 "Post Haniyeh killing, Israel faces Hamas 2.0 in a grinding war of attrition")
A perplexed child donning military fatigues, wearing a headband with Arabic words and brandishing a submachine gun is kissed several times by Yahya Sinwar, who then lifts him at a Hamas celebration held in honour of its members killed in the 11-day war with Israel in May 2021.
The video, posted by the IDF on May 26, 2021, was symbolic. Through the boy, Sinwar—earlier Hamas’s Gaza head and now overall chief after the Israeli assassination of its political bureau chairman Ismail Haniyeh—represented the organisation’s inherent hatred for Israel, the posterity’s pledge for its destruction and how young recruits will replenish the outfit’s members killed in conflicts.
Sinwar now has the complete authority to decide on hostage rescue or a ceasefire deal, making the negotiations tougher for Israel and the US.
Sinwar’s surprise appointment, contradicting news reports of the high probability of Haniyeh’s predecessor Khaled Mashal replacing him, is a stern message to Israel: Hamas remains united and strong and will fight it out.
The appointment also shows Hamas’s ‘ beehive leadership ’ structure, which replaces one assassinated leader/commander with the next in line, ensuring that it is never bereft of a leader.
Israel has fought five wars with Hamas, including the ongoing conflict, but the terrorist outfit has survived every blow.
“If the Hamas battalions were largely destroyed, Israeli forces wouldn’t still be fighting,” retired US Army Colonel Peter Mansoor, who helped oversee the 2007 counterinsurgency strategy, Iraq War Troop Surge, told CNN. “The fact that they’re still in Gaza and still trying to rout out elements of the Hamas battalions shows me that Prime Minister Netanyahu is wrong.”
In its ‘Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community’ report dated February 5, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) stated: “Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from HAMAS for years to come.”
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More ShortsHamas ramps up recruitment
The ongoing war, in its 11th month, has damaged Hamas’s communication and military strength, but it hasn’t made the terrorist organisation weaker if not stronger.
In May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that 14,000 of Hamas’s estimated 30,000-40,000 fighters had been killed, but the outfit insisted that only 6,000-8,000 fighters were dead. In the same month, a US intelligence report stated that only 30-35 per cent of Hamas members were killed.
Netanyahu, who told a joint meeting of US Congress on July 24 that “victory is in sight”, doesn’t want to admit that Hamas hasn’t been destroyed, as initially planned, and is replacing the dead fighters with recruits. The same intelligence report stated that Hamas recruited thousands in the months before May.
The IDF made the tactical mistake of withdrawing from Gaza’s southern city of Khan Younis on April 7. Though Israel said that the preference for targeted raids based on new intel, instead of involving several brigades, was behind the decision, it highlighted the impossibility of retaining the destroyed areas with the Israeli forces stretched out in Gaza.
The IDF decision allowed Hamas to return and recruit fighters. Hamas plans to recruit around 20,000 new fighters, as young as 16-18, and has held training camps in Khan Younis.
On July 12, Israeli commandos uncovered a Hamas recruitment and drone and bomb production site inside a UNRWA building in Tel el-Awa, near Al-Shifa Hospital, northern Gaza.
.@UNRWA Headquarters in Gaza: the IDF uncovered a Hamas operations center in an UNRWA building filled with advanced surveillance equipment, rockets, drones and other weaponry. pic.twitter.com/3C48Lbfufl
— Israel ישראל (@Israel) July 12, 2024
One month after the war, experts had warned that the carpet-bombing of Gaza will radicalise the youth, helping Hamas to tap their anger and frustration.
It risks creating “Hamas 2.0” or “worse from another group we’ve not seen yet,” HA Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told NBC News.
“They’re going to be recruiting like crazy based on the kinds of things that Israel has done,” Emily Harding, director of the Intelligence, National Security and Technology Programme at Washington DC-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told CNN.
In another dangerous development, Hamas is also recruiting in Lebanon by using the anger of Palestinian refugees, whose descendants were expelled after Israel’s creation in 1948.
Besides, the Israeli assassination of senior Hamas leaders like Haniyeh, and his deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, who was based in Beirut, in January, has also helped Hamas recruitment in Lebanon. Several rallies expressing defiance and anger following Haniyeh’s killing were held in Lebanon, where he was extremely popular among young Palestinians.
For example, Ain al-Hilweh, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, has become a centre of Hamas’s secretive recruitment and recruits are covertly trained by Hamas and Hezbollah.
Gaza’s staggering unemployment rate also helps Hamas in recruiting jobless youths, who stare at an uncertain future and are enraged by the destruction caused by Israel’s incessant bombardment.
A June report compiled by the ILO and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics shows that the unemployment rate in Gaza and the West Bank jumped to 79.1 per cent and 32 per cent, respectively, since the war with the average rate of joblessness in the two areas at 50.8 per cent.
Moreover, real GDP has tanked by 83.5 per cent in Gaza Strip and 22.7 in the West Bank with the average decrease in the two areas at 32.8 per cent.
