TEL AVIV – The Southern Command of the Israeli armed forces believes that Hamas has ceased to be an orderly and organized army, to become a “guerrilla army” made up of disconnected local organizations. He told it Daron Kadoshmilitary radio correspondent Galei Tzahalin a long and detailed report.
The head of the IDF Southern Command, Major General Yaron Finkelmanlast week convened a broad discussion “lasting several hours” to outline an “Assessment of the enemy’s capabilities” outlining the state of the art of Hamas after 8 months of war. The IDF, says Kadosh, believes that today every local commander controls only his area, without coordination and liaison with others.
Of 24 battalion commanders, 12 were eliminated and replaced with less capable replacements. But the two leaders, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, are still safe: “At no point in the war did we have the exact position at that given moment”, explains the IDF.
The ability to launch rockets is also severely compromised but not yet destroyed. The IDF estimates that Hamas still has “a few hundred long-range rockets” with launch batteries of up to 10 rockets at a time, hidden in Khan Younis and Rafah. In the north of the Strip there would instead be only short-range missiles. During the discussion, Kadosh reports, a senior officer assured that “we will not reach zero rockets but we will get close.”
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As for the tunnels, the IDF estimates the underground network is approximately 500 kilometers long. He believes there were around forty people used for smuggling between Rafah and Egypt, and he has so far neutralized 25 of them.
It also claims to have eliminated half of the operatives in the military wing of Hamas, around 14 thousand out of thirty thousand. As for the approximately 15,000 still alive, intelligence estimates that a third are routed, have fled to refugee camps and are often unarmed. There would therefore be 5 thousand inactive, but they are still considered an integral part of Hamas fighters because “at any time they can take up arms and return to fighting”.
The active forces in combat position would instead be around ten thousand men. Two thousand are believed to be in the north of the Strip, a contingent now insufficient to maintain full control. According to the IDF “we are increasingly closer to the moment in which a government challenge to Hamas can grow there”. An issue which, however, goes well beyond the competences of the IDF. It is a chapter that falls to politics, and in the Israeli government there are more divergences than consensus: it does not seem to have a unified strategic idea on post-Hamas at all.
