MESSAGE
| DATE | 2023-11-04 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Hamas Weapons Cache.
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wsj.com
Hamas Has Deadlier Weapons Than the Last Time Israel Invaded Gaza
Benoit Faucon and Sune Engel Rasmussen
11–14 minutes
Updated Nov. 4, 2023 12:01 am ET
The last time Israel invaded the Gaza Strip nearly a decade ago, its
troops pummeled an overmatched Hamas fighting force. They destroyed
tunnel systems and sealed off smuggling routes, costing the Islamist
group two-thirds of its missiles by the time they withdrew.
Now, as Israel steps up a new invasion, it faces a more-potent enemy
that has rebuilt its arsenal with help from Iran. Since the operation
started on Oct. 27, Hamas has attacked the Israeli army with
explosive-laden drones, anti-tank missiles and high-impact rockets—the
sorts of weapons that have transformed the battlefield in Ukraine.
With 26 fatalities in a week of operation, Israelis are dying at more
than twice the rate as in 2014, when 67 lost their lives during a
seven-week campaign.
At the heart of Hamas’ ability to respond to the invasion is the group’s
longstanding relationship with Iran, which has continued to support the
Palestinian militants with money and technical expertise. In the months
leading up to the Oct. 7 attack, hundreds of Hamas fighters went to Iran
for military training, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official, said that while he
expects Israel to ultimately triumph, the sophisticated arsenal meant
Israel would have to brace for a long-haul struggle. “Hamas is a
military power that is significant thanks to Iran,” said Melamed. “They
are armed to the teeth.”
The Islamist group has used the expertise to develop local skills in
arms manufacturing, cobbling together weapons from materials available
in the Gaza Strip, despite an Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the
territory, weapons it is now using to fight the Israeli army.
Some analysts say that even if Israel manages to deplete Hamas’ military
capabilities, the destruction wrought to achieve that goal may prompt a
lengthy insurgency once the campaign is over.
The U.S. fought several wars against militant groups, including al-Qaeda
and the Taliban, only to face lengthy and stubborn insurgencies.
Eradicating Hamas will perhaps be even harder, analysts say.
“Hamas has very, very deep roots, and that’s different from al Qaeda,
which was smaller,” said Dan Byman, senior fellow and expert in
counterterrorism with the Center for Strategic and International Studies
think tank.
Even if a defeat for Hamas deters Palestinians from joining the group,
the Israeli offensive will fuel anger among Palestinians, who might join
other armed groups. Israel hasn’t offered any indication of what comes
after the military operation. It likely won’t maintain a permanent
ground troop presence in the strip, and there are no settler communities
that appear willing to live there. Crucially, Byman said, even the U.S.
had tangible support in the populations where it fought insurgencies.
“The U.S. had advantages, a lot of Iraqis and Afghans who wanted to work
with them,” he said. “There are no Palestinians eager to work with
Israelis in Gaza.”
Marwan Abdel-Al, a senior official in the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine, a Syria-based secular armed group with
operations in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, said in an interview in
Lebanon that Hamas and its allies are better equipped to respond to an
Israeli ground invasion than in the past.
“Today, it’s totally different from 2014,” he said, pointing to drones,
as well as the type of advanced guerrilla methods developed by Iran’s
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Russian Wagner mercenary group.
The Front said it participated in the Oct. 7 attacks and that it
continues to lob missiles into Israel from Gaza.
Abdel-Al warned Israel will get bogged down, like Germany did in Russia
during World War II or the U.S. in Vietnam. “The guys there, on the
ground,” he said, “they are ready.”
Hamas has been manufacturing rockets for more than two decades. The
first generation of Qassam rockets, cheap sugar-fueled rockets that
Hamas began producing during the Palestinian uprising known as the
Second Intifada, around 2001, had a range of 2 to 3 miles. The third
generation, Qassam 3, had a range of about 10. Now, Hamas has shown
missiles with a range of up to 150 miles, covering basically all of Israel.
In the past, Iran produced rockets in Sudan and smuggled them into Gaza
via tunnels from Sinai with the help of Egyptian Bedouins. That has
largely been stopped now, since Egypt flooded the tunnels and Sudan
initiated a rapprochement with Israel and distanced itself from Iran.
Instead, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have moved to indigenous production and
are manufacturing both explosives and the weapon from raw materials,
according to analysts.
To manufacture rockets, Hamas has used steel piping for metal in motors
and warhead casings. It has used unexploded Israeli artillery heads for
explosives. Other elements, like the fusion system and fins are easy to
build and weld together, and fuel for the rocket’s propellant can be
smuggled in.
Hamas’ most-potent defense may be its extensive tunnel network that runs
beneath Gaza like an underground city, storing fighters, fuel, weapons
and, since Oct. 7., hostages.
“The tunnels really change everything,” said Daphné Richemond-Barak,
professor at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, and author of a
book on underground warfare. “The tunnels neutralize any military
advantage.”
Hamas’ tunnels have been extended and reinforced since the 2014 war,
likely with counsel from Iran, which keeps some of its own military
facilities underground, Richemond-Barak said, adding that Hamas has also
been inspired by Islamic State’s use of similar tunnels.
“This is probably the most sophisticated network of tunnels seen in any
type of war,” she said.
The tunnels also run to the sea, which can be used for smuggling, to
launch unmanned underwater vehicles and as conduits for Hamas frogmen,
according to Lenny Ben-David, an expert in Hamas weaponry with the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a think tank.
The central role of the tunnels partly explains the scale of the Israeli
bombardments. Israel says Hamas stores weapons and command centers under
civilian buildings, including hospitals. Israel has also deployed a
special-forces unit specialized in searching and destroying tunnels,
called Yahalom.
To get to Hamas’ weapons, the Israeli military must “peel off the top
layer of Gaza,” Ben-David said.
Israel says it has hit more than 11,000 targets in Gaza, population two
million, using missiles, bombs and artillery.
The campaign has taken a tremendous toll on Palestinians in the Strip,
killing more than 9,200, the majority women and children, according to
health authorities in Hamas-controlled Gaza. The toll, which couldn’t be
independently verified, doesn’t distinguish between militants and
civilians. An estimated 1.5 million people have been displaced, many of
them fleeing south or taking shelter in schools, hospitals and
international aid facilities.
Earlier this week, repeated Israeli airstrikes targeted Jabalia, a
refugee camp that has become a warren of permanent homes. Gaza hospital
officials said hundreds of people were killed and injured in the strike.
The Israeli military said it had struck an underground bunker killing
dozens of militants, including a senior Hamas commander who played a key
role in the Oct. 7 massacre.
Privately, Hamas has expressed confidence it can sustain a long-term
campaign before it runs out of arms, according to officials in the
region. A few days after the Oct. 7 attack, Hamas told Iranian Foreign
Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian the militants “can continue for months
on their own,” Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said in an
interview.
Back in 2014, Hamas mostly relied on Soviet-era projectiles with no
guidance system that dated as far back as 1969, according to a United
Nations report published the following year. Drones were a rarity in
Hamas’ hands and were generally crude models with limited strike
capabilities.
In this war, Hamas has published videos of targeting Israeli troops with
munitions dropped from drones, a Ukraine-style battlefield innovation,
and damaged two tanks and several military vehicles.
Israeli forces have also faced attackers equipped with North Korea-made
F-7 High-Explosive Fragmentation rockets; Kornet man-portable anti-tank
guided missile, a model developed in Russia but often copied by Iran;
and locally-produced “Al-Yassin” Tandem anti-tank rockets.
A new addition to the battlefield has been paragliders, which Hamas used
to penetrate Israel on Oct. 7 as a form of airborne infantry. To avoid
detection in Gaza, Hamas fighters received training in paragliding in
Iran, according to people familiar with the matter.
This week, Hamas published a video displaying a guided underwater
vehicle called Al-Asef described by Hamas as a “torpedo,” which appears
similar to an underwater drone that Israel in 2021 said the militant
group had tried to fire at one of its vessels.
Hamas has acquired these weapons despite attempts by Israel and Egypt in
the aftermath of the 2014 war to reduce the flow of weapons going
through tunnels connected to Gaza with the Sinai. Over time, some of
those routes were rebuilt and smuggling resumed, according to
Middle-East security officials.
More importantly, Israel failed to seal off access by sea to Gaza’s 25
miles of coastline. Smuggling by sea, especially via fishing boats used
by local Gazans, has been much more difficult to monitor for the Israeli
military.
The sea route may explain the presence of specialty assault rifles that
turned up on the bodies of dead militants on Oct. 7. The AK-103-2 were
initially manufactured by a Russian government factory and exclusively
bought by Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi following the lifting of an
arms embargo in 2003, said Adam Rousselle, a researcher at the Militant
Wire, a network of experts that examines weapons used by non-state actors.
A team of Hamas operatives exported large amounts of weapons sent from
Libya to Gaza possibly as recently as 2017, according to a Libyan
prosecutor’s file reviewed by the Journal. The group received the
assistance of the two former leaders of the Libyan Islamic Fighting
Group, an al-Qaeda affiliate, said a Libyan security official.
During its rampage at Kibbutz Holit, a rural settlement 1.2 miles from
the Gaza Strip, Hamas used Iranian made man-portable surface-to-air
missiles, according to Calibre Obscura, an open source analyst that
specializes in identifying weapons used by non-state actors. The armed
branch of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad posted a video of an attack on
the settlement with anti-tank guided missiles. Both weapons were
produced by subsidiaries of the Iranian ministry of defense in the 1990s.
Hamas has also developed a robust domestic weapons-manufacturing
capability that partly relies on Iranian technology transfers.
It has built a drone called Ababil, developed after Iranian design.
Hamas also has a domestically produced drone called the Zouari, named
after a Tunisian engineer, Mohammed al-Zawari, who helped develop the
weapons and was assassinated in Tunisia in 2016, a killing Hamas blamed
on Israeli intelligence.
“We have to destroy these places and not allow them to be built again,”
said Yaakov Amidror, a former Israeli national security adviser and now
senior fellow at the conservative Jerusalem Institute for Strategic
Studies think tank, referring to Hamas’ military infrastructure. “That’s
why the IDF after the war will maintain freedom of action in Gaza,
whether with airstrikes or troops on the ground.”
Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon-at-wsj.com and Sune Engel Rasmussen
at sune.rasmussen-at-wsj.com
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