Why Hamas’s rocket threat to Israel remains as deadly as ever ...Middle East

At the same time as it was handing over Israeli hostages, Hamas was this week undertaking another task at the core of its survival strategy – visibly deploying armed fighters and police across parts of Gaza.

The show of strength was interpreted by some, among them Donald Trump, as a necessary – if temporary – step to prevent the territory dissolving into anarchy as a ceasefire takes hold.

However, the Islamist militant group behind the massacres on 7 October 2023 seemed to be wasting no time in seeking to reassert its authority amid the ruins of Gaza, claiming it was targeting “collaborators and traitors”, alongside reports of executions. Such deeds suggest that rather than being eradicated in its two-year war with Israel, Hamas remains a reduced but extant military force.

The sight of assault rifle-wielding Hamas fighters on the streets of Gaza throws into a sharp relief a key issue with Trump’s push for peace: will the militant group bow to the demand that it disarm and demobilise, or will it seek to shape events to regroup and eventually return to its founding principle of seeking to end Israel’s existence by force?

Experts told The i Paper that all options – from an incremental process towards disarmament to Hamas being driven underground and re-emerging as a threat not only to Israel but also Europe – remain viable.

As a Western diplomatic source put it: “Hamas is facing an existential crisis of its own making. The legacy of the 7 October attacks is one of wholesale destruction visited upon its own people.

“But the point is that Hamas has not been destroyed and the risk is that it now poses more of a threat than ever because its only purpose is to establish a Palestinian state by force. It does not have a record of seeking to achieve what it wants by negotiation. A leopard is being asked to change its spots.”

Is Hamas still a fighting force? 

According to US intelligence services, prior to the 7 October attacks, Hamas had up to 25,000 fighters. Despite an onslaught that is estimated to have killed between 9,000 and 13,000 of its gunmen, the terror group’s manpower is believed to remain at a similar level to that before the war.

US estimates suggest that Hamas has succeeded in recruiting as many 15,000 new members in Gaza since the start of the conflict. Although many of these recruits are young and untrained, they are seen as evidence of Hamas’s ability to endure in the face of the destruction of its stronghold in the last two years.

There are other indications that while the militia’s military wing has been degraded by its confrontation with Israel, its structures – both literal and figurative – remain in place.

Israeli defence officials estimate that the tunnel system Hamas built beneath Gaza over decades stretches to 310 miles, allowing it to house fighters and factories to improvise weapons as well as facilitating smuggling of armaments from its sponsors in Iran.

Estimates vary as to just how much of the network has been destroyed. But according to the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think-tank, it could be as little as 25 per cent, suggesting a large part of Hamas’s physical infrastructure remains in place.

A similar picture may exist for the group’s arsenal of armaments. Prior to the 7 October attack, Hamas had amassed 18,000 rockets and missiles with a range of between 10km and 40km. To date it is estimated to have fired some 10,200 of these weapons into Israel.

But it is the munitions coming in the opposite direction, which in an irony of modern war, are thought to be perpetuating Hamas’s ability to maintain production and an offensive capability.

Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza are estimated to have had a failure rate of about 15 per cent, meaning each unexploded projectile is a significant – if perilous – source of explosive for the terror group’s subterranean weapons factories. A single 750lb aerial bomb can provide enough explosive for several hundred missiles or rockets to be fired back at Israel.

At the same time, experts say Hamas has pursued a strategy that “survival itself is a form of victory”. In so doing, it has become adept at shifting its battlefield tactics to reduce the number of direct attacks on the Israeli Defence Forces, in favour of guerilla tactics and ambushes to preserve its forces.

ACLED, a US-based think-tank monitoring conflicts, said it had seen a distinct shift in the militia’s tactics as Israel has struck ever harder at its structures, moving to a mixture of guerrilla tactics and occasional large-scale operations involving heavy weapons and attempted kidnappings.

It is a significant remove from claims by the Israeli military as recently as this spring that Hamas had ceased to be an operational military force incapable of internal co-ordination.

In a study last month, ACLED said: “While Hamas’s military wing is degraded and governing structures battered, the group has adapted by shifting toward guerrilla tactics on the battlefield and establishing informal mechanisms of governance and law enforcement to survive and maintain domestic influence.”

Has the peace deal emboldened Hamas? 

Shortly after the ceasefire deal was finalised last week, Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s senior political leader based in Qatar, issued a statement declaring the agreement was a “victory for steadfastness and resistance”.

The speech by Al-Hayya, whose son was killed in the recent Israeli strike on the Qatari capital of Doha, was notable as much for what it omitted as for its familiar oratory about jihad and confronting Israel.

To date, the terror group has given no public commitment towards renouncing violence or shifting its political and philosophical underpinnings towards achieving its chief goal – a Palestinian state within the borders set by the 1967 Six-Day war – by peaceful means.

Experts draw a contrast between Hamas’s rhetoric and that of insurrectionist groups – ranging from the Palestine Liberation Organisation to the IRA in Northern Ireland to the FARC rebels in Colombia – who all presaged peace processes with commitments to lay down their arms.

In this regard at least, Hamas would appear to be in lockstep with the ordinary Gazans who have borne the brunt of the two-year war. An opinion poll conducted in the territory in May found around half of the population supported the 7 October attacks – the worst single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – and a heavy majority (64 per cent) were opposed to disarmament by Hamas.

The result is a pessimism that Hamas has shifted its worldview sufficiently to allow the sort of incremental peace process envisaged by Trump.

Michael Froman, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said: “It is highly possible that Israel and Hamas make progress on the first points of the plan – a cessation in fighting and the exchange of hostages and prisoners – only to see the long-term components crumble and the war resume.”

Could Hamas commit to disarmament? 

For all its formulaic declarations of a victory built on the wreckage of Gaza, Hamas is seen by some mediators as having shown at least some willingness to engage with a process that could lead to it – at least partially – laying down its arms.

The militia is widely seen as having had to bow to pressure from key Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to shift its stance and surrender its principle source of leverage – the Israeli hostages – to secure its proclaimed understanding that hostilities with Israel have ceased.

Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, Qatar’s prime minister and one of the key figures in efforts to thrash out a deal between Israel and Hamas, said last week: “Hamas are actually open to have a discussion about how they won’t pose a threat for Israel.”

What that means in reality is of course the gordian knot that the Trump peace proposals will now seek to unravel amid unease that plans for a technocratic government in Gaza – devoid of Hamas participation – can be achieved. While short on detail, the Trump plan leaves little wriggle room for Hamas to have its fighters on the streets of Gaza by aspiring to “demilitarisation under the supervision of independent monitors”.

The Western diplomatic source said: “I think the ball is certainly in Hamas’s court. Everyone will now be looking for a sign from its leadership that they are prepared to shift from unyielding extremism towards some form of pragmatism. It is a live debate within Hamas and we don’t yet know the outcome.”

Ahmed Yousef, a senior Hamas figure who was an advisor to the group’s assassinated leader Ismail Haniyeh, has mooted the idea that Islamist groups, like Hamas, born from the Muslim Brotherhood movement need to look self-critically at their achievements and ultimately reject the armed struggle.

Writing in July, Yousef said: “It is necessary to publicly and clearly disavow all forms of armed violence in domestic arenas, or those committed falsely in the name of Islam, in order to protect the Islamic project from being classified as terrorist.”

The result is a potential tension between Hamas’s senior leadership in Qatar, who are thought to have signalled a willingness to consider demobilisation, and its fighters on the ground in Gaza.

It remains the case that Hamas is far from being the only armed insurrectionist group operating in Gaza.

The potential for internal conflict was underlined this weekend by clashes between Hamas fighters and members of the Dughmush clan, a rival militia in part of Gaza City, which Hamas had accused of stealing weapons from its own stores – 27 people were reported to have died in the fighting.

At least half a dozen other organisations, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad which participated in the 7 October massacres, remain active and in some cases have already rejected any attempt to impose an international mandate on the territory.

Consequently, experts see ample room for Hamas fighters to take their militancy and weaponry elsewhere within Gaza should they feel their cause is no longer being sustained by the terror group.

Dale Pankhurst, an expert on political violence at Queen’s University Belfast, said: “[Hamas’] entire reason for existence is to seek the destruction of the Israeli state through violence. So if the Hamas leadership are to pursue some form of demobilisation, they risk fracturing the organisation into dissenting armed factions that continue their militancy against Israel.”

What could disarmament look like?

Amid the uncertainty over whether the Gaza ceasefire can be turned into an enduring peace, there are at least precedents for navigating the task of allowing an armed group to lay down its weaponry while avoiding an impression of abject surrender.

The decommissioning process undertaken in Northern Ireland in the wake of the Good Friday agreement has already been put forward by the UK government as a potential model for what could happen in Gaza.

Such a structure would allow Hamas to retain its weaponry while agreeing to a timetable to put it beyond use under the auspices of an independent monitoring organisation.

One version of disarmament could see Hamas dismantle its units of assault troops and rocket forces while allowing its fighters to be absorbed into the security forces of an eventual successor to the Palestinian Authority.

Any solution would require negotiators to tread the extraordinarily fine line between the insistence of Israel and its allies that Hamas cease to exist as a meaningful entity and the group’s status as an entrenched and economically powerful network stitched into the fabric of Gaza.

One conclusion being reached in Western capitals is that for all the risks of including Hamas in a long-term settlement in Gaza, still greater dangers lie in its exclusion.

As Martin Jager, head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, put it this week: “We must indeed expect that if Hamas is not involved in a transitional administration… and is driven out of Gaza or forced underground, then there is a very real risk it will strike outside Gaza. This would affect the Arab world and certainly also Europe.”

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