Israel faces urban warfare in Hamas backyard
From day one of the ground invasion, it was known that Israel would find it difficult to fight an urban war in the coastal enclave, which has one of the world’s highest population densities with around 2 million people living on 365 sq km.
Irregular high-rise buildings, crammed streets and lanes, the high population and Hamas’s vast network of tunnels were bound to hinder the IDF’s progress.
In fact, the US had sent experienced military advisers to Israel a few days before the ground invasion to advise the IDF on urban warfare. The advisers included Marine Corps Lieutenant General James Glynn, who commanded operations against the Islamic State in Iraq’s Mosul in June 2014 and was part of two Battles of Fallujah in April and November 2004, respectively.
David Petraeus, former CIA director and Commander of CENTCOM, the International Security Assistance Force (Afghanistan) and Multinational Force Iraq, warned Israel of a “very, very difficult” time in Gaza a few days before the ground offensive.
Petraeus, an expert in street-to-street, urban warfare who oversaw the Surge, told POLITICO’s Power Play podcast, “You don’t win counterinsurgencies in a year or two. They typically take a decade or more as we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
However, Netanyahu hastily launched the ground operation despite the IDF’s only extended ground invasion of Gaza in the 2014 War, which lasted only around three weeks.
A case in point is the First Battle of Fallujah (Iraq), launched in haste by the US. The battle lasted only six days due to the failure of American forces to quell the insurgency.
“Senior political leaders should not react emotionally in war and direct immediate action against a densely populated urban area when conditions for success are not present,” the Modern War Institute, West Point, stated in a studyin October 2022.
“The US forces lacked a clear understanding of the unique urban warfare challenges—enemy situation, status of population, information operations and political situation at all levels—present in Fallujah to provide the best alternatives or what would be required to set the conditions for success within an acceptable timeframe.”
Like the IDF, the US forces in Fallujah didn’t have adequate time to gather intelligence of the urban environment. “The Marines that would plan and execute Operation Vigilant Resolve had only been in Iraq in general and Fallujah in particular for less than a month. They did not have a clear understanding of the city or the enemy,” the study stated.
“The First Battle of Fallujah was a loss for the US forces not because of fighting capability but due to insufficient planning, force ratios, information operations and ultimately political support for the operation.”
Similarly, the Second Battle of Fallujah was the bloodiest in the Iraq War. Marines faced the heaviest urban combat since Huế City in Vietnam in 1968 and the most brutal battle since the Vietnam War’s end. The US forces encountered tunnels, trenches, spider holes and booby traps—typical tactics employed in urban warfare.
The IDF entered into a dense urban terrain extensively prepared by Hamas and inhabited by a large number of Israel-hating civilians.
Buildings after building reduced to rubble by jets and artillery “resulted in an irregular, congested and complex visual environment”, according to a July report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the world’s oldest and the UK’s leading defence and security think tank.
“Forces that had been trained to talk one another onto targets using the windows and floors of a building as reference points struggled to rapidly convey where enemy were to one another in structures that no longer had uniformity,” the report stated.
According to the IDF, it faced a “devastated terrain warfare” causing friendly fire and combat accidents mainly because of the “unfamiliarity with the impact of heavier weapons in close terrain” with soldiers injured by fragmentation.
Moreover, ruined buildings “visually” merged with the “effect becoming more pronounced over distance or at night”. “Movement in a building in an adjacent unit’s movement corridor would frequently be mistaken for movement within a unit’s area of responsibility.”
Hamas aided by tunnel network
Israel had the misconception that the depletion of Hamas’s size had substantially weakened the organisation, and it wouldn’t resurface in areas flattened by sustained bombardment.
The IDF’s biggest mistake was not implementing the second and third steps of the ‘Clear, Hold and Build’ process. Clearing an area of terrorists or insurgents should be immediately followed by holding it 24x7 and building it again by providing humanitarian assistance and restoring civic amenities.
Whenever the process isn’t followed, mayhem and bloodshed ensue. For example, the US abandoned Afghanistan in 1989 after the Soviet withdrawal. Though President Mohammed Najibullah ruled for three years, by 1992, Afghanistan had turned into a quagmire with warlords Burhanuddin Rabbani, Ahmad Shah Masud and General Rashid Dostum (Northern Alliance) on one side and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar on the other. Internecine fighting finally allowed the Taliban to take over.
Hamas was ready for a grinding war of attrition knowing that the IDF wasn’t experienced in an extended urban warfare and wouldn’t be able to hold onto cleared areas.
After the degradation of its military capability and loss of members, Hamas transformed from an organised army into a guerrilla force, like the Viet Cong, aware that it couldn’t match the IDF’s firepower and manpower.
Like the Iraqi insurgents in the Battles of Fallujah, the decentralised battalions of Izz al-DinAl-Qassam Brigades ambush the IDF using IEDs, snipers and booby-traps.
The guerrillas store arms and ammunition in tunnels, mosques, hospitals, UNRWA buildings and abandoned/destroyed houses and rig such houses with explosives and tripwires.
