Poland has claimed that Russia is orchestrating a Hamas-style tunnel operation in Belarus to send illegal migrants into Europe and destabilise the West.
According to Polish authorities, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has brought in tunnel builders from the Middle East with “a high level of expertise” to construct pathways underneath their shared border to allegedly facilitate illegal immigration.
“Officers of the Podlaskie Border Guard Unit have uncovered a total of four tunnels under the border with Belarus, all in 2025,” Polish Border Force Lt Col Katarzyna Zdanowicz told The Telegraph.
“Physical and electronic security measures at the border, such as thermal imaging cameras and detection systems, allow us to immediately respond to any attempted violations of the state border, even underground ones,” he added.
Moscow has long been accused of using illegals as pawns in efforts to undermine Europe through its puppet state of Belarus into bordering nations such as Poland and Lithuania, both of which have erected border walls and fences to prevent such “hybrid warfare”.
In an apparent attempt to undermine such defences, Warsaw claims that Minsk has hired tunnel-building specialists from the Middle East, potentially from groups such as Hamas, ISIS, or Kurdish or Iranian-backed militants.
Poland said that it discovered a 1.5-metre-tall tunnel near the eastern village of Narewka in December, which they claim was used by around 180 illegals, predominantly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, to attempt to break into the country.
The Polish border police said that the tunnel stretched 50 metres into Belarus and 10 metres into Polish territory.
American military historian Dr Lynette Nusbacher suggested that the currently unknown tunnel makers could be coming from various Middle East factions, saying: “One of the things we immediately saw after the 2006 Lebanon war was parades of cement mixers queuing up in southern Lebanon…we were seeing loads and loads of Iranian tunnel construction.
“We also have ample evidence of Hamas doing the same thing in Gaza. So if you want that deep tunnelling expertise, then the answer to your question is going to be with Middle Easterners.”
The crisis between Belarus and Poland previously came to a head in 2021 when open conflict broke out at the border between stone-hurling migrants and Polish soldiers deploying water cannons to push them back.
At the time, it was reported that the Lukashenko regime — presumably working on behalf of Moscow — had lured prospective migrants to the Polish border with false promises that they would be given free transport to Germany if they reached European Union soil.
Poland has not been the only EU nation to respond to the weaponisation of migration by Russia and its proxy by constructing border walls or other fortifications. In 2022, for example, Lithuania completed a 300-mile, 4-meter-high steel fence with barbed wire along its border with Belarus to stem similar artificial migratory flows.
