Defeating Hamas could take 2-3 years, think tank warns

Two decades of gathering weapons and building tunnels cannot be gotten rid of so quickly, says Dr. Eitan Shamir of the BESA Center.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The final military defeat of Hamas could take years, considering the time it has had to build its terror infrastructure, the director of a Middle East policy-oriented think tank told The Media Line Wednesday.

“Hamas had over twenty years to accumulate a massive amount of firepower, dispersing it in many areas, including in its widespread underground tunnel network,” said Dr. Eitan Shamir, director of Bar Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center).

“Combined with other terrorist organizations, such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), it had approximately 30,000 fighters. This could take two to three years to get rid of.”

The IDF said more than six months ago that it had destroyed or completely degraded all of Hamas’s 24 military brigades. However, according to a recent Channel 12 report, the two groups have managed to recruit new men and now have between 20,000 to 23,000 fighters.

Although the new recruits are barely trained in comparison to their predecessors, the army still has to root them out in major military operations, going back into places where it had already fought once or twice before.

For example, in the just-concluded round in the northern part of the Strip, the IDF said more than 300 terrorists were killed.

The Israeli army’s death toll in the ground offensive so far in Gaza stands at 398, with three soldiers losing their lives in the last two days.

According to Yoni Ben Menachem, a Middle East expert from the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, a think tank specializing in public and foreign policy, Hamas’s tunnel network is also a big threat that will take time to defeat.

“There is an estimated 40% of the tunnels still remaining, hundreds of kilometers of tunnels the Israeli intelligence was not aware of,” he told The Media Line.

“There are still very long tunnels that Israel has yet to have located, some of them with hostages inside,” he noted. “This requires a very big operation and a massive amount of explosives that Israel currently does not possess.”

The IDF has estimated that there are up to 450 miles of tunnels in the Strip. It has concentrated on destroying the largest and most strategically important ones, including those closest to the border with Israel, while damaging key points in others to render them unusable.

Whether they stay inoperable is questionable, however, as a Channel 12 report in July cited an IDF assessment that the terrorists had managed to repair “many” tunnels in Khan Yunis, for example.

“Israel does not have enough forces at this point to subdue Hamas both militarily and in its ability to govern Gaza,” Ben Menachem added. “In order to do that, Israel needs to occupy the entire Gaza Strip and announce it is enforcing temporary military administration.”

This is the preferred option of the more right-wing members of the current coalition.

The outgoing Biden administration had flatly refused to endorse such a plan, desiring that a “reformed” Palestinian Authority (PA) take over on “the day after.”

Considering the PA’s ongoing encouragement of terrorism, this idea has been shot down several times by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has yet to produce any concrete proposals regarding the governance of the Gaza Strip after the war’s goal of Hamas’s “total defeat” is achieved.

gaza stripHamas tunnelsIDFIsrael-Hamas war