDF and Gaza's Border - 'We Spend Days and Nights in the Field Until We Find the Tunnel' by Yossi Yehoshua and Reuven Weiss - Ynet Magazine
Based in three trailers near the Gaza border, with advanced computers and technologies, is 'the lab': 10 soldiers—some of whom finished their physics degree in high school—who already found 15 terror tunnels, the latest neutralized this week; when the need arises, they go out to the field and under the ground; 'finding a tunnel is not a scavenger's hunt. It's a game of chest against Hamas,' says one…
… some two years after Operation Protective Edge, the IDF and the defense establishment were at a loss when trying to find ways to locate Hamas's tunnels, which crossed the border and got all the way to Israeli communities. The first project that was launched was the underground obstacle under the border fence, which will be completed next year. The second project, which was launched almost in tandem, was the "technological laboratory to locate tunnels," or, in short, "the lab."
"The idea began to take shape even before Protective Edge," says Col. Yaniv Avitan, the head of the Collection and Assault Unit in the Technological Division of the Ground Forces. "The first steps were made in February 2016, when we started concentrating the efforts to develop technological capabilities to locate tunnels. The beginning was difficult. Many were surprised and couldn't understand why the Ground Forces' Technological Division was dealing with tunnels. But despite the surprise, everyone very much wanted to find a solution, and so we got all of the tools and backing."
While they were working, they realized that to succeed in realizing the advantages of the technology, it wasn't enough to merely develop it from afar, it must be tested again and again in the field. This is how the "technological laboratory to locate tunnels" came to be—a small group of less than 10 soldiers, with Lavi being one of them, who may be part of the Technological Division, but were physically far away from there, at the Gaza Division's base, right on the strip's border.
This group was joined early on by the best minds recruited for this project from the Technion, the Weizmann Institute of Science and other universities, including geologists, physicists and mathematicians. The technological side was bolstered with the intelligence capabilities of the collection unit 8200 and other units from the Military Intelligence Directorate (MID) and the Shin Bet, as well as the operational capabilities of the Gaza Division…