Media outlets, including The Times of Israel, were given a tour of several of the facilities on Monday, from an underground rocket engine production lab to a warehouse where the body tubes of the projectiles were built, to a storage facility.
All of the sites were located within the vicinity of Salah a-Din, which had been declared by the IDF as a humanitarian route for Palestinians to flee from northern Gaza to its south during the early stages of the war.
Around a dozen tunnel entrances were found in the area, along with the headquarters of Hamas’s al-Bureij Battalion, which Vollozinsky’s forces recently captured.
Inside a seemingly unremarkable building in the area, the soldiers found what appeared to be a waiting room with couches and a bathroom, and in the next room was a staircase leading down into a tunnel. Inside the tunnel, which goes down some 20 meters, forces found a large chemicals lab used to manufacture explosives and rocket engines, according to Vollozinsky.
Pointing to a bag containing a chemical used by Hamas to manufacture rocket fuel, Vollozinsky said troops found hundreds of similar bags inside the underground lab, where Hamas made “a lot of explosives for the rockets for flight into Israel.”
He said that the underground lab also led to the other tunnels they had discovered in the area, and that the site was likely built over several years. “To build such a factory takes a lot of time; [Hamas] managed to maintain this achievement for a long time,” Vollozinsky said. Asked whether the IDF had intelligence on the site before the ground operation, Vollozinsky told The Times of Israel that forces had information about the general area, but not the exact location.
