Skepticism is growing about Israel’s ability to dismantle Hamas

Standing in front of a gray background decorated with Hamas logos and gunman emblems commemorating the bloody Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Osama Hamdan, the organization’s representative in Lebanon, indicated he was not concerned about the expulsion of his Palestinian faction from Gaza.

“We are not worried about the future of the Gaza Strip,” he recently told a busy news conference in his office in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “The decision maker is only the Palestinian people.”

Mr. Hamdan thus rejected one of Israel’s main objectives since it began its attack on Gaza: to dismantle the Islamist political and military organization that Israeli officials say was behind the massacre of about 1,200 people and that still holds more than 100 hostages holds. .

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has repeatedly emphasized this objective, even as he faces increasing international pressure to scale back military operations. The Biden administration has sent senior envoys to Israel to push for a new phase of the war focused on more targeted operations rather than sweeping destruction.

And critics both inside Israel and beyond have questioned whether the decision to destroy such a deeply entrenched organization was ever realistic. A former Israeli national security adviser called the plan “vague.”

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

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has survived repeated attempts to eliminate its leadership. According to political and military specialists, the structure of the organization was designed to accommodate such unforeseen circumstances. Furthermore, Israel’s devastating tactics in the Gaza war threaten to radicalize a broader swath of the population, inspiring new recruits.

Analysts likely see the most optimal outcome for Israel as follows: affecting Hamas’ military capabilities to prevent the group from repeating such a devastating attack. But even that limited goal is considered a formidable slog.

Hamas is rooted in the ideology that Israeli control over what it considers Palestinian land must be countered by force, a principle that is likely to persist, experts say.

“As long as that context is there, you will have to deal with some form of Hamas,” said Tahani Mustafa, senior Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank. “It is fantasy to imagine that you can simply uproot such an organization.”

The Israeli army said this week it had killed about 8,000 Hamas fighters, out of a force estimated at 25,000 to 40,000. But it is unclear how the count is done. The military says about 500 have surrendered, although Hamas has denied that any were among its ranks.

The army has sometimes issued positive progress reports on its objectives, describing as “imminent” full control of areas in northern Gaza where it began its ground offensive in late October.

But Netanyahu acknowledged on Sunday that the war is “taking a very high cost from us,” as the army announced that 15 soldiers had been killed in the past 48 hours alone. Rockets are still being fired into Israel from southern Gaza on an almost daily basis, albeit far fewer than before.

Michael Milshtein, a former senior intelligence officer for Israel, criticized statements by some Israeli leaders portraying Hamas as a breaking point, saying this could raise false expectations about the duration of the war.

“They have been saying this for a while, that Hamas is collapsing,” Mr. Milshtein said. “But it’s just not true. Every day we face tough battles.”

The Israeli army recently distributed fliers in Gaza offering cash for information leading to the arrest of four Hamas leaders.

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

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

Although long among the most wanted men in Gaza, the elusive Mr. Deif has avoided assassination or capture. The only photo of him in public is a decades-old portrait photo.

The bounties appeared to be a new indication that Israel is struggling to oust the Hamas leadership.

It is believed that the top of the group, along with most of the fighters and the remaining hostages, are hiding in deep tunnels. Although the Israeli military has said it has demolished at least 1,500 shafts, experts believe the underground infrastructure is largely intact.

It is believed that the tunnels, built over fifteen years, are so extensive, estimated to be hundreds of kilometers long, that Israelis call them the Gaza Metro.

“Hamas is actually weathering this attack very well,” said Tareq Baconi, an author who wrote a book about the group. “It still shows that it has an offensive military capability.”

Giora Eiland, a retired major general and former head of Israel’s National Security Council, said Hamas has shown the ability to quickly replace commanders who are killed with others equally capable and equally committed.

“From a professional point of view, I have to recognize their resilience,” he said. “I cannot see any sign of a collapse in Hamas’s military capabilities, nor of their political strength to continue running Gaza.”

Hamas is rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood, which was born in Egypt in 1928 as a religious social reform movement but has often been blamed for fueling jihadist violence in recent decades. Israel once grew the group as an Islamist counterweight to the more mainstream and secular Palestine Liberation Organization.

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

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

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

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

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

Divided geographically, the five main brigades were located in northern Gaza; Gaza City; central Gaza; and two southern cities, Khan Younis and Rafah.

Most of the elite forces were in the two northern brigades, which make up about 60 percent of the force, said an Israeli military official who requested anonymity due to military regulations. About half of them have been killed, injured, arrested or fled south, the official claimed.

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

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

“The top leadership could disappear at any moment because they could be killed, arrested and deported,” he said. “So they developed this mechanism of easy transmission of commands.”

The Qassam Brigades are divided into battalions, with even smaller units defending individual neighborhoods. Other specialized battalions include an anti-tank unit, a tunnel-building unit and an air wing whose drones and paragliders were a key part of the Oct. 7 surprise attack, analysts and former military and intelligence officials said.

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

Completely eliminating Hamas would require street-to-street, house-to-house fighting, and Israel lacks both the time and personnel, said Elliot Chapman, a Middle East analyst at Janes, a defense analytics firm.

As the United States has experienced in its efforts to suppress Al Qaeda and the Taliban, these organizations tend to bounce back once armed pressure is lifted. The struggle in Gaza has been compared to the campaign to wrest Mosul, Iraq, from the Islamic State less than a decade ago, but there are significant differences.

Hamas is particularly organic to Gaza – it emerged from frustration over the fact that mainstream factions have given up the armed struggle against the Israeli occupation. 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: more than 20,000 Gazans have been killed so far, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Some Gazans curse Hamas, even taking to the airwaves or social media, despite the organization’s history of suppressing opponents. Other Gazans, however, say they still support “the resistance,” and Hamas has long received support by providing services such as schools and clinics.

A recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Research found that most respondents supported Hamas’ attack on Israel. Support for Hamas in Gaza has risen from 38 percent to 42 percent since the start of the war, the poll found.

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

But even if Israel were to somehow manage 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 this group wake up.

“The right way to think about it 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 just have a strategy to kill everyone,” he added. “You have to have that day-after scenario.”

Aaron Bokserman, Hwaida Saad And Abu Bakr Bashir reporting contributed.