“Hamas are cowardly, you can’t even call them animals. The world needs to wake up.” Speaking after visiting Israel with a group of military experts, the army veteran known for heroic service in Iraq said UK forces should provide greater assistance to Israel.
“The British Army should be sending advisers – not boots on the ground, but advisers. We have certain skill sets that could be useful.” He criticised the UK’s recent partial arms sales suspension with Israel as “moronic”.
“We should be bolstering armaments,” the former sergeant added. “We should be standing alongside Israel because it comes back to Iran, which is the common denominator here. The West needs to recognise that Israel is fighting for all of us.”
Taken into Gaza last week with the Israel Defence Forces, Ryan toured the Philadelphi Corridor – the narrow strip between Gaza and Egypt that has become the focus of the Israel-Hamas negotiations.
“Israel has got to hold onto the route,” the decorated veteran said, adding that the mass of tunnels underneath it amount to “ten to 100 times the size of the London Underground”, and span Gaza. Stunned by the scale, he added, “The only way I can describe the tunnels is if you look at a plate of spaghetti and look at the strip of Gaza, [it is similar], there is layer upon layer of tunnels.
“As an ex-soldier, I didn’t realise the extent of the tunnel system and the depth they go down to, in some cases, it is 50 metres deep and you can have maybe four or five layers of tunnels on top of one another, which makes it a tactics nightmare to enter an area like that.”
He and other military figures were “gobsmacked” by their engineering sophistication and labyrinthine scale.
“You could drive a Humvee right into Egypt,” Ryan noted, referring to the weapon-smuggling tunnel route between Gaza and Egypt. The construction could not have been done without the knowledge of the local population, he said.
“You can’t do that sort of lifting or taking spoil without anybody knowing. “There was an Egyptian outpost right there, there was no way the Egyptians didn’t know there was a tunnel being built there.”
When addressing the military tactics associated with the tunnels, Ryan said Israel was fighting in the first war of its kind. “I’ve read about tunnels in Vietnam and the Second World War, but the difference is they were in a countryside setting and these tunnels are under buildings, so you have the problem of clearing the buildings.”
The network creates deadly ambush scenarios for Israeli forces.
“There are thousands of entry points above surface, so Hamas can pop up anywhere and ambush the troops,” Ryan said, adding that there were shafts into mosques, as well as “nearly every school, hospital, and government building”.
Once you get into the tunnel, Ryan said “you can’t go charging down, there are booby traps of all types”.
The network has made the IDF’s progress arduously slow in Gaza “because you’re looking for IEDs [improvised explosive devices], in some cases the tunnels are 5ft in height so you’re crouched over, and then as you go down a main route, there are branches going off to your left, right and further into the ground, so all of those tunnels have to be cleared before going forwards above ground.
“Not only are the guys clearing each house and building as they move forward, they are [also] underneath doing the same thing and it has to be coordinated. When the raiding parties on the surface do a hard stop, underneath the guys are playing catch up.” In one case, Ryan said, “the guys were going down the tunnel and there was a doorway and as they got to it, they looked above and there was an IED operated on a remote from the other side of the tunnel by Hamas terrorists”.
In another instance, soldiers saw “containers the size of a 45-gallon drum full of explosives linked into two or three others with a booby trap.
“The only way to clear that is to knock that building down.
“It is pretty shocking. The IDF are doing one hell of a job doing this. I don’t know anywhere in the world they have faced this kind of a problem.”
Ryan said this is why there are such devastating images of destruction coming out of Gaza – Hamas have left explosive devices in buildings for the IDF. The former sergeant achieved mythical status when he evaded capture by walking 190 miles across Iraq during the Gulf War – a feat he wrote about in The One That Got Away – but Hamas’s tunnel network was unlike anything he had seen on the battlefield.
“It is very claustrophobic, not every soldier will be able to handle it. The tunnels are horrible and cramped, and you’re looking for IEDs, as well as the enemy. If you’re engaging with the enemy, there are no blocks inside, you have no cover in the tunnels and there is the fear of explosions going off. Inside there is a shortage of air, it is dusty and smelly. If there is a place that is worse than hell then it is there.”
Recalling his time training SAS troops, Ryan said: “In the jungle, soldiers on selections became claustrophobic – some can’t handle seeing a green curtain in front of them. But you never know how these things will affect a soldier.” The IDF is developing tactics fighting in the tunnels which “the world will be learning from”, Ryan added.
He also saw evidence of Hamas decorating parts of the tunnel network – which has electricity and water supply – with fake grass and bedding. “Even rats make nests underground,” he said. In one room off a tunnel, Ryan saw a cage used to house hostages.
Deeply sceptical of the casualty figures being printed in Western media, Ryan saw no evidence of genocide inside Gaza.
“The Israelis are doing everything in their power to minimise civilian casualties. They won’t open fire on anyone in civilian clothes.”
Ryan also remarked that the ratio of civilian casualties to combatants is very low in Gaza: “It is at mostly 1.4 to one and perhaps as low as one to one. In Mosul it was one to 68, in Fallujah it was one to 45.” The rate of Hamas combatants to civilians killed is “the gold standard”, he went on, citing several methods used by the IDF to tell civilians to leave the area, including the use of loudspeakers, flyovers and leaflets. “The figures of dead Palestinians are coming out of Iran… in this information war, ask yourself why we haven’t seen one dead Hamas fighter?”
Ryan is frustrated when the BBC repeats these Hamas figures. The information he received in Israel and Gaza was “completely different”.
“It hurts me every time I see a BBC news report when they say the numbers killed on October 7 and then get back to Gaza,” he added, suggesting that the bloodthirsty context of Hamas’s crimes is needed to understand the conflict. “If the world saw what Hamas did, I don’t think they would believe it.”
Ryan warned that Hamas’s tunnel warfare and the larger conflict should serve as a wake-up call for the West, drawing direct connections between Hamas and Iran.
“Hamas is Iran,” he said starkly. “And we’re next. Israel is fighting not just for its own survival, but for the future of the West.”
He called on the UK government to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Follow Chris Ryan on X/Twitter: @ChrisRyanMM
Chris Ryan visited Kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel where over 50 people were murdered and at least 20 were taken hostage to Gaza on October 7 (Photo courtesy of Ryan)[Missing Credit]