Hamas may have up to 12,000 fighters left, according to US officials who spoke to Reuters. This assessment would mean that Hamas has lost around half its strength in eight months of war.
Israel’s assessments were that Hamas had some 24 battalions at the outset of the war and that most of them were defeated. Israel also believed that around 14,000 Hamas members were killed. This would mean thousands were wounded.
This is now a numbers game of interpretation. If Hamas has 9,000-12,000 fighters left, then it has some 12-15 battalions left, not just a few.
“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 to Reuters.
When the numbers don't add up
The report claimed that Hamas also still has fighters in Rafah. But the numbers game here makes no sense. “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,” the report said.
How can this be? If Hamas has so many people in Rafah, then it has only 1,000 to control the rest of Gaza
This requires skepticism. The fact is that Hamas probably moved most of its fighters out of Rafah and moved back to Khan Younis. Yahya Sinwar, and Sinwar's second-in-command Mohammed Deif are probably in Khan Younis, where Sinwar is from.
Hamas clearly has thousands of fighters in the central camps area of Gaza as well. In addition, Hamas likely has thousands of affiliates in northern Gaza. Hamas also works with other terror groups in Gaza, and they have hundreds or thousands of members. All of the groups are also recruiting and preparing for a long war of attrition.
The fact that Hamas fighters approached the Israeli border fence on the morning of June 6 and clashed with the IDF, killing one IDF soldier, shows the group is still capable of planning and executing operations.
The article claimed Hamas has 500km of tunnels in Gaza. But how can this be known? Some tunnels have been found, but there are probably many that have not been found. The IDF hasn’t even operated in parts of Gaza, including parts of Rafah, Mawasi, the central camps, and parts of northern Gaza.
Hamas works to gain more control
Gaza now boils down to a numbers game. Hamas is recruiting. Hamas is learning, and Hamas is preparing. Whether it has 8,000 or 12,000 fighters may not be that important. It controls most of Gaza. It always returns when the IDF leaves.
There is no huge breakdown in control, and no one seems to openly oppose Hamas in Gaza. It’s believed that many people do oppose Hamas, but it still has a mafia-like grip on the whole of Gaza.
Israel has preferred to move displaced Gazans into areas that Hamas controls, cementing its grip. Israel doesn’t do what the Iraqi army did in Mosul, which is moving the people behind its lines so they can be separated from the terrorists.
Therefore, a continued pool of recruits is always handed to Hamas. So far, the war has been waged for eight months, and the result is to basically keep Hamas in power. Israeli leaders talk about a “day after” plan but it doesn’t seem to be serious.
Talk of humanitarian “bubbles” or handing over control to others has never panned out, and there doesn’t seem to be any stomach in the region or in the US and elsewhere to work toward this handover of Gaza to anyone other than Hamas.
This leaves the tactics in Gaza without a strategy. Whether Hamas has 8,000 or 10,000 fighters, therefore, doesn’t matter if, in the end, Gazans expect Hamas to return and Hamas is never replaced. It could be defeated and replaced, but the political will is not yet there in Israel.
Every day that goes by, Hamas likely becomes strong. It may have reached some kind of nadir at some point, but now it has nowhere to go but up.
All it has to do is hang on and entrench and carry out a few attacks a day in Gaza. That’s how it thrived from the 1990s to 2007. It knows how to do this.