![\"(Photo](\"https:\/\/breaking911.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/HT_idf_hamas_tunnel_1_sk_140722_16x9_992.jpg\")
<\/a>JERUSALEM – The Israeli military announced Monday that its engineering corps had destroyed an offensive Hamas tunnel that stretched from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory.<\/p>\n
The tunnel reached 30 to 40 yards into Israel near a farming community in southern Israel. It was reinforced with pre-fabricated concrete slabs and had lights, communications lines and rail tracks used by the diggers to ferry the dirt out of the tunnel.<\/p>\n
Military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said the tunnel was the first one discovered since Israel’s 2014 summer war with the Islamist militant movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n
“The working assumption is that this is not the only tunnel penetrating into Israel, that there are others,” he said.<\/p>\n
During the 2014 war with Hamas, Israeli troops discovered and destroyed 32 tunnels around the Gaza periphery and said that 14 had penetrated into Israel.<\/p>\n
Hamas militants emerged from at least one such offensive tunnel during the war and attacked and killed Israeli soldiers.<\/p>\n
Residents of the Israeli communities along the Gaza perimeter fear that Hamas soldiers could emerge from the tunnels and kill civilians in their farms and towns.<\/p>\n
More than a dozen tunnel diggers working for Hamas have died in recent months in collapses underground.<\/p>\n
In Gaza on Monday, Hamas officials said that the Israelis had found an old tunnel no longer in use.<\/p>\n
Lerner disputed this.<\/p>\n