The long and bloody history of tunnel warfare

Tunnel fighting has always been a problem. As Israel battles in Gaza against some 5,000 Hamas fighters embedded in buildings, ruins and 300 miles of tunnel, it seems an appropriate moment to look at the history of tunnel warfare and its difficulties.    

Jewish history is not unfamiliar with the fighting of defensive wars in tunnels. In the third leg of the Roman-Jewish war, known as the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Jewish rebels built an extensive network of tunnels in greater Judea. To date archaeologists have unearthed underground hideout systems in 140 Jewish villages. Eventually, after four years of fierce fighting and the sending of Roman legions from as far away as Galicia, the Jewish resistance was smoked out of its hideouts. 

The Roman historian Lucius Cassius Dio, in book 69 of his History of Rome, wrote,   

‘Nine hundred and eighty-five of their [Judea’s] most famous villages were razed to the ground. 580,000 men were slain in the various raids and battles…Thus nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate.