Katz said to tell visiting Vance 60% of Hamas tunnels haven’t been destroyed

Channel 12 reports, without citing any sources, that Defense Minister Israel Katz told US Vice President JD Vance during the latter’s visit earlier this week that 60 percent of Hamas’s tunnels across Gaza have not yet been destroyed.

The network speculates that half of those tunnels are located on the Israeli side of the Yellow Line, to which the IDF withdrew at the start of the ceasefire on October 10; that half of the tunnels will therefore be easier for Israel to neutralize in the coming weeks and months.

The IDF earlier this year estimated that it had destroyed just 25% of Hamas’s tunnels across the entire Strip since the beginning of the war. However, the military argues that the main focus has been on Hamas’s attack tunnels and those used as command centers or for weapons manufacturing — the vast majority of which have been destroyed — rather than on the numerous tunnels that Hamas uses to move around the Strip, especially in areas where ground troops never operated.