IDF Destroys Nearly Mile-Long Hamas Tunnel Route in Northern Gaza, a Year Into the Ceasefire

Israeli troops have found and destroyed a Hamas tunnel route about 1.5 kilometers long in the northern Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces announced Oct. 6, 2026. That is nearly a mile of underground terror infrastructure, discovered in ground the IDF still holds under the ceasefire, and it is one more piece of evidence that Hamas never stopped thinking of Gaza’s underground as its real battlefield.

According to the IDF, the work was carried out by troops of the Northern Brigade, operating under the 99th Division, together with engineering forces from Southern Command. The route ran east of the Yellow Line, the boundary that marks where Israeli forces pulled back to under the first phase of the ceasefire.

What the IDF found

The tunnel route sat in territory that came under Israeli control when the Yellow Line was recently expanded. The IDF said that expansion was driven by operational needs, to protect its forces and Israeli communities, and JFeed reported that the tunnel route itself was a central consideration in extending control over the area.

Some of the underground infrastructure in the sector was already known to the IDF, the military said. Once the line moved and troops gained access, engineers went in and took the route down in sections, causing significant damage to the tunnel and the area around it, JFeed reported.

The military framed the operation as consistent with the truce. Its troops, it said, are operating “in accordance with the ceasefire agreement” and “will continue to operate to remove any immediate threat,” according to Israel National News.

The IDF’s assessment of what comes next was just as plain. According to JFeed, the defense establishment believes “the underground will continue to serve Hamas as an operational tool.” To find what is left, the military says it is relying on intelligence and technology, including systematic drilling along the Yellow Line.

Not an isolated find

This is not the first tunnel the IDF has taken down since the guns mostly went quiet. The ceasefire under President Trump’s Gaza plan took effect on Oct. 10, 2025, leaving Israeli forces in control of just over half of the Strip, according to NBC News. Since then, troops on the Israeli side of that line have been quietly clearing what Hamas left beneath it.

In early September 2026, the IDF said its troops had disabled more than 26 kilometers of underground terror tunnels east of the Yellow Line since the ceasefire began, including a tunnel about one kilometer long dismantled in the weeks before that announcement, Israel National News reported. The new 1.5-kilometer route comes on top of that total.

Twenty-six kilometers is roughly 16 miles. That is not a stray bunker or a smuggling hole. It is a network, and it was still there, still intact, three years after Hamas launched the October 7, 2023, massacre and long after the world was told the war in Gaza was winding down.

The scale of the problem was clear from the start of the truce. In October 2025, as the 99th Division wrapped up a four-month operation in northern Gaza, The Jerusalem Post reported that Defense Minister Israel Katz had said more than 60 percent of Hamas’s tunnels remained undestroyed, on both sides of the Yellow Line. That same division, the IDF said at the time, had killed hundreds of terrorists, including five Hamas battalion commanders, and dismantled more than a kilometer of tunnel routes during that mission alone.

Why the tunnels matter

Hamas’s tunnels have never been civilian infrastructure. They are the backbone of the group’s military strategy: a way to move fighters and weapons out of sight, to stage attacks and to survive Israeli strikes while the people of Gaza live above them. A ceasefire that leaves that network in place leaves Hamas’s ability to fight in place too.

That is the core issue in the next phase of the Trump plan. Further Israeli withdrawal is tied to Hamas disarming, and as NBC News reported, there have been serious doubts from the start about whether Hamas would ever disarm as the deal requires. An Israeli researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, Kobi Michael, put the logic simply: “If Hamas complies, there will be no ‘yellow line.'”

Every kilometer of tunnel the IDF collapses is a kilometer Hamas cannot use to rearm, hide commanders or launch the next attack. It is slow, dangerous engineering work that rarely makes headlines. But it is exactly what a responsible military does when the enemy across the line has never renounced its goal.

The ceasefire Hamas keeps testing

Critics of Israel tend to treat any IDF activity in Gaza as a threat to the truce. The opposite is true. The ceasefire left Israeli troops deployed along the Yellow Line precisely so they could keep the area secure. Clearing tunnels in territory Israel holds is not an escalation; it is the job.

The real threat to the ceasefire is the one Israel keeps digging up: a terror group that, by the IDF’s own assessment, still sees the underground as its operational tool. A year into the truce, Israel is not waiting for Hamas to keep its promises. It is making sure Hamas cannot break them from below.

A ceasefire silenced the guns, but it never stopped Hamas from digging, and Israel is right to keep filling those holes one kilometer at a time.

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