Israelis hear drilling, feel shaking amid West Bank terror tunnel fears

Residents of Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal, a town of about 9,000 in Israel’s Sharon region, have told authorities in recent weeks that they feel “shaking and drilling and excavation noises” in their homes at night. 

The town is located near the Green Line, only about 800 meters from Kalkilya in the West Bank, which is governed by the Palestinian Authority. Residents are concerned that they are hearing the excavations of tunnels of the sort used by Hamas to attack Israel in the South and Hezbollah to attack Israel in the North. 

“I felt like there was an earthquake far off like the bed I was lying on was moving and sailing,” said Baruch Ben Neria, a resident who reported his experience to the authorities. “I’m not making it up,” he said. “I’ve been feeling this for the last two years, and sometimes it lasts for minutes in the middle of the night. There’s quiet outside, and then suddenly, it happens.

“At first, I thought it might be heavy trucks passing on the road,” said Ben Neria, “but there weren’t any trucks in the middle of the night.”

“Kalkilya is a straight line from here, close by, they can dig to us from there,” he continued. “My house is something like 200 meters from the fence. After what happened in Gaza, and the fact that they found tunnels in the Galilee in the past– which is a really rocky terrain, similar to what we have here– the whole story raises a big question mark.”

Another resident of the town shared a video recording of the sound in a Facebook group for locals, several of whom say they’ve heard similar noises themselves. 

An investigation is forthcoming 

Yuval Arad, head of the town’s regional council, said that an investigation has not yet been made to rule out the existence of tunnels, but the Ephraim Brigade has been referred to the issue and is expected to investigate it. 

“Any strange sound we hear could sound to us like digging tunnels,” Arad said. “On this issue, I believe the army will act, it is investing great efforts into it precisely because of the strategic threat of an infiltration that a fence won’t stop.”

“If they enter from here,” Arad said, “it is into the soft underbelly of Israel. A horror story like what we saw on October 7 would be just the beginning of what we would see here, too.”

The reports mirror similar concerns from residents of Bat Hefer, a community of about 5,000 located nearby. “We have a fairly large group of people who hear it in several places here,” said Matan Buchner, a local. “The last time I heard these drilling noises was last Thursday night.”

Buchner took aim at the claims used to minimize residents' concerns: “All the stories we are told here,” he said, “that the soil in northern Samaria is very difficult to dig in, it’s one big lie. Our ancestors already dug cisterns and secret tunnels here, using the tools they had back then. Now you can’t dig here?”

Following the complaints in Bat Hefer, which sits only about 800 meters from the West Bank city of Tulkarm, a terror hotspot that sees frequent IDF operations, three tests were carried out by a company specializing in the field, as well as the Home Front Command and the Defense Ministry. These tests did not provide any evidence of the presence of tunnels, but further investigations are expected in the coming days by a specialized military engineering unit and a soil testing team from the Geophysical Institute. 

Although the tests carried out in Bat Hefer found no signs of tunnels, residents from the locality are still worried. They explained that localities on the border with Lebanon had reported these sounds for years before their existence was finally revealed in a 2018 operation. 

“The IDF is taking a serious look and listening to residents’ reports,” the IDF said. “The security forces conducted scans…that did not produce findings at this time, and the issue is under continuous monitoring.”