In the third month of the Gaza offensive, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari announced that his country had “completed the dismantling of the Hamas military cadre in northern Gaza” and that the operation was entering in a new phase intended to repeat the same objectives in the center and south of the Gaza Strip. By this time, soldiers had also managed to divide the Palestinian enclave in two via the Netzarim corridor – to isolate Hamas units – and Israel had racked up several strategic military victories.
However, since last weekend, Israel has once again punished northern Gaza with all its force and announced a new offensive with intense bombardments and severe sieges to try to stop attempts to reconstitute the forces of the Hamas. The army ordered a new forced displacement of civilians from the north, affecting some 400,000 people, bombed civilian shelters and dropped leaflets announcing a “new phase of the war”. “There is no end to the hell” civilians are experiencing in northern Gaza, said Philippe Lazzarini, director of UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees and the main provider of humanitarian aid in the strip.
“The Israeli attack on Gaza, for all its ferocity, revealed certain weaknesses in Israeli military capabilities. It has been vastly outmatched in the asymmetric urban war of attrition on the ground, in which, after a full year of fighting, Hamas irregulars, lightly armed and with no sanctuary outside the combat zone, continue to challenge the forces Israeli forces and make the prospect of prolonged reoccupation daunting,” says Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, a former adviser to the Israeli government and a former negotiator in two peace processes under Isaac Rabin and Ehud Barak.
Levy believes that with the latest blows to Hezbollah, “the army [israelí] “They reaffirmed their technological superiority, their sense of power and their capacity for deterrence, but they nevertheless revealed their limitations on the battlefield,” he explains. “Its massive destruction of Gaza – now repeated in Lebanon and, in some respects, the West Bank – suggests that its overwhelming technology, air power and artillery coexist with a diminished appetite and capacity for infantry combat. “Urban warfare in Gaza has been largely abandoned in favor of mass destruction,” he adds.
A recent survey by ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), a database of armed conflicts around the world, claims that Hamas maintains about half of its fighters. Israel claims to have killed 17,000 of the 25,000 to 30,000 Hamas fighters, but ACLED research, which analyzes all the violent incidents of the offensive one by one, identifies only 8,500 deaths among the fighters, one a figure that also includes members of other Hamas armed groups and perhaps even Hamas fighters. other unarmed members of Hamas. “As expected, given the circumstances, the resistance even managed to reconstitute its ranks among the civilian population,” adds Lévy.
ACLED researchers explain how fighting continued in four of the five areas of the Gaza Strip over which the army had declared operational control. “The fighting since December 1 has shifted to more urban areas, which provide better defensive terrain for a light infantry force defending against a mechanized assault,” says analyst Brian Carter in a report for the think tank Institute for the Study of War.
“The withdrawal of Israeli troops beginning at the end of 2023 allowed Hamas to once again strengthen its control over the Palestinian population because the army had not secured the area or replaced Hamas with a new government authority. Hamas began rebuilding its governing authority as early as January 2024, when, as an Israeli analyst and former government official noted, Hamas began exercising surveillance in northern Gaza and managing trade within just a few weeks. after the first large-scale departure of five Israeli soldiers. brigades on December 29,” Carter wrote. “It is very likely that the group’s confidence will continue to grow through the remainder of spring 2024, encouraged in part by the Israeli decision to withdraw most of its remaining forces from the Gaza Strip last April,” he added. he.
The Israeli army not only recognized Hamas’s efforts to recruit new fighters and its attempt to rebuild its military organization, but also the production of weapons “using unexploded Israeli ordnance as raw material”, explains the analyst military. “The military estimates that between 2,000 and 3,000 Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza failed to explode, although other experts and an Israeli intelligence official estimate that the number could be between 5,000 and 7,500 bombs .” It should be added to this that “Hamas’ vast network of tunnels remains operational in many areas,” say ACLED analysts.
The abandonment of urban warfare in Gaza in favor of mass destruction “leads to the kind of self-inflicted mistakes that the less powerful side relies on in an asymmetric war,” Levy says. “Israel is preparing to be drawn into a continued reoccupation of Gaza (and perhaps parts of Lebanon), which will likely provoke a war of attrition that could exacerbate Israel’s already scarce labor force, while the anger generated by their massacres will ensure the reconstitution of numbers. the strength of resistance and creates enduring narratives that also further weaken the political position of Arab leaders who have remained silent or complicit.
Seeking a war of attrition rather than direct confrontation against a much stronger army, Hamas is trying to improve its chances of survival.
Regarding “manpower,” Levy points to signs of attrition in Israeli ranks after a year of conflict. “There is a lot of information about how exhausted reservists are after so many tours of duty; on the mobilization rate below 50% during the last calls; and on Israel’s recruitment of asylum seekers,” he said. Members of the Defense Ministry and several witnesses confirmed to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the authorities had promised permanent residence to the refugees in exchange for leaving to fight in Gaza.
“Even though Hamas no longer has the capacity or desire to govern war-torn Gaza, it retains the capacity to continue waging low-intensity conflict. Given that Israeli military presence is expected to persist in some form in Gaza and Hamas is far from completely eradicated, armed violence is likely to continue in Gaza for the foreseeable future,” note the ACLED researchers. .
The organization’s analysts also confirm that Hamas activity in the West Bank has skyrocketed after 15 years of “relative inactivity.” Last year, Hamas was involved in 130 violent incidents in the West Bank, representing a 135% increase from the previous 12 months. “It is likely that Hamas is involved in hundreds of other unclaimed acts of violence, as the group often only takes responsibility if the operative has been killed – to protect itself from Israeli vengeance,” say the authors.
Finally, this year, Israel also revealed “the extent of its total dependence on the United States, even as its actions have simultaneously weakened American influence in a changing geopolitical climate,” Levy asserts.
