Eyeless in Gaza

Isabel Kershner has an article in The New York Times about the latest find in (technically, under) Gaza:

The Israeli military announced that it had discovered an underground tunnel leading from Gaza (near Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha, just outside the southern Gaza Strip) into Israel that it said could have been used for an attack against Israeli soldiers or civilians. In response to the discovery, the military said it had suspended the flow of building materials to the private sector in Gaza, a Palestinian coastal enclave.
Major General Sami Turjeman, the Southern Command chief, said the freeze was ordered because Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, was using construction materials approved by Israel for civilian purposes to build tunnels like the one discovered recently. Officials said Israel would continue to allow the transfer of construction materials for projects overseen by international organizations.
Military officials said the tunnel was about a mile long and was built at a depth of nearly sixty feet. They added that it had probably been constructed more than a year ago, and was discovered last week. It was the third such tunnel discovered this year, they said.
The mouth of the tunnel is near Ein Hashlosha, an Israeli communal farm near the border with Gaza. In 2006, Hamas and other militant groups used a smuggling tunnel for a cross-border raid in which they killed two Israeli soldiers and seized a third, Gilad Shalit, who was whisked into Gaza and held captive for five years before being released in a prisoner exchange.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the security forces in remarks at the beginning of his weekly cabinet meeting. “This is part of our policy— an aggressive policy against terrorism, including preventive action, intelligence, initiated action, responsive action and, of course, Operation Pillar of Defense,” Netanyahu said, referring to a military offensive in Gaza in November of 2012 that Israel said was aimed at halting rocket fire from Gaza against southern Israel. As a result of these measures, he said, Israel had enjoyed its quietest year in more than a decade, although he also pointed to what he said was a rise in terrorist actions in recent weeks.
Hamas has largely observed an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire with Israel that ended the fighting in November of 2012.
But the discovery of the tunnel east of Gaza was portrayed locally by Hamas as evidence that it had not dropped armed resistance and that it continued to prepare for the next round of fighting against Israel.
A spokesman for Hamas’ military wing, who goes by the nom de guerre of abu Obaida, said: “The determination that rests in the minds and hearts of the resistance fighters is more important than tunnels dug in the mud; out of the first, you can make thousands of the second.”
Over the past month, two Israeli soldiers were killed by Palestinians in the West Bank, and a nine-year-old girl was lightly wounded in a shooting outside her home in a West Bank settlement. Recently, an Israeli man was bludgeoned to death in an isolated area of the West Bank’s Jordan Valley. The Shin Bet security agency said that, with the help of the military and the police, it had arrested three Palestinians from the Hebron area on suspicion of involvement in the killing. It said that two of the suspects, one eighteen and the other twenty-one, had confessed to carrying out the killing, and that it was investigating whether it was an act of terrorism or a criminal attack.

Rico says it's hard to distinguish between terrorist and criminal acts...