‘More Vietcong than Isis’: Hamas’s military tactics

For more than a decade, Israel’s military leadership grudgingly acknowledged one overriding trait in its Gaza enemy: Hamas knew how to bide its time.

“Let the beast sleep until you’re ready,” was the mantra of Mahmoud Ajrami, a veteran Palestinian fighter who has trained a generation of Gaza militants.

Examples were plentiful. In 2018, Hamas released images of Israeli soldiers in the crosshairs of its snipers – the shot never taken, even as the Israelis shot at protesters at the border fence. Another video showed militants destroying a military bus with a Kornet missile – but waiting for the soldiers to disembark and the driver to take a cigarette break.

The apparent restraint was interpreted by Israel as a sign that Hamas was deterred. But to Ajrami, the militant group was merely waiting to draw Israel into a battle at the time of its choosing.

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“Bring the beast to me, and we will slay it together,” he vowed to fighters outside his palatial villa in 2021, after Hamas claimed victory over Israel in an 11-day war that involved a ferocious exchange of Palestinian rockets and Israeli air strikes – but no ground troops.

The trigger came on October 7th, when Hamas fighters rampaged through Israeli towns and military posts, killing more than 1,400 people and taking more than 230 hostages, according to Israeli authorities – the biggest loss of life within Israel since its creation. The scale and horrors of the attack have drawn Israel into its biggest ever military operation in Gaza, its air strikes and artillery flattening large parts of the territory with more than 8,000 people killed, according to Palestinian officials.

With technological superiority and massed weaponry on its side, Israel has launched its first ground offensive in Gaza in almost a decade. Since late on Friday a vanguard has moved with Merkava tanks into largely unpopulated areas to the north of the strip.

But within a few minutes’ drive lie the warrens of al-Shati and Jabalia refugee camps – and then, Gaza City, the heart of Hamas’s political and military machinery.

“As the IDF goes into Gaza, Hamas has the home advantage – and they’re ready,” said Devorah Margolin, the Blumenstein-Rosenbloom senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East policy.

As recently as August, Maj Gen Yitzhak Brik, a former military ombudsman, warned that Israel was “not ready for war”. Its soldiers have not fought a major land battle since 2014 – the last time it deployed troops inside Gaza – and its top brass has been consumed by potential threats from Iran, rather than the territory next door.

Meanwhile, Hamas had grown stronger militarily since 2008-09, when it first fought an Israeli ground assault, military officials and analysts said.

Even then, Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigade, fielded 16,000 fighters alongside 2,000 dedicated combat troops. Now, according to the Israeli Defence Forces, it has as many as 40,000 elite fighters, and an arsenal of drones and about 30,000 rockets. It has fired 8,500 since October 7th, draining Israel’s Iron Dome interceptors to the point where the US had to fly in replacements.

Emile Hokayem, director of regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said Hamas had been trained by “the best in the business”, referring to Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard and its most powerful proxy, Hizbullah in Lebanon. “It is also a learning organisation that has fought Israeli forces several times,” said Hokayem. “Hamas knows its terrain extremely well and will defend it fiercely and with ingenuity.”

Its fighters already showed during their October 7th assault that they could pull off a tightly co-ordinated operation that involved at least 1,500 troops attacking Israel from land, air and sea, under cover of a barrage of 3,000 rockets that nearly overwhelmed Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system.

In Gaza, Hamas has dug a giant network of deep, bombproof tunnels, and stocked them with provisions to resist a months-long Israeli siege.

“We have been prepared for an [Israeli] ground offensive since before we even launched our attack,” Ali Barakeh, a senior member of Hamas’s exiled political leadership, told the Financial Times last week. “We have some surprises for the enemy,” he added. “We are able to face an urban war more easily than an air war – there’s no comparison.”

Many of the military lessons that Hamas has learnt from Hizbullah stem from a fateful moment in 1992 when Israel deported about 400 Palestinians, including Hamas leaders, to Lebanon and abandoned them in midwinter on a mountainside in no-man’s land.

Predominantly Shia Iran and Hizbullah saw that as an opportunity to co-opt the Sunni Hamas, after having cultivated the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, a smaller militant group that is also in this battle. Israeli officials say Hizbullah has shared rocket technology, training and other techniques with Hamas.

Beirut has since become home to several Hamas chiefs and, in time, Hamas began to build a military presence in Lebanon – as demonstrated when a suspected Hamas weapons depot in Tyre exploded in late 2021.

Hamas has since steadily improved the quality of its armaments, smuggling in components to convert dumb rockets into guided precision weapons, and even building an underwater drone.

According to Hamas, the group now makes Mutabar-1 shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, which it says can take out Israeli helicopters, and al-Yassin anti-tank rockets, which it claims can penetrate the reactive armour of Israel’s Merkava tanks.

Meanwhile, it has developed an urban style of warfare conditioned by its need to counter Israel’s technological and air superiority by forcing the battle down to gritty street fighting.

“Hamas is more Vietcong than Isis,” said Hokayem, referring to the communist fighters that ultimately beat US forces during the Vietnam war, and the jihadi group that Israel likens to Hamas.

Just as the Vietcong did in Vietnam, Hamas has turned Gaza into a fortress of barricades and mouse holes – including a 400km network of tunnels that Hamas fighters can shelter in during Israeli air strikes and use to attack Israeli forces from the rear.

As Israeli troops move deeper into Gaza, Hamas is likely to try to use above-ground ambushes, quick strikes and camouflaged bombs to wear down Israel’s largely civilian army of reservists and bog them down in street fighting.

“Hamas doesn’t have a codified doctrine. Its approach is mostly about damaging and hurting the Israelis as much as possible, using a mix of hybrid and conventional forces,” said Bilal Y Saab, an associate fellow at the Chatham House think-tank in London.

“Operations are also highly decentralised. There is a sort of cellular military structure, where every company operates on its own,” he said.

Hamas’s propaganda operations are another important component. Downed Israeli helicopters, destroyed tanks or captured soldiers will help the militant group project an image of victory, military analysts said.

At the same time, rockets fired from hidden launchers seek to take the fight deep into Israeli territory and bolster Hamas’s support base – such as when the Ben Gurion international airport in Tel Aviv was shut down during the 50-day 2014 war.

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Another lesson that Hamas copied from other militant groups is the importance of secure communications. While Hizbullah has built its own fibre optic network, Hamas has maintained operational security by going “stone age” and using hard-wired phone lines while eschewing devices that are hackable or emit an electronic signature.

One reason Israel was unable to predict the October 7th attack, said one Israeli official, was that it was listening to “the wrong lines”. Crucial military information was meanwhile shared either over that “analogue” system, or another encrypted system, maybe imported from Iran, that was unknown to Israel.

It is a technological sleight of hand that holds a powerful warning for the Israeli ground attack.

“What else were they hiding?” the Israeli official said. “You don’t think we are asking ourselves the same question?” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023