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According to U.S. intelligence services, Israeli forces have killed between 20% and 30% of Hamas members. This number is less than Israel’s target of eliminating the organization, but it does demonstrate the group’s resiliency following months of fighting that have destroyed large areas of the Gaza Strip.
According to U.S. officials who verified a classified report, the group is trying to reassemble its police force in some areas of Gaza City, and Hamas still has enough ammunition to strike Israel and Israeli forces in Gaza for months, according to the U.S. estimate of the group’s casualties.
Israeli authorities have acknowledged that they haven’t succeeded in eliminating Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since the Palestinian Authority was overthrown in 2007, despite an intense air and ground war within the region that has claimed hundreds of civilian lives. Military experts stated that while the group’s militants have changed their tactics to operate in smaller groups and conceal themselves between ambushes on Israeli forces, individual fighters are probably taking on more work to make up for the lost time of their fallen compatriots.
After pressure from the United States to move to a more surgical phase of its assault against Hamas, Israel withdrew hundreds of troops from Gaza; nevertheless, military sources warn the fight may last for many more months. Concerns have been expressed about Hamas’s survival in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Officials from the Biden administration have started to lower their expectations for the war, citing Hamas’s complete annihilation as the reason for its decline in security danger. Furthermore, the United States has pushed Israel to refocus the conflict on more focused actions against Hamas leadership.
According to American and Israeli estimations, Hamas has lost thousands of deaths, but its main goal is to survive this fight, according to current and former Israeli military sources.
Regarding Hamas’s objective, a senior Israeli military officer stated, “You don’t have to win, you just have to not lose.”
For the combatants who survive, “two or three jobs”
In their onslaught on Israel on October 7, Hamas claimed the lives of almost 1,200 individuals, the majority of whom were civilians, and captured over 200 more. It led Israel to try, for the first time, to completely uproot the organization and destroy it as a danger. Until then, the majority of American and Israeli officials and experts thought the organisation posed a manageable danger to Israel.
Palestinian health officials report that over 24,000 Palestinians have died in the war, with almost one-third of them being men. The UN humanitarian affairs office reports that 1.9 million people, or almost 85% of Gaza’s population, have left their homes.
The statistics provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry do not differentiate between soldiers and civilians. While it has not disclosed an exact figure for the number of fighters lost, Hamas has refuted claims that its forces have sustained significant casualties.
In addition to thousands of police and other troops, the U.S. assessed that the group, which it labelled as a terrorist organisation, had between 25,000 and 30,000 combatants prior to the battle. Israel calculated that the organisation included at least 30,000 fighters.
The U.S. estimate was derived on intelligence given by the Israelis, drone surveillance of the area, analysis of the ruins in Gaza, and intercepted communications, as disclosed in a secret report earlier this month.
A somewhat higher estimate comes from the Israeli military, which believes it has killed over 9,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza since the conflict started and over 1,000 during the raid on October 7, or roughly 30% of the group’s combat strength. Furthermore, Israel counts many more injured Hamas militants than the United States does, taking them out of the conflict forever.
A senior Israeli military officer stated that the number of injured Hamas militants is estimated to be as high as 16,000, with almost half of them not expected to return to combat. According to a U.S. person familiar with the assessment, the U.S. believes that between 10,500 and 11,700 militants have been injured, and many of them may ultimately return to the battlefield.
The Israel Defence Forces report that since Israel began its offensive war in Gaza, some 190 Israeli troops have lost their lives and about 1,200 have been injured.
According to U.S. military doctrine, a conventional force would be deemed combat-ineffective if it lost 25–30% of its fighters. However, Hamas is an irregular army with access to hundreds of kilometres of tunnels beneath Gaza that it uses to conduct a defensive war in a densely populated area. Although it has demonstrated its fighting ability, the losses “keep putting more pressure on Hamas’s network,” according to former Army General Joseph Votel, who oversaw American military operations in the Middle East.
He stated, “One person might now have to do two or three jobs.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the United States declined to comment through a spokesman. The Israeli military refused to provide any details and reiterated its own estimate of Hamas’s death toll. Remarks were requested, but Hamas did not answer.
According to Israeli officials and Palestinian residents, Hamas is trying to reassert its authority in the north, where much of Gaza City and other areas have been destroyed by Israeli airstrikes and fighting, by assigning small groups of police and emergency services to patrol the streets. This is another example of the group’s tenacity. Gaza City residents claimed there was little police presence and that civil order was remained mostly absent from the city.
A few Israelis were concerned that Hamas will just reestablish itself in any regions that are not under Israeli military control after the group launched a flurry of rockets into Israel earlier this week from a central Gaza location where Israeli soldiers had been operating the day before.
According to an Israeli military soldier, Hamas officials affiliated with Gaza’s Interior Ministry have made their way back to Gaza City. This includes areas that the Israeli military had previously occupied after concluding a large-scale army withdrawal earlier this month.
Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli military intelligence chief of Palestinian relations, stated that it is just a matter of time before Israel withdraws its troops from these areas and restores its military wing.
