Hamas hiding among civilians in Gaza to protect itself, ambush IDF troops, NYT reports
Terror group uses children to lure soldiers into false sense of security as it hides underground, waiting to spring carefully laid traps; tunnels have landline phone network
Over the last nine months of war in Gaza, Hamas has heavily relied on embedding itself into the enclave’s civilian population as both a method of survival and way to ambush Israeli troops, according to an in-depth analysis of the terror group’s strategy.
In an investigation published Saturday, The New York Times spoke to Hamas members and Israeli soldiers returning from Gaza to piece together an image of the methods employed by the terror group.
The strategy, according to the report, is mainly based on evading Israeli troops while waiting for them to fall into carefully laid traps, and Hamas’s use of the vulnerable civilian population for its own advantage.
After the October 7 terror onslaught in southern Israel — in which thousands of Hamas terrorists slaughtered some 1,200 people and seized over 250 hostages — and as Israel prepared for its ground operation inside the Gaza Strip, Hamas fighters vanished underground, the Times reported.
There they remained — using hundreds of miles of tunnels to move around the Strip — until the IDF was deep enough inside the enclave to be effectively ambushed, IDF reservist Lior Soharin said. When they emerged again, they were no longer dressed in the military uniforms they had worn to invade Israel, but in civilian clothes, ready to launch attacks while hidden in plain sight among the public.
A former officer in Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, told the Times that the terror group’s objective is “to vanish, avoid direct confrontation while launching tactical attacks against the occupation army.”
Backing up his account, an unnamed Hamas official who left Gaza ahead of October 7 but is in contact with his subordinates, said that as Israel began to issue evacuation warnings to residents of northern Gaza, the terror organization moved in, taking advantage of the suddenly empty homes and residential areas.
Hamas booby-trapped hundreds of houses, setting up mines that were connected to tripwires, movement sensors and sound detectors.
Homes that aren’t booby-trapped are instead often used to store weapons. Speaking to The New York Times, Israeli soldiers recalled finding guns hidden behind a false wall in a child’s bedroom and grenades hidden in a closet. The buildings are marked with specific symbols as a way to inform Hamas operatives of what is being stored inside.
The soldiers explained that Hamas fighters would often emerge from underground without weapons, in order to pass as civilians, and would then pick them arms from the homes-turned-weapons depots.
Hamas uses “secret signs outside homes, like a red sheet hanging from a window or graffiti, to signal to fellow fighters the nearby presence of mines, tunnel entrances or weapons caches inside,” the report said.
The heavy damage done by the IDF in residential areas is the result of Hamas’s methods, Israeli officials have said, as what appears to be lawless destruction of civilian property is in fact a targeted campaign against an enemy hiding behind the public.
In a clear breach of international law, Hamas has also taken advantage of other civilian infrastructure by building its vast tunnel network under a major United Nations compound, hospitals and government buildings.
Hamas officials have defended the use of such methods. Speaking to the Times, senior politburo member Mousa Abu Marzouk asserted that Hamas’s methods were only being scrutinized to deflect from what he claimed were Israeli crimes.
“If there’s someone who takes a weapon from under a bed, is that a justification for killing 100,000 people?” said Abu Marzouk, who days after the October 7 attack declared his terror group is not responsible for protecting Palestinian civilians. “If someone takes a weapon from under a bed, is that a justification to kill an entire school and destroy a hospital?”
Since October 7, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 38,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, although the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 15,000 combatants in battle and some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 attack.
Israel’s death toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 326.
Earlier this week, it was reported that the IDF believes much of the tunnel network is in “good functional shape,” and the parts of it that Israel did manage to destroy have since been repaired.
The Times report said the tunnels are equipped with “a landline telephone network that is difficult for Israel to monitor and that allows fighters to communicate even during outages to Gaza’s mobile phone networks.”
The terror group has largely remained hidden away underground. At the start of the war, according to the Times, Hamas had enough drinking water and canned food in its bunkers to last for at least 10 months — indicating that it has yet to run out of its stockpiles.
In order to effectively ambush Israeli troops, Hamas lures them into a false sense of security, allowing soldiers to move freely for hours at a time, or even days, before emerging from the tunnels and springing the trap. Both Hamas operatives and Israeli soldiers told the Times that soldiers are tracked using hidden cameras, drones and civilian lookouts, including children.
Hamas has acknowledged, and defended, its use of civilian infrastructure and populations in its war against Israel.
“Every insurgency in every war, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, saw people fighting from their homes,” said al-Awawdeh, who resides in Turkey. “If I live in Zeitoun, for example, and the army comes — I will fight them there, from my home, or my neighbor’s, or from the mosque. I will fight them anywhere I am.”
Al-Awawdeh was imprisoned in Israel for 19 years before he was released in 2011 as part of the Gilad Shalit deal.
Arguing that having fighters wear civilian clothes — a violation of the Geneva Convention — is a legitimate attempt to avoid detection, he told the Times that doing so was “natural for a resistance movement.”