Israel has failed to destroy Hamas. How strong is the group now?

On the evening of October 7, Israel officially declared war on Hamas and Binyamin Netanyahu proclaimed its “destruction” to be his principal war aim. He later spoke of its “annihilation”.

Last week President Trump gave Hamas a “last warning”, on his Truth Social platform. “Release all of the Hostages now, not later … or it is OVER for you.” Hamas’s response to Trump’s bombast was robust — almost measured. The best way to release the hostages, said Hamas, was to get on with the specified phase two of January’s ceasefire deal.

As with the grotesque hostage handovers that Hamas has staged in recent weeks the response was intended to convey a defiant message: this is a group that remains in control in Gaza and is not yet close to being annihilated.

Hamas is sending a grotesque message to the world that it is anything but annihilated, insulting Israel and staging paramilitary antics as it hands over Israeli hostages — or their corpses.

But Hamas has certainly been severely hit by the Israeli offensive in Gaza. Its three top leaders have been killed, its 24 reported battalions have been dismantled and a contested Israeli figure of 18,000 Hamas terrorists is included in the 48,200 Gazans that Hamas claims have been killed.

Hamas failed to provoke the multi-front war on Israel that would have galvanised Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Palestinians on the West Bank and Iranian-backed groups across the wider region. Indeed, Israel is now on the offensive against all its local enemies and hopes to “remake” its immediate neighbourhood.

But Hamas has nevertheless survived, which is all a terrorist group has to do to succeed.

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) acknowledge that it may be years before they can reduce Hamas to its pre-2006 status in Gaza, when it took over from the Palestinian Authority. It may never get there.

As Antony Blinken put it in his final week as US secretary of state: “Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.” It may be worse than that for the IDF.

Among Gaza’s 2.3 million people rattling round in a devastated landscape, more than half are under 18 and some 300,000 young men are within the age bracket from which Hamas normally recruits.

Hamas’s new, shadowy leaders probably feel there is a lot for the organisation to live for, even if they know they’re unlikely to see much of it themselves.

Hamas’s survival can be attributed to two sides of the same strategic coin.

One side is the preparation Hamas leaders made for the Israeli response to October 7. Its leaders probably didn’t expect the luxury of a 20-day gap before the IDF moved into Gaza. But when it did, Hamas fell back on stockpiled weapons in their miles of underground tunnels. As they were forced out of each area, they either escaped through them or joined the throngs of civilian refugees who were too numerous for the IDF to screen properly. They sheltered from Israeli air attacks in the tunnels, not available to ordinary Gazans, and were well fed with stockpiled food when Israel restricted food supplies in a failed attempt to turn the population against Hamas.

The terrorists found it comparatively easy to relocate themselves as the focus of the IDF offensive shifted. When Israel concentrated on the north, they went south. When Israel finally moved into the south, Hamas moved back north to centres like Jabalia and Shejaiya. The IDF has revisited the Jabalia refugee camp three times already. Hamas was able to run a mini-state almost freely in central Gaza, which the IDF had bypassed, and even controlled al-Mawasi, the designated civilian refuge in the south, once it had hold of aid supplies being sent there.

Above all, Hamas made preparations to keep its structure intact through its own intelligence operations, no matter how many of its leaders, terrorists or weapons production plants were lost. It is said to have redirected its resources after every attack.

In addition to its stockpiled weapons, Hamas’s home-made production of short-range 107mm
rockets and 60mm mortars continued, and it maintained some flow of Iranian-supplied Russian and Chinese weapons. Russia’s ubiquitous AK-47 rifles are evident, as well as the Iranian-manufactured Sayyad sniper rifle. Beyond that, Russian anti-armour RPG-7s and their many derivatives have been used extensively against Israeli forces, alongside a Chinese RPG derivative, the Type 69.

Iran continues to bankroll Hamas. But over 17 months of war, Hamas also seized enough food aid to raise almost a billion dollars selling the aid to Gazans themselves — about 30 per cent more than the Qataris are thought to have supplied directly to the strip for humanitarian purposes. A broken organisation could never have done all this. Indeed, by spring last year the conflict seemed to turn on the battle between Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence arm and Hamas’s tight and brutal intelligence operation in the Qassam Brigades, which has so far held out and managed to maintain tight control over a desperate population.

The other side of the coin is therefore the strategic ineptitude of the IDF, given that Netanyahu never gave it an achievable war aim.

A classic counterinsurgency strategy might have been more successful. That would have involved clearing and holding areas of Gaza, letting civilians back and providing properly for them, and moving from one area to another, linking up “ink spots” of secured and occupied areas until Hamas was frozen out of communities or bottled up in one particular area. This sort of counterinsurgency requires lots of troops for a long time and would inevitably incur losses. It requires great ‘“heroic restraint”, which is frustrating for commanders and soldiers alike.

But the IDF never came close to such a strategy. Analysts even at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs described IDF operations being “handled haphazardly”. The Israeli government is prepared to fight a war on three or maybe four different geographical fronts, and can claim now to be having some success. As such, it never wanted to tie up too many troops in Gaza, so after calling up 300,000 reservists and an initial five-division attack into the Strip, troop numbers in Gaza came down dramatically in early 2024 and have spiked again only occasionally.

The troops have gone to the Lebanon front and the West Bank, and back to their civilian jobs where the economy needs them. The IDF instead relied on extensive air attacks whenever it got intelligence of Hamas groups setting up again. That suited Hamas perfectly. It re-established itself in schools and hospitals in the knowledge that the IDF would bomb and kill more civilians. The IDF might reflect on a history of failed counterinsurgency campaigns that relied too much on air bombardment, from the Northwest Frontier in the 1920s to Afghanistan and northern Iraq in the 2020s. And hundreds of Hamas’s tunnels, about 40 per cent of them, are still there and usable enough as air raid shelters for terrorists. Engineers of the IDF’s 143rd Division are tasked with finding and destroying those essential tunnels that connect southern Gaza to Hamas supply routes across the border in Sinai. But it’s a long job and even here, not all are believed yet to be mapped.

Israeli claims that Hamas holds its own population hostage through autocratic terror seem entirely correct. There have been no elections in Gaza or the West Bank for almost two decades and Hamas in Gaza is a vicious organisation. Yet last September Hamas still had the highest level of support among all Palestinians of any political group, 36 per cent. Israel’s own defective military strategy in Gaza has probably done a lot to create that statistic.

Michael Clarke is visiting professor in defence studies at King’s College London and a former director of the Royal United Services Institute