Hamas on the ropes

Hamas fighters are being kept constantly on the run and defeated in one city after another.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine

The IDF has been relentlessly killing Hamas’ top leaders and commanders with surgical strikes.

On July 13, the long-sought military commander of Hamas in Gaza, Mohammed Deif, was assassinated.

On July 31, the head of Hamas’ political wing, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed when a bomb exploded in his room at a heavily-guarded guesthouse in Tehran.

Another dozen Hamas commanders, just below the top level, have been killed during the Gaza campaign.

Only Yahya Sinwar, the man mainly responsible for the October 7 attacks, has still managed to stay alive, slithering from tunnel to tunnel underneath Gaza, bringing with him Israeli hostages whose proximity, he assumes, will preserve him from an IDF attack.

Hamas fighters are being kept constantly on the run, defeated in one city after another, and forced to keep moving, if they can, from cities that the IDF has announced it has targeted to the “safe” areas it has warned civilians to move to.

The pressure never ends. The IDF sometimes will clear an area, and then returns if it detects Hamas operatives have been regrouping there.

Many of the Hamas operatives appear to be living in squalor in the tunnels underneath Gaza.

The IDF can rotate out its troops for rest and recuperation, but the Hamas combatants don’t have that luxury.

They must continue to fight, from their hideouts in civilian apartments, schools, and mosques, or emerging from the network of tunnels in attempts to ambush IDF soldiers.

Their morale is low; after all, they have seen half of their original number killed, and an unknown number of wounded operatives are being treated in wretched conditions.

Hundreds of the tunnels have been destroyed.

Their weapons hideouts have been uncovered and are being systematically destroyed; every day they lose more weapons that are found and seized by the IDF.

The IDF has also taken control the Philadelphi Corridor, a strip of land inside southern Gaza on the border with Egypt, and has ended all smuggling of weapons into Gaza both above ground and through the tunnels, now destroyed, that formerly snaked underground from Egypt into Gaza.

Of the 35,000 operatives Hamas had in Gaza before October 7, almost half — 17,000 — have been killed, and many (no one has publicly speculated as to how many, but ordinarily in wars the wounded far outnumber the dead) have been wounded and are now hors de combat.

Hamas has seen hundreds of its tunnels blown up, along with the weapons hidden in them.

And a great many of the weapons hidden by Hamas above ground, in schools, mosques, hospitals, and apartments, have either been blown up or seized.

Every day brings fresh news of more weapons, being discovered, and seized or destroyed, by the IDF.

Hamas is on the ropes.

Will the Bidenites, eager to see a ceasefire deal before November’s election that they can promote as a great diplomatic accomplishment, manage to pressure Israel into agreeing to a permanent ceasefire that will mean Hamas operatives can declare a victory because “we are still standing,” allowing the terrorists to regroup in Gaza, while also recruiting new members and training them to take the places of those who have been killed?

Will Netanyahu agree to give up control of the Philadelphi Corridor, as Egypt so insistently demands, which would mean a reprise of the weapons smuggling from Egypt into Gaza?

Or will Prime Minister Netanyahu hold fast, despite terrific pressure from Washington and from hostage families, and continue to insist on a limited, not a permanent ceasefire, of a month or two, so that Hamas hasn’t the time to reconstitute some military units?

I’m betting on Netanyahu’s stubborn determination, that so infuriates the Bidenites, as when, despite Biden’s dire warnings not to, the IDF entered Rafah and killed thousands of Hamas operatives in the city.

Meanwhile, the Presidential election in the U.S., the anti-mass migration protests in the U.K. that the government has tried to crush by demonizing and arresting hundreds of protesters, the continuing governmental crisis in France, Ukraine’s surprising push into the Kursk region of Russia, and the 26 million people now facing famine in war-torn Sudan have all been taking attention away from the Gaza War, to the great dismay of Hamas.

It’s hard to see how Hamas can make itself again, as it was for the first several months of the Gaza war, the cynosure of all eyes.

The world’s media are on to other, much more riveting subjects.

And there is nothing Yahya Sinwar can do about this, unless he turns himself in to the IDF, or is captured or killed, which should be good for a few days of stories. But not more.