How Hamas intends to ensnare Israel in the Gaza maze

According to two people close to Hamas’ leadership, the group is ready for a protracted conflict in the Gaza Strip and thinks it can stall Israel’s approach long enough to pressure its fierce rival into accepting a truce.

The persons, who wished to remain anonymous because of the delicate nature of the situation, said that Hamas, the organization that controls Gaza, had accumulated guns, missiles, food, and medical supplies. According to the persons who spoke with Reuters, the organization is certain that its thousands of militants can fend for themselves for months in a network of tunnels excavated out of the Palestinian enclave and impede Israeli troops using urban guerrilla tactics.

According to the sources, Hamas thinks that as civilian deaths increase and international pressure mounts on Israel to lift the siege, a ceasefire and a diplomatic settlement could be forced, in which case the militant group would have to make a concrete concession like freeing thousands of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli hostages.

According to four Hamas officials, a regional official, and a source familiar with the White House’s thinking, the organization has made it plain to the US and Israel via indirect, Qatar-mediated hostage discussions that it aims to impose such a prisoner release in return for hostages.

In the long run, Hamas has declared its intention to lift Israel’s 17-year siege of Gaza, put an end to Israeli settlement growth, and stop what the Palestinians see as oppressive measures by Israeli security forces at Jerusalem’s most revered Muslim site, the al-Aqsa mosque.

UN experts said that there was a “grave risk of genocide” for the Palestinian people in Gaza on Thursday and demanded a humanitarian truce. A spiraling crisis is what many analysts see, with no obvious conclusion in sight for either side.

Former deputy prime minister and foreign minister of Jordan Marwan Al-Muasher currently works in Washington for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The mission to destroy Hamas is not easily achieved,” he remarked.

“Militant resolution of this dispute is not possible. These are hard times for us. There won’t be a brief conflict.”

Since the Oct. 7 onslaught, in which Hamas terrorists broke out of the Gaza Strip, murdering 1,400 Israelis and capturing 239 captives, Israel has used massive aircraft force.

nearly 9,000 people have died in Gaza, and the daily bloodshed there is igniting rallies against the fate of the nearly 2 million people who are besieged in the small enclave—many of whom without access to electricity, water, or food—around the globe. At least 50 Palestinians including a Hamas leader were killed on Tuesday when Israeli aircraft struck a packed refugee camp in Gaza.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, has dismissed pleas for a truce and pledged to destroy Hamas. Israeli authorities accuse the extremists of hiding behind civilians and warn they have no illusions about what may happen next.

According to Danny Danon, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN and member of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee, the nation has prepared for a “long and painful war.”

“We know at the end that we will prevail and that we will defeat Hamas,” he said to Reuters. “The question will be the price, and we have to be very cautious and very careful and understand that it’s a very complex urban area to manoeuvre.”

Although it acknowledges that humanitarian assistance delivery requires pauses in hostilities, the United States has said that the moment is not right for a broad ceasefire.

A ‘FULLY PREPARED’ HAMAS

Adeeb Ziadeh, a Palestinian foreign affairs professor at Qatar University who has researched Hamas, said that the organization had to have had a longer-term strategy in place to carry out its attack on Israel.

“Those who executed the Oct. 7 assault with this degree of skill, experience, accuracy, and ferocity would have been ready for a protracted conflict. Ziadeh told Reuters that Hamas could not launch such a strike unless it was fully mobilized and ready for the consequences.

According to a person familiar with White House thinking who wished to remain anonymous so they could talk freely, Washington anticipates Hamas trying to drag Israeli troops into street-by-street fighting in Gaza and inflict enough military fatalities to also garner Israeli public support for a protracted struggle.

Nevertheless, the individual said, Israeli officials have emphasized to their American colleagues that they’re ready to take on Hamas’ guerilla tactics and endure worldwide condemnation of their onslaught. The insider said that it is still unclear whether the nation is able to completely destroy Hamas or only seriously weaken the group.

About 40,000 fighters are part of Hamas, according to sources inside the organization. They have a massive network of defensive tunnels that are hundreds of kilometers long and up to 80 meters deep, which they have dug over many years, to travel about the enclave.

Residents and recordings from Gaza claim to have witnessed terrorists coming out of tunnels on Thursday to fire at tanks before vanishing back into the network.

According to an Israeli military spokeswoman, there has been a “complex urban fight” in Gaza where troops from the Yahalom special combat engineering unit have been collaborating with other forces to identify and destroy tunnel shafts.

Ali Baraka, the director of Hamas’ External Relations in Beirut, said that the organization has progressively enhanced its military capabilities, especially its rockets. Hamas and Israel have fought many conflicts in the last few decades. He said that the greatest range of Hamas missiles during the 2008 Gaza war was 40 km (25 miles), but by the 2021 battle, it had increased to 230 km.

“We surprise the Israelis with something new in every war,” Baraka said to Reuters.

After weeks of bombing, an official close to the Hamas-affiliated Lebanese organization Hezbollah, which is supported by Iran, said that the Palestinian militant group’s combat power remained mostly intact. According to Hezbollah and Hamas leaders, Hezbollah has a unified military operation center in Lebanon with Hamas and other allied organizations in a regional network supported by Iran.

DEMANDED FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL

Israel, the US, and the EU have all recognized Hamas as a terrorist organization. In its founding charter from 1988, Hamas demanded the annihilation of Israel.

The organization finally acknowledged the concept of a Palestinian state within the 1967 boundaries that Israel had claimed during the Six-Day War in a later declaration known as its 2017 charter, albeit it did not expressly acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

The ongoing conflict in Gaza and the Oct. 7 incident, according to Beirut-based Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan, will resurrect the debate over Palestinian statehood.

We have the chance to demonstrate to them that we are in control of our own fate. We can adjust the region’s equation in a manner that benefits us,” he said to Reuters.

After decades of fighting came to an end in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Peace Accord between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas acquired more clout. In 1996, Netanyahu achieved his first electoral victory. The US government’s reluctance to stop Jewish settlement construction in the occupied West Bank throughout the years, according to Palestinians and US negotiators, has hampered attempts to establish a distinct Palestinian state. Israeli authorities have previously disputed that settlements stand in the way of peace, and Netanyahu’s far-right government has adopted an even more adamant stance against giving up seized territory.

Since 2002, there has been an Arab peace project that has widespread support both internationally and among Arabs themselves. A autonomous Palestinian state is offered in return for peace accords with full diplomatic connections to Israel.

Instead, Netanyahu has chosen to pursue an Arab Sunni alliance with Israel, which includes the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Egypt and Jordan, with which Israel has peace treaties from 1979 and 1994. He was in US-brokered discussions with Saudi Arabia before to the Oct. 7 Hamas assault to create a historic diplomatic agreement as a unified front against Iran, but that process has now been halted.

According to Muasher, the former minister of Jordan at Carnegie, there was no chance that Middle Eastern security could be achieved without including the Palestinians when Hamas launched its onslaught.

“It’s clear today that without peace with the Palestinians, you are not going to have peace in the region.”