Israeli forces prepared to invade Loop with the mission of eliminating Hamas They will face an increasingly capable opponent, trained for years by a clandestine support network that extends far beyond the small enclave, to Iran and allied Arab groups.
The deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 6 – unprecedented for the group in its planning and scale – was a devastating demonstration of military experience which it has acquired since taking control of Gaza in 2007.
“Necessity is the mother of invention,” says Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official, adding that the group has long relied on money and training from Iran and Iranian regional proxies such as the Hezbollah in Lebanon, while strengthening its own forces in Gaza.
The difficulties in importing weapons meant that in the last nine years the Islamist group has developed its own “capabilities” and can now “manufacture them locally,” adds Baraka, who resides in Lebanon.
In the 2008 Gaza war, Hamas rockets had a maximum range of 40 kilometers (25 miles), but that range had increased to 230 kilometers in the 2021 conflict, he added.
Today, the secretive and sprawling organization has little to do with the small Palestinian group that issued its first leaflet 36 years ago in protest of the Israeli occupation, according to Reuters interviews with 11 people familiar with the group’s capabilities, including figures of Hamas, regional security officials and military experts.
Military school
“They are a mini army“says a source close to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, who does not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter. He assures that the group had a Military school who trained in a variety of specializations, including cyber securityand has a unit of naval command among its military wing 40,000 troops. In the 1990s, Hamas had fewer than 10,000 fighters, according to globalsecurity.org.
Since the early 2000s, the group has built a tunnel network in the underground of Gaza to help the fighters disappear, shelter weapons factories and store weapons brought from abroad, according to a regional security source, who also asks not to be identified. The group has acquired a variety of bombs, mortars, rockets, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, Hamas officials say.
The expansion of capabilities has produced increasingly lethal results over the years. Israel lost nine soldiers during its 2008 raid. In 2014, the number jumped to 66.
JA. Hellyer, a research associate at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, maintains that Israel is capable of destroying Hamas in its expected attack on the densely populated enclave. “The question is not whether it is possible or not. The question is what kind of price will be imposed on the rest of the population, because Hamas does not live on an island in the ocean or in a cave in the desert.”
After the latest war in Gaza in 2021, Hamas and an affiliated group called Palestinian Islamic Jihad managed to retain 40% of their missile stock, a key target of the Israelis, according to the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, an organization nonprofit based in the United States, maintaining approximately 11,750 missiles compared to 23,000 before the conflict.
Iranian ambition
Hamas, whose 1988 founding charter called for destruction of Israelis classified as terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, the European Union, Canada, Egypt and Japan.
For Iran, Hamas has helped realize its long-standing ambition to surround Israel with legions of paramilitaries, including other Palestinian factions and Hezbollah in Lebanon, according to Western officials. Armed with sophisticated weaponry, they all share a long-standing enmity with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. The group’s leaders are spread throughout the Middle East, in countries such as Lebanon and Tastebut its power base remains Gaza.
In the October 7 attack, the worst breach in Israel’s defenses in 50 years, Hamas fired more than 2,500 rockets as fighters using paragliders, motorcycles and 4×4 vehicles overwhelmed Israeli defenses and leveled towns and communities, killing 1,300 people. and taking as hostages to dozens.
The people consulted by Reuters maintain that while Iran trained, armed and financed the group, there is no indication that Tehran directed or authorized the October 7 attack. “The zero hour decision was in the hands of Hamas, but, of course, the cooperation generally, the training and the preparation They came from Iran,” says the regional security source. Iran acknowledges that it helps finance and train Hamas, but has denied involvement in the attack, although it has praised it.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said in an interview with Al Jazeera television last year that his group had received $70 million in military aid from Iran. “We have rockets that are manufactured locally, but the long-range rockets came from abroad, from Iran, Syria and other countries through Egypt“he added. According to a 2020 US State Department report, Iran provides around 100 million dollars annually to Palestinian groups, including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.
An Israeli security source says Iran significantly increased funding for Hamas’s military wing last year, from $100 million to about 350 million dollars.
Possible regional conflict
After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas began importing rockets, explosives and other equipment from Iran, Western intelligence sources explain. They were sent through Sudantransported in trucks through Egypt and smuggled into Gaza through a labyrinth of narrow tunnels beneath the Sinai Peninsula, they add.
Flows of weapons, training and funds also shifted from Iran to other regional paramilitary allies, eventually giving Tehran a dominant presence in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza.
The crown jewel of the Iranian militia network is Hezbollah, conceived in the Iranian embassy in Damascus in 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon during the 1975-90 civil war. Hezbollah bombed American targets and carried out an agenda of hostage-taking and kidnappings, expelling Israel from Lebanon in 2000 and then gradually taking over the leadership of the Lebanese state.
Iran took the opportunity to co-opt Hamas in 1992, when Israel ddeported about 400 Hamas leaders to Lebanonsays a source close to Hamas. Iran and Hezbollah received members of Hamas, cThey shared military technology and they trained them in the construction of homemade bombs for suicide attacksadd this source.
Related news
Baraka, the Hamas official, notes that the ultimate goal of the October 7 attack on Israel was to achieve the release of the 5,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, stop Israeli attacks on the Al Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site of Islam, and ending the 16-year blockade of Gaza.
He warns that if Israel’s ground offensive continues, blessed by the United States and the United Kingdom, the war will not be limited to Gaza but will could spread to a regional conflict. “It is not just an Israeli war against Gaza, there is an Atlantic war against Gaza with all the powers,” she emphasizes. “There will be new front lines“.