Israeli military has killed about half of Hamas’s midlevel commanders in Gaza, Israeli officials said, as its troops pressed forward Wednesday into the suspected hiding place of the group’s leader in a bid to eliminate its top brass.
Israel is deploying a deliberate strategy to find and kill the militant group’s midlevel operatives to disrupt Hamas’s ability to fight in Gaza, though military analysts caution doing so is unlikely immediately to deliver the victory it craves.
Israel has so far failed to assassinate the U.S.-designated terrorist group’s senior leadership, which includes Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas in Gaza, and Mohammed Deif, the head of the group’s armed wing. But fighting is now coalescing around Khan Younis, one of Hamas’s strongholds in the southern strip, where the Israeli military says Sinwar and others could be hunkering.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday his troops had surrounded Sinwar’s house in Khan Younis. The move is largely viewed as symbolic but one that proves “our forces can reach anywhere in the Gaza Strip,” he said.
The structure of Hamas’s secretive armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, isn’t widely known. But Israel estimates it has roughly 24 battalions each with 1,000 or more fighters. The Israeli military has said it has significantly degraded 10 of those by taking out midlevel commanders.
Late on Tuesday, Israel’s military said it killed senior commanders hiding in a tunnel in northern Gaza, frustrating the group’s ability to direct operations in that part of the strip. Israeli forces also released a photo of what they said was a group of operatives who led battalions and brigades, likely overseeing thousands of Hamas fighters. The military said it had found the photo during fighting and highlighted those in the picture whom it claims to have killed, including the commander of the northern brigade in Gaza, although it didn’t say when the people died. Hamas said late last month that Ahmed al-Ghandour, the head of its northern brigade, had died.
Israeli military analysts question the extent of the role of Deif, who is believed to have been rendered disabled by repeated assassination attempts. But Sinwar has been involved in negotiating for the hostages with Israel and military analysts believe Qassam’s deputy leader, Marwan Issa, a Gazan in his late 50s, is still in operation.
Israeli forces are now engaging in street-to-street combat into the militants’ stronghold of Khan Younis, the biggest city in the southern part of the strip, where Sinwar grew up and which is now considered a main hub for Hamas, as fighting has shifted south. The battle for the city of over 400,000 could prove decisive in isolating pockets of Hamas fighters outside their main command-and-control centers. A video from Khan Younis taken Wednesday showed destroyed buildings with gunfire in the background.
Israel’s stated goal of eradicating Hamas could prove difficult because as well as being a militant group, it is a political movement followed by Palestinians, said Hugh Lovatt, a senior policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. But the deaths of its leadership would give Israel a public-relations boost that could help create the conditions to end the war, Lovatt added.
“Being able to point to the elimination of Mohammed Deif or Yahya Sinwar would give the Israeli government a lot of capital that could allow it to then claim that its military objectives have been accomplished,” he said.
The next stage of the fight threatens to push tens of thousands of civilians toward Rafah, near the Egyptian border, where families are sleeping in tents and parks, and food and water are scarce. Around 70% of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million is in the southern part of the strip, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. That includes the hundreds of thousands of people who fled the northern part of the enclave in recent weeks at the direction of the Israeli military.
Egypt has reinforced security cordons around its border with Gaza, while tents have been set up in the cities of Sheikh Zuwayed and Rafah to prepare for the likely inflow of refugees. It has also closed off the port city of Al Arish, roughly one hour’s drive west of Rafah that has become a collection point for humanitarian supplies for Gaza, Egyptian officials said.
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