Hamas propaganda videos on social media show its members in civilian clothes suddenly firing RPGs from tunnels and buildings, attaching mines to tanks and sniping Israeli soldiers. “Hamas arms caches were widely dispersed throughout the terrain with IDF units reporting that about a third of structures in Gaza City contained arms,” according to the RUSI report.
Guerrilla Warfare: Hamas proudly posts videos of “battles” where terrorists in civilian clothes fire mortar shells and rockets from densely populated areas, including refugee camps. pic.twitter.com/zKlowIwrYC
— Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) May 18, 2024
Hamas guerrillas let IDF convoys pass and assemble in an area for hours. Suddenly, the convoys are ambushed from tunnel mouths or buildings.
“Once the IDF pushed into an area, Hamas would begin to emerge from subterranean infrastructure to conduct rocket-propelled grenade and sniper engagements against IDF vehicles through rubblised structures,” the report stated.
In some instances, according to the report, Hamas heavy weapons were brought out from tunnels camouflaged with earth. “Hamas fighters would move in civilian profile without weapons and then retrieve cached arms at their intended point of ambush to conduct the engagement.”
Analyses by the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, the Institute for the Study of War and CNN shows that of the 24 Al-Qassam battalions, only 3 have been destroyed, 8 are combat effective and the remaining 13, which have been degraded, have turned into guerrillas.
Hamas repeated its well-known act of installing a “guerrilla charge” on a IDF Merkava Mk 4 tank during urban battles in the vicinity of Gaza. pic.twitter.com/uQer3nF9mH
— Clash Report (@clashreport) November 19, 2023
Hamas’s vast network of tunnels is critical in its guerrilla warfare.
Like the Viet Cong’s Củ Chi tunnels, which served as communication and supply routes, hospitals and food and weapon caches and were the base of operations in the Tet Offensive, Hamas tunnels have become a nightmare for the IDF.
The massive warren of the tunnel network, more than 720 km long and around half the length of the New York subway system, has been named Gaza Metro by the IDF. The tunnel length under Khan Younis alone is 160 km long. Some tunnel mouths (entrance shafts) are concealed beneath houses or destroyed buildings, others are under sandy dunes.
On December 17, the IDF posted a video of the largest tunnel, measuring four km, located 1,310 feet from the Erez Crossing. “This tunnel system was a project led by Mohammad Sinwar, the brother of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and the commander of Hamas’ Khan Yunis Battalion,” the IDF posted.
The more sophisticated tunnels, unlike the ones for operatives, have offices and residential quarters for top Hamas leaders like Sinwar. In February, the IDF posted a video showing Sinwar along with his family inside a tunnel under Khan Younis.
Spotted: Yahya Sinwar running away and hiding in his underground terrorist tunnel network as Gazan civilians suffer above ground under the rule of Hamas terrorism.
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) February 13, 2024
There is no tunnel deep enough for him to hide in. pic.twitter.com/KLjisBFq1f
Al-Qassam commander Mohammed Deif was also hiding inside a tunnel until he was eliminated in an Israeli airstrike on a compound on the outskirts of Khan Younis on July 13. A tunnel inside a building in Gaza City and used by Deif had an elevator that went down 65.6 feet underground and a staircase of similar length.
The IDF, unfamiliar with subterranean warfare, found it extremely difficult to deal with a unique operating environment. “The IDF lacked the ability to accurately map the subterranean environment,” the RUSI report stated. “The IIDF found that subterranean fighting was extremely stressful for its personnel and required many distinct techniques. The fact that every corner could lead to an extremely close confrontation with an enemy or the discovery of an IED created a staccato quality to the pressure on individuals that was corrosive of morale.”
8 terrorist tunnels were destroyed in Shejaiya as our troops completed their mission in the area.
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) July 10, 2024
Weapons, laptops and communication equipment were found inside the tunnels. Additionally, equipment that enables extended stays and electricity and gas infrastructure that would be… pic.twitter.com/NlinlL5RYe
The DNI report stated that Israel would “struggle to neutralise Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength and surprise Israeli forces”.
Way back in February, Israel’s military intelligence Aman circulated a document among Israeli politicians warning that even if Hamas is dismantled, it will survive as “a terror group and a guerrilla group”.
A terrorist group confined to a region can’t survive for decades without the support of its inhabitants. The devastation and near-famine situation caused by Israeli bombing has increased the hostility of the residents of Gaza and the West Bank towards Israel, which is a boon for Hamas,
A May-June survey by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed that support for armed struggle in Gaza and the West Bank increased from 46 per cent in March to 54 per cent in June. In Gaza, the percentage jumped from 39 per cent to 56 per cent.
The support for Hamas in both Gaza and the West Bank increased from 34 per cent to 40 per cent though the backing for the October 7 massacre reduced from 71 per cent to 57 per cent in the same time period.
When asked which political party they support, 40 per cent chose Hamas compared to 34 per cent in March and 22 per cent in September 2023. Moreover, 51 per cent believe that Hamas is the most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people today compared to 49 per cent in March and 27 per cent in September.
The writer is a freelance journalist with more than two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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