WASHINGTON: Hamas has seen about half its forces wiped out in eight months of war and is relying on hit-and-run insurgent tactics to frustrate Israel’s attempts to take control of Gaza, US and Israeli officials told Reuters.
The enclave’s ruling group has been reduced to between 9,000 and 12,000 fighters, according to three senior US officials familiar with battlefield developments, down from American estimates of 20,000-25,000 before the conflict. By contrast, Israel says it has lost almost 300 troops in the Gaza campaign.
Hamas fighters are now largely avoiding sustained skirmishes with Israeli forces closing in on the southernmost city of Rafah, instead relying on ambushes and improvised bombs to hit targets often behind enemy lines, one of the officials said.
Several Gaza residents, including Wissam Ibrahim, said they too had observed a shift in tactics.
“In earlier months, Hamas fighters would intercept, engage and fire at Israeli troops as soon as they pushed into their territory,” Ibrahim told Reuters by phone. “But now, there is a notable shift in their mode of operations, they wait for them to deploy and then they start their ambushes and attacks.”
The US officials, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said such tactics could sustain a Hamas insurgency for months to come, aided by weapons smuggled into Gaza via tunnels and others repurposed from unexploded ordnance or captured from Israeli forces.
This kind of protracted timeframe is echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser who said last week the war could last until the end of 2024 at least.
A Hamas spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment on its battlefield strategy.
In a parallel propaganda drive, some of the group’s fighters are videotaping their ambushes of Israeli troops, before editing and posting them on Telegram and other social media apps.
Peter Lerner, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), told Reuters they were still some way from destroying Hamas, which he also said had lost roughly half of its fighting force.
Lerner said the military was adapting to the group’s shift in tactics and acknowledged Israel couldn’t eliminate every Hamas fighter or destroy every Hamas tunnel.
“There is never a goal to kill each and every last terrorist on the ground. That’s not a realistic goal,” he added. “Destroying Hamas as a governing authority is an achievable and attainable military objective,” he added.
Hamas leaders Sinwar and DEIF
Netanyahu and his government are under pressure from Washington to agree to a ceasefire plan to end the war, which began on Oct. 7 when Hamas fighters stormed into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and seizing over 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent ground-and-air campaign in Gaza has left the territory in ruins and killed more than 36,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities. The United Nations says over a million people face “catastrophic” levels of hunger.
There are about between 7,000-8,000 Hamas fighters reportedly entrenched in Rafah, the last significant bastion of the group’s resistance, according to Israeli and US officials. Top leaders Yahya Sinwar, his brother Mohammed, and Sinwar’s second-in-command Mohammed Deif are still alive and believed to be hiding in tunnels with Israeli hostages, they said.
The Palestinian group has shown the ability to withdraw rapidly after attacks, take cover, regroup, and pop up again in areas that Israel had believed to be cleared of militants, a US administration official said.
Lerner, the IDF spokesperson, agreed Israel faced a protracted battle to overcome Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2006.
“There is no quick fix after 17 years of them building their capabilities,” he added.
Hamas has constructed a 500 km (310 miles) subterranean city of tunnels over the years. The labyrinth, dubbed the Gaza metro by the Israeli military, is roughly half the length of the New York subway system. Equipped with water, power and ventilation, it shelters Hamas leaders, command and control centers, and weapons and ammunition stores.
The Israeli military said last week that it had taken control of the entire Gaza-Egypt land border to prevent weapons smuggling. About 20 tunnels used by Hamas to carry arms into Gaza were found within the zone, it added.
Egypt’s State Information Service didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Israel’s claims of arms-smuggling from the country. Egyptian officials have previously denied any such clandestine trade is taking place, saying they destroyed the tunnel networks leading to Gaza years ago.
Echoes of Falluja insurgency?
The Gaza incursion is Israel’s longest and fiercest conflict since it invaded Lebanon to oust the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1982.
Netanyahu has defied domestic and international calls to outline a post-war plan for the territory. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned that the absence of such a roadmap could trigger lawlessness in the enclave.
One Arab official told Reuters that criminal gangs had already emerged in Gaza amid the power vacuum, seizing food deliveries and conducting armed robberies.
The official and two other Arab government sources, who all requested anonymity to speak freely, said the IDF could face similar threats to those encountered by America in the city of Falluja in 2004-2006 following the US-led invasion of Iraq.
A broad insurgency in Falluja swelled the ranks first of Al-Qaeda and then Islamic State, miring Iraq in conflict and chaos from which it has yet to fully emerge two decades later.
Washington and its Arab allies have said they are working on a post-conflict plan for Gaza which involves a time-bound, irreversible path to Palestinian statehood.
When the plan, part of a “grand bargain” envisioned by the United States that aims to secure a normalizing of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, is complete, Washington aims to put it to Israel, the US officials said.
A United Arab Emirates official with direct knowledge of the discussions said a Palestinian invitation was needed for countries to assist Gaza in an emergency operation, as well as an end to hostilities, full Israeli disengagement, and clarity on Gaza’s legal status, including control of borders.
The emergency process could last a year and be potentially renewable for another year, according to the UAE official who said the aim to be to stabilize the enclave rather than rebuild it.
For reconstruction to begin, a more detailed roadmap toward a two-state solution was needed, he added, as well as serious and credible reform of the Palestinian Authority.
How the United States aims to overcome Netanyahu’s repeated rejection of a two-state solution, which Riyadh says is a condition to normalizing ties, is unclear.
David Schenker, a former US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, dismissed any suggestion of a clean IDF pullout from the Palestinian territory.
“Israel says it’s going to maintain security control which means that it’s going to constantly fly drones over Gaza and they’re not going to be limited if they see Hamas re-emerging, they’re going to go back,” said Schenker, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute US-based think-tank.
Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israeli military chief serving in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, has proposed an Egyptian-led international coalition as an alternative to Hamas rule in Gaza.
In a closed-door briefing last week to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, he emphasized the complex nature of anti-militancy warfare.
“This is a religious, nationalistic, social, and military struggle with no knock-out blow but rather protracted warfare that will last many years,” he said.
INSIGHT: Diminished Hamas switches to full insurgent mode in Gaza
INSIGHT: Diminished Hamas switches to full insurgent mode in Gaza
- Hamas fighting force reduced by half — US officials
- Group relying on ambushes, improvised bombs, such tactics could sustain a lengthy insurgency
Foreign workers trapped and terrified in Lebanon’s conflict
Nazmul Shahin, who works at a supermarket in Beirut’s Achrafieh neighborhood, says explosions jolt him awake at night
MANILA/LAGOS/DHAKA: Cici Brinces came to Lebanon as a domestic worker 14 years ago, married a Palestinian, had a son, survived leukaemia and was building a new life. Then bombs began falling in Beirut and now she wants to go home to the Philippines.
“I feel that the end is near for me — worse than when I had cancer,” said Brinces, 46, who fled her home near the airport two weeks ago and lived on the streets for days before moving into a shelter with her 10-year-old son.
Nazmul Shahin, who works at a supermarket in Beirut’s Achrafieh neighborhood, says explosions jolt him awake at night.
“My heart begins pounding — and it feels like something is gnawing at my entrails,” the 30-year-old Bangladeshi citizen, who has been living in Lebanon for about a year, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview from Beirut.
Md Al Mamun loves the job he got at a Beirut bakery three months ago, but now he too wants to go home to Bangladesh.
“I really like it here — the pay and the environment are so much better — but since the bombing began, I have been badly missing home,” he said.
A nearly year-long conflict between Israel and the Hezbollah militant group has intensified in recent weeks, with Israel bombing southern Lebanon, Beirut’s southern suburbs and the Bekaa Valley, killing many of Hezbollah’s top leaders, and sending ground troops into southern Lebanon.
Iran-backed Hezbollah has fired rockets into Israel.
Lebanese authorities say at least 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced and more than 2,300 people killed since last October, the majority in recent weeks.
Most of the country’s 900 shelters are full and people are now sleeping in the open or in Beirut’s parks.
Among them are many foreign workers.
The International Organization for Migration says Lebanon hosts more than 177,000 migrant workers, primarily from Africa and Asia. Human Rights Watch has quoted Lebanon’s Labour Ministry as saying the number is around 250,000.
They mostly comprise women who work in the domestic and hospitality sectors and are employed under the kafala system, a sponsorship model also common in Gulf nations where employers control the legal status of any migrants who work for them.
Uganda-based activist Safina Virani, who is fundraising online to get food and shelter to African migrants, said many women had been cut adrift by their employers, who fled when the Israeli attacks began.
“Many said their employers took their passports at the airport as soon as they arrived, and they didn’t give (them) to them again. They have no money, and their employers abandoned them as soon as the war broke, and they didn’t give them their documents,” Virani told the Thomson Reuters Foundation from Uganda’s capital Kampala.
“Most of them don’t have bank accounts or documents that can identify them officially,” Virani said, explaining that this made it difficult for relatives back home to send money.
Virani said stranded Africans also faced discrimination.
“African migrants are being treated as second-class citizens, and this has a lot to do with racism, and that is why governments need to take the protection of the citizens seriously,” she said.
’PLEASE SEND AIRPLANES’
There are more than 11,000 documented Filipino workers in Lebanon. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has ordered the government to prepare for a safe and timely repatriation of its citizens.
This is exactly what Brinces, whose husband is working in Nigeria, wants.
“President Marcos, please send airplanes here for us, like what other nationalities did for their countrymen,” she said.
Some 500 Filipinos have been repatriated since last year and by Oct. 8, the Philippines embassy in Beirut had received more than 1,700 applications for repatriation.
The embassy has set up temporary shelters for Filipino workers, but Brinces said many people were reluctant to use them as cellphones were at times restricted so they could lose contact with home.
Some Filipinos say the embassy has been slow to help.
“My sister only got repetitive replies from government chatbots, until they asked her to go to the embassy in Beirut which was impossible for her because her employer won’t allow her to and she did not have her passport,” said Mark Anthony Bunda, whose sister works in Lebanon as a domestic helper.
Brinces’ situation is different: she has her documents but her passport has expired and she needs exit clearance from the Lebanese authorities as a foreign worker.
When she first fled her home, she sent her son to live with her mother-in-law in the relative safety of the mountains outside Beirut. She wanted to stay close to the embassy in case there was news of repatriation.
“The embassy told me they can’t respond to our requests all at once. Especially since the government here has been slow to process our applications,” she said.
She has now been reunited with her son and is living in a shelter in the capital.
FRAUDSTERS AND DONATIONS
Among many African workers in Lebanon, there are some 26,000 Kenyans, according to foreign ministry data, many a direct result of an agreement between Kenya’s National Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Lebanese companies.
The Kenyan government told Kenyans to register with the embassy in Kuwait for free evacuation and has allocated 100 million Kenyan shillings ($778,210) for the evacuation.
Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi said almost 1,500 people had already registered.
The government has also warned people to be aware of fraudsters offering fake evacuations for exorbitant fees.
“We would like to alert all Kenyans currently in Lebanon about reports of fraudsters exploiting vulnerable individuals. These individuals are unlawfully charging fees for evacuation services,” the ministry of foreign and diaspora affairs said in a statement.
About 150,000 Bangladeshis are also in Lebanon, working in petrol stations, supermarkets, garages and as cleaners. Bangladeshis typically pay about 500,000 taka ($4,200) to migration brokers to get a job in Lebanon.
Officials at Bangladesh’s embassy in Beirut are providing medical care and advice and have started collecting information on those who want to return home.
Md Touhid Hossain, foreign adviser for the interim government in Dhaka, said Bangladesh had asked the IOM to arrange a chartered flight to evacuate Bangladeshis.
Siddikor Rahman, who has worked as a supervisor in a Lebanese factory for about 10 years, said many Bangladeshis have lost their jobs and homes since the airstrikes and are surviving in shelters provided by the community and the embassy.
“Those of us who can afford to lend a hand are supporting our compatriots — either giving them cash, buying food for them, or providing them shelter,” said Shahin.
“But my heart is sinking day by day and the only thing I hope for is to go home,” he said.
NO EASY DECISION
Virani has been working with Lebanese activist Dea Hage-Chahine to reach vulnerable female migrant workers.
Hage-Chahine told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Beirut that she had secured a private building for a few months to house 147 Sierra Leonean women and three babies who had been sleeping outside their embassy in Beirut.
Working with a team of just four, she has also rented five apartments for another group of 58 Africans, mostly Sierra Leoneans, and liaised with their government to obtain the paperwork they need to get home.
“Migrant communities in Lebanon are marginalized and ignored, and you can imagine what is happening while we are going through a war and a huge humanitarian crisis; we need support,” she said.
“We’re working on the paperwork for the women, but we’re worried that we won’t be able to secure flights. We’re hoping the government will send a plane,” she said.
Sierra Leone’s Foreign Minister Timothy Musa Kabba told local media that because the government doesn’t have a trade employment deal with Lebanon, it has been difficult for them to quickly evacuate the workers.
However, the administration is working with IOM and leaders of the Sierra Leonean community in Lebanon to congregate citizens in a safe place while they process their repatriation.
Leaving Lebanon is not an easy choice for everyone.
In South Lebanon, Filipino domestic helper Ritchel Bagsican said she could not sleep because of the airstrikes and drones.
But the 32-year-old, who has been in Lebanon for nine years and has applied for repatriation, is torn about going home.
“Despite the economic crisis and the war here in Lebanon, job opportunities here are still better than in the Philippines. Work is not guaranteed there, so we might have to work abroad again,” she said.
Israeli hostages will not return until Gaza ‘aggression’ stops, Hamas official says
- Al-Hayya confirmed the death of the group’s leader, Yahya Sinwar
DUBAI: Israeli hostages in Gaza will not return until “the aggression” on the besieged Palestinian enclave stops and Israeli forces withdraw, Khalil Al-Hayya, deputy Gaza Hamas chief and the group’s chief negotiator, said on Friday.
In a televised statement, Al-Hayya confirmed the death of the group’s leader, Yahya Sinwar.
Hamas confirms death of leader Yahya Sinwar
- Hamas: ‘We mourn the great leader, the martyred brother, Yahya Sinwar, Abu Ibrahim’
- Israeli drone video captures last minutes of Hamas leader’s life
DOHA/JERUSALEM: Palestinian militant group Hamas on Friday confirmed its leader Yahya Sinwar had been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza, a day after Israel announced his death.
“We mourn the great leader, the martyred brother, Yahya Sinwar, Abu Ibrahim,” Qatar-based Hamas official Khalil Al-Hayya said in a recorded video statement broadcast by Al Jazeera.
Iran: Slain Hamas chief an 'inspiration' for Middle East
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Friday that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, remains an inspiration for militants fighting Israel across the Middle East.
“His fate – beautifully pictured in his last image – is not a deterrent but a source of inspiration for resistance fighters across the region, Palestinian and non-Palestinian,” Araghchi said on X, adding that “the cause for liberation of Palestine from occupation is more alive than ever.”
Drone video
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was tracked by an Israeli mini drone as he lay dying in the ruins of a building in southern Gaza and filmed him slumped in a chair covered in dust, according to video released by Israeli authorities on Thursday.
As the drone hovered nearby, the video showed him throwing a stick at it, in an apparent act of desperation.
After an intensive manhunt that had lasted for more than a year, the Israeli troops that killed Sinwar were initially unaware that they had caught their country’s number one enemy after a gunbattle on Wednesday, Israeli officials said.
Intelligence services had been gradually restricting the area where he could operate, the military said on Thursday, after dental records, fingerprints and DNA testing provided final confirmation of Sinwar’s death.
But unlike other militant leaders tracked down and killed by Israel, including Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on July 13, the operation which finally killed Sinwar was not a planned and targeted strike, or an operation carried out by elite commandos.
Instead, officials said he was found by infantry soldiers from the Bislach Brigade, a unit that normally trains future unit commanders. The soldiers were searching an area in the Tal El Sultan area of southern Gaza on Wednesday, where they believed senior members of Hamas were located.
The troops saw three suspected militants moving between buildings and opened fire, leading to a gunfight during which Sinwar escaped into a ruined building.
According to accounts in Israeli media, tank shells and a missile were also fired at the building.
On Thursday, the military released footage from a mini drone that it said showed Sinwar, badly wounded in the hand, sitting on a chair, his face covered in a scarf. The film shows him attempting to throw a stick at the drone, in a futile effort to knock it down.
At this stage, Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said, Sinwar was only identified as a fighter, but troops entered and found him with a weapon, a flak jacket and 40,000 shekels ($10,731.63).
“He tried to escape and our forces eliminated him,” he told reporters in a televised briefing.
Hamas has not made any comment itself, but sources within the group have said that the indications they have seen suggest Sinwar was indeed killed by Israeli troops.
“The dozens of operations carried out by the IDF and the ISA over the last year, and in recent weeks in the area where he was eliminated, restricted Yahya Sinwar’s operational movement as he was pursued by the forces and led to his elimination,” the Israeli military said in a statement.
In the last months of his life, Sinwar, the main architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza, appears to have stopped using telephones and other communication equipment that would have allowed Israel’s powerful intelligence services to track him down.
Israeli officials said they believed he was hiding in one of the vast network of tunnels that Hamas dug beneath Gaza over the past two decades, but as more and more have been uncovered by Israeli troops, even the tunnels were no guarantee of escaping capture.
The head of Israel’s military, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said Israel’s pursuit of Sinwar over the past year drove him “to act like a fugitive, causing him to change locations multiple times.”
Israeli officials, who knew Sinwar as a ruthless and committed enemy, were long concerned that he had surrounded himself with some of the 101 Israeli and foreign hostages still held in Gaza as a human shield to protect himself from Israeli attacks.
But no hostages were found nearby when he was finally trapped on Wednesday, although Hagari said samples of his DNA were located in a tunnel a few hundred meters from where six Israeli hostages were executed by Hamas at the end of August.
Israel sends more troops into north Gaza, deepens raid
- The escalation of Israel’s Jabalia operation came a day after it said it had killed Yahya Sinwar,
CAIRO: The Israeli military said on Friday it sent another army unit to support its forces operating in Jabalia, the largest of Gaza’s eight historic refugee camps, where residents said tanks blew up roads and houses as they thrust further into the territory.
Residents of Jabalia in northern Gaza said Israeli tanks had reached the heart of the camp, using heavy air and ground fire, after pushing through suburbs and residential districts.
They added that the Israeli army was destroying dozens of houses on a daily basis, sometimes from the air and the ground and by placing bombs in buildings then detonating them remotely.
The Israeli military said its forces, which have been operating in Jabalia for the past two weeks, killed dozens of militants in close-quarters combat on Thursday and carried out aerial strikes and dismantled military infrastructure.
The escalation of Israel’s Jabalia operation came a day after it said it had killed the country’s number one enemy, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s chief, whom it blamed for ordering the Oct 7 attack on Israel, the deadliest in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israeli military says its operation in Jabalia is intended to stop Hamas fighters from regrouping for more attacks.
Residents said Israeli forces had effectively isolated the far northern Gazan towns of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia, and Beit Lahiya from Gaza City, blocking movement except for those families heeding evacuation orders and leaving the three towns.
Appeal for immediate hospital supplies
On Friday, health officials appealed for fuel, medical supplies and food to be sent immediately to three northern Gaza hospitals overwhelmed by the number of patients and injuries.
At the Kamal Adwan Hospital, medics had to replace children in intensive care with more critical cases of adults badly wounded by Israeli air strikes on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Jabalia on Thursday, killing 28 people.
The children were moved to another division inside the facility, where they were being well taken care of, he said.
“All those cases are critical and they need medical intervention,” said Hussam Abu Safiya, Kamal Adwan’s director in a video sent to the media.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, said on X that the attack on the school was the third on an UNRWA facility this week, adding the agency had now lost a total of 231 team members in the past year of fighting.
Abu Safiya said 300 medical staff, who had been working for 14 days, were becoming too exhausted, especially at the failure of the hospital to provide them with adequate food as all supplies were depleting.
Doctors at the Kamal Adwan, Al-Awda and Indonesian hospitals have refused to leave their patients despite evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military at the start of its Jabalia push.
Northern Gaza, which had been home to well over half the territory’s 2.3 million people, was bombed to rubble in the first phase of Israel’s assault on the territory a year ago.
Israel began its military campaign after the Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas-led fighters, who killed 1,200 people and captured 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
More than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive so far, according to Gaza’s health authorities.
Hamas official says group cannot be eliminated, does not confirm Sinwar’s death
A senior Hamas official said the Palestinian militant group cannot be eliminated with the killing of its leaders, but stopped short of confirming the death of its chief, Yahya Sinwar.
“Hamas is a liberation movement led by people looking for freedom and dignity, and this cannot be eliminated,” Basem Naim, senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, told AFP.
In a statement, he listed several Hamas leaders killed in the past, and said their deaths had boosted the group’s popularity.
“It seems that Israel believes that killing our leaders means the end of our movement and the struggle of the Palestinian people,” Naim said.
“Hamas each time became stronger and more popular, and these leaders became an icon for future generations to continue the journey toward a free Palestine.”
