Russia warned Israel against carrying out its threat to flood the Gaza Strip tunnels with seawater, and said that this step would be a war crime, after announcing that Tel Aviv would establish a large system of pumps that could be used to flood the tunnels used by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) under the Strip in an attempt to expel its fighters. .

The American magazine Newsweek quoted Dmitry Polyansky, the Russian Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations, as saying - yesterday, Saturday - that Israel's tactic of flooding the tunnels threatens the water supply in the Strip, even if it may push Hamas fighters to leave them.

Polyansky added that flooding the tunnels would harm civilians in Gaza, noting that there was a possibility that there were civilians in the tunnels who fled to them for fear of indiscriminate Israeli bombing, especially since there was no other place they could take refuge in the Strip.

The Israeli military has not yet commented on the Russian warning, according to Newsweek.

It is noteworthy that over the past two months, Russia has condemned the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, and Russian President Vladimir Putin considered the Hamas operation on October 7 an example of the failure of the policy pursued by the United States in the Middle East.

The Wall Street Journal quoted American officials - last week - as saying that the Israeli army had completed placing at least 5 pumps approximately one kilometer north of the Beach refugee camp in Gaza, which can transport thousands of cubic meters of water per hour and flood the tunnels within. Weeks.

Previous reports also said that Israel is considering using "sponge bombs" to close resistance tunnels in the Gaza Strip.

In a previous interview with Newsweek magazine with an Israeli officer, he said that the Israeli army did not expect the tunnels to be so durable and advanced, noting that they had seen a lot of concrete, stairs, and intersections in the tunnels during the recent war on the Gaza Strip.

Israel has tried several times to destroy resistance tunnels in recent years by blowing them up or using bulldozers, and yet Hamas has managed to rebuild them each time.