Hamas fighters dress as civilians, store weapons in civilian homes, in mosques, in the linings of sofas, in the walls of children’s bedrooms, and hide beneath the ground in an extensive network of tunnels, the New York Times reported Saturday in an extensive expose of Hamas’s use of guerrilla warfare.
Throughout over eight months of fighting in Gaza, the Qassam Brigades have fought as a primarily hidden force, only briefly emerging from underground tunnels, occasionally, grenade in hand, to kill soldiers. Hamas forces have largely abandoned their bases and outposts to overcome Israel’s technological and numerical advantages by launching surprise attacks on small squads of soldiers, the Times reported.
The New York Times conducted its analysis using Hamas-released battlefield videos, interviews with three Hamas members, and interviews with many Israeli soldiers, most of whom spoke to the Times on the condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly.
Based on these sources, the Times concluded that Hamas’s strategy of hiding includes using hundreds of miles of tunnels to move around Gaza without being seen by Israeli soldiers and using civilian homes and infrastructure, including medical facilities, UN facilities, and mosques, to conceal fighters, tunnel entrances, booby-traps, and ammunition stores.
Its tactics include ambushing Israeli soldiers with small groups of fighters dressed as civilians, as well as using civilians, including children, to act as lookouts, leaving secret signals outside homes, like a red sheet hanging from a window or graffiti, to tell fellow fighters the nearby presence of mines, tunnel entrances, or weapons inside.
Additionally, another strategy used is to drag the war out for as long as possible, even at the expense of more civilian death and destruction, to exhaust Israel in an attritional battle that has increased international condemnation of Israel.
In an interview with the Times, a member of Hamas, Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, said, “The aim is to vanish, avoid direct confrontation while launching tactical attacks against the occupation army. The emphasis is on patience.”
Before October 7, the Qassam Brigades operated as “an army with training bases and stockpiles,” al-Awawdeh said. “But during this war, they are behaving as guerrillas,” he shared.
At the beginning of the war, Hamas and its local allies fired a barrage of rockets toward civilian areas of Israel, using launchers based in densely populated civilian areas of Gaza. The IDF captured and destroyed these launchers, which they found near a mosque and a kindergarten.
The Times report also included a statement by a senior Hamas official based in Qatar who defended the use of these tactics and claimed that condemning these tactics distracted from paying attention to Israeli wrongdoing.
“If there’s someone who takes a weapon from under a bed, is that a justification for killing 100,000 people?” Mousa Abu Marzouk said. “If someone takes a weapon from under a bed, is that a justification to kill an entire school and destroy a hospital?” Although Marzouk alludes to Hamas operatives performing these actions by chance, the extensiveness of these activities illustrates that storing weapons in civilian homes is a plan, and a strategy for the war.
“Every insurgency in every war, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, saw people fighting from their homes,” said Hamas member al-Awawdeh. “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.”
Hamas fighters wear civilian clothes in a legitimate attempt to avoid detection, al-Awawdeh added. “That’s natural for a resistance movement,” he said, “and there’s nothing unusual about it.”
According to International Law, and the rules of war, since civilians are not lawful objects of attack in armed conflict, it follows that disguising combatants in civilian clothing to commit hostilities constitutes perfidy. An act of perfidy occurs when someone uses the protective provisions of the Geneva Conventions with the intention of deceiving, killing, injuring, or capturing an opponent.
Using residential buildings, civilian homes for stockpiling weaponry
Hamas has also used residential buildings to hide weaponry throughout the Strip, the Times reported, citing over a dozen Israeli soldiers who found these weapon stockpiles.
The soldiers said it became customary to find munitions hidden inside civilian homes and mosques.
Some soldiers said their units needlessly destroyed civilian property, but others said there was usually a military purpose for going through civilian belongings. According to the Times, one soldier found guns behind a false wall in a child’s bedroom, and another said they found grenades in a woman’s clothing closet.
When Gazans began to evacuate in October, Hamas terrorists began booby-trapping hundreds of houses, the Times reported, citing the Hamas official. The mines were linked to tripwires, movement sensors, and sound detectors that detonate the explosives once triggered. After this, the terrorists went into the tunnels.
International law requires combatants to avoid using “civilian objects,” which include homes, schools, hospitals, and mosques, for military objectives.
To help fellow Hamas members find these weapons caches inside civilian homes, several Israeli soldiers said, Hamas has developed a system of code for marking houses that contain weapons, tunnels, or booby traps.
Some Israeli units were given printed guides to help them identify the meaning of each symbol or object used to mark homes, a soldier told the Times.
Soldiers sometimes entered houses by blowing a hole in their walls in case the front doors were rigged with mines, according to a senior military officer, Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv.
To draw Israelis toward a trap, Hamas members sometimes scattered a building with visible signs of their presence, such as a Hamas flag. At other times, two Israeli soldiers said, Israeli troops were lured inside by a piece of Israeli clothing or identification card, which hinted that hostages might be held inside.
One soldier said Hamas used chained dogs to entrap IDF soldiers in a rigged building, hoping that the soldiers would try to free the dogs.
Another soldier spotted a dead Hamas fighter inside an apartment block and made his way toward the body. As he came closer, he realized the corpse had been rigged with an explosive, he said. When his squad fired at the body, it blew up and set the building ablaze, he said.
Ambushing Israeli soldiers
When soldiers first invaded Gaza, they were not met with Hamas fighters at their bases or outposts. According to a Hamas fighter, this was because the Qassam Brigades’ strategy was to ambush Israeli soldiers once they had advanced deep into the territory.
There are videos across social media that display Hamas fighters in civilian clothes emerging from tunnels to attack Israeli tanks, attaching mines near the turrets of the tanks, firing rocket-propelled grenades from residential buildings, and shooting at soldiers with sniper rifles.
Hamas had been preparing for a ground war since at least 2021, when the group began scaling up production of explosives and anti-tank missiles and stopped making so many long-range rockets, the Hamas officer said.
It also prepared by increasing the number of tunnels across the territory fitted with a landline telephone network that is difficult for Israel to monitor and permits the terrorists to communicate even during outages to Gaza’s mobile phone networks, which are controlled by Israel, according to the Hamas officer, al-Awawdeh and Israeli officials.
According to the Times report, Hamas has enough food rations in the tunnels for at least ten months, and the terrorists have trained themselves to consume as little rations as possible and still be able to remain focused.
In a well-planned ambush, Hamas squads allow Israeli soldiers to roam freely for hours or even days in areas marked for attack. They track the IDF soldiers’ locations using hidden cameras, drones, and intelligence provided by civilian lookouts, including children, according to five Israeli soldiers. They said the children stand on roofs and provide information to commanders below.
The terrorists stayed hidden until an Israeli convoy had moved through one area for several minutes or Israeli forces had grouped in a particular place for hours, so they believed Hamas had left the area. After a period of calm, a group of four terrorists will emerge from the tunnels.
Two of them attach explosives to the sides of a vehicle or fire anti-tank missiles at it. A third carries a camera to film propaganda footage, and the fourth stays at the tunnel entrance to prepare a booby-trap that will be activated when the others return, to kill any Israelis who try to enter the tunnel.
The terrorist squads aim to take out not only the initial Israeli force but also the backup fighters and medics who come to rescue the wounded, the Times reported, citing soldiers who experienced such ambushes and the Hamas officer.
These tactics have been videographed by Hamas and appear in an extensive eight-minute video released on its social media channels in early April.
In the video that is inaccessible to The Jerusalem Post, