Will Israel be able to dismantle Hamas? The year begins with doubts and skepticism

Standing in front of a gray background decorated with Hamas logos and gunmen’s emblems commemorating the bloody October 7 attack on Israel, Osama Hamdan, the organization’s representative in Lebanon, expressed no concern that its Palestinian faction was expelled from the Gaza Strip.

“We are not worried about the future of the Gaza Strip,” he told a packed news conference recently at his offices in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “It is only the Palestinian people who make the decisions.”

Hamdan thus rejected one of Israel’s key objectives since the start of the attack on Gaza: to dismantle the political and military organization responsible for the massacre of around 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and which still holds more than a hundred hostages.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly emphasized this goal even as he faces a growing international pressure to reduce military operations. Joe Biden’s administration has sent high-level envoys to Israel to push for a new phase of the war focused on more targeted operations rather than widespread destruction.

And critics, both inside and outside Israel, question whether it was ever realistic to decide to destroy such a deeply rooted organization. A former Israeli national security adviser called the plan “vague.”

“I think we have arrived at a moment where the Israeli authorities will have to define more clearly what their ultimate objective is,” French President Emmanuel Macron said this month. “The total destruction of Hamas? Does anyone believe this is possible? If so, the war will last ten years.”

Since its appearance in 1987, Hamas has survived repeated attempts to eliminate its leaders. According to political and military specialists, the very structure of the organization was designed to absorb such contingencies. Furthermore, Israel’s devastating tactics in the war against Hamas threaten to radicalize a larger segment of the population, inspiring new recruits.

Analysts believe the optimal outcome for Israel would likely be to reduce Hamas’ military capabilities to prevent the group from repeating a similarly devastating attack. But even this limited goal is considered a colossal job.

Hamas is rooted in the ideology that it must forcibly oppose Israeli control over what it sees as Palestinian land, a principle that is likely to endure, experts say.

“As long as this context exists, some form of Hamas will have to be confronted,” said Tahani Mustafa, senior Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank. “To assume that you can simply eradicate such an organization is a fantasy.”

The Israeli army reported this week that it had killed around 8,000 Hamas fighters out of a force estimated at between 25,000 and 40,000. But it is not clear how this calculation was made. According to the army, around 500 militants have surrendered, although Hamas denies that they are all part of its ranks.

At times, the army has given positive reports on the progress of its objectives, calling full control over areas of northern Gaza where the ground offensive began in late October “imminent.”

“A very high cost” for Benjamin Netanyahu

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged as much on Sunday The war “is imposing a very high cost” on Israel, when the Army announced that fifteen soldiers had died in the previous 48 hours alone. Rockets continue to be fired almost every day from southern Gaza into Israel, although far fewer than before.

Michael Milshtein, a former senior Israeli intelligence official, criticized claims by some Israeli leaders that Hamas was at breaking point, saying this could create false expectations about how long the war would last.

“They’ve been saying this for a long time, that Hamas is falling apart,” Milshtein said. “But that’s simply not true. Every day we face tough battles.”

The Israeli army recently distributed pamphlets in Gaza offering money in exchange for information that would lead to the arrest of four Hamas leaders.

“Hamas has lost its power. “They couldn’t fry an egg,” the flyer said in Arabic, quoting a popular expression. “The end of Hamas is near.”

The army promised $400,000 for Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader in Gaza, and $100,000 for Mohammed Deif, head of its military wing, the Qassam Brigades. The two are considered the architects of the October 7 attack.

Long one of Gaza’s most wanted men, the elusive Deif has avoided ending up dead or captured. The only image of him in public is a decades-old portrait.

Rewards seemed to be another indication of this Israel is having trouble eliminate the Hamas leadership.

Hamas tunnels

The group’s top levels are believed to be taking refuge, along with most of the remaining fighters and hostages, in deep tunnels. Although the Israeli army said it had demolished at least 1,500, experts believe the underground infrastructure is largely intact.

The tunnels, built over 15 years and hundreds of kilometers long, are believed to be so extensive that Israelis call them the Gaza Metro.

“Hamas is actually resisting this attack quite well,” said Tareq Baconi, author of a book about the group. “It still shows that it has offensive military capability.”

The resilience of Hamas

Giora Eiland, a retired major general and former head of Israel’s National Security Council, said Hamas has demonstrated the ability to quickly replace dying commanders with equally competent and dedicated ones.

“From a professional perspective, I have to recognize their resilience,” he said. “I see no sign of a collapse in Hamas’ military capabilities or its political strength to continue to lead Gaza.”

Hamas has its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, born in Egypt in 1928 as a religious social reform movement but which in recent decades has often been accused of fomenting jihadist violence. Israel once allowed the group to grow as an Islamic counterweight to the more conventional and secular Palestine Liberation Organization.

In one of Israel’s first and most important attempts to dismantle Hamas, it deported 415 of its leaders and allies in 1992, dumping them in a buffer zone along the Israel-Lebanon border. In the months before their return, they formed an alliance with Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the most powerful Iranian-backed militia in the region.

The United States and Israel condemn both Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations.

Even a series of Israeli assassinations of Hamas political, military and religious leaders failed to weaken the group. This gained control of Gaza in free Palestinian elections in 2006 and then ousted its more moderate rival, the Palestinian Authority, in a bloody conflict the following year.

The tentacles of the extremist group

Israel fought three more wars in Gaza against Hamas between 2008 and the current crisis.

The operations of Hamas’ military wing, the Qassam Brigades, remain opaque. The units were designed to continue functioning even if Israel destroyed parts of them.

Divided geographically, its five main brigades were in northern Gaza; city ​​of Gaza; Central Gaza; and two southern cities, Khan Younis and Rafah.

Most of the elite troops were part of the two northern brigades, which make up about 60% of the force, said an Israeli military official who requested anonymity under military regulations. About half of them were killed, injured, arrested or fled to the south, the official said.

For Israel, the goal is to first dismantle the government and then disperse the fighters and eliminate the commanders and their subordinates, the Israeli official said.

But Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian journalist and Muslim Brotherhood member who wrote a book about Hamas, said the group was prepared for this.

“Top leaders can disappear at any time because they can be assassinated, they can be detained, they can be deported,” he said. “So they developed a simple command transfer mechanism.”

The Qassam Brigades are divided into battalions, with even smaller units defending particular neighborhoods. Other specialized battalions include an anti-tank unit, a tunnel construction unit and an air wing whose drones and paragliders were a major element of the Oct. 7 surprise attack, according to analysts and former military and intelligence officials.

The Nukhba Brigade, made up of around a thousand highly trained fighters, also appears to have played a central role on 7 October.

Trying to completely eliminate Hamas would require street-to-street and house-to-house fightingand Israel lacks the time and personnel, said Elliot Chapman, a Middle East analyst at Janes, a defense analytics firm.

As the United States discovered when it tried to crush Al Qaeda or the Taliban, organizations tend to recover once armed pressure is reduced. The fighting in Gaza has been compared to the ISIS terrorist group’s campaign to take Mosul less than a decade ago, but there are significant differences.

In particular, Hamas is organic in Gaza: it was born out of frustration with the abandonment of the armed struggle against the Israeli occupation by the main factions. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel and, according to its founding charter, is committed to its destruction.

The scale of Israel’s war is likely to radicalize a new generation: so far More than 20,000 people have been reported dead in Gaza. according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

Some in the Strip curse Hamas and do so even on the radio or on social media, despite the organization’s history of repressing its opponents. Others, however, say they still support “the resistance,” and Hamas has long gained support by providing services such as schools and clinics.

A recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Research found that a majority of respondents support Hamas’s attack on Israel. According to the poll, support for the terrorist group in Gaza has increased from 38% to 42% since the start of the war.

Forecasts

At best, Israel can probably contain Hamas, experts say.

But even if Israel somehow manages to dismantle the group in Gaza, there are still branches in the West Bank and abroad, in places like Lebanon and Turkey, that could revive it.

“The right way to think about this is to degrade the organization to the point where it no longer poses a sustainable threat,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA officer who specialized in counterterrorism in the Middle East.

“You can’t have a strategy that kills everyone,” he added. “You have to have a morning-after scenario.”

Fountain: The New York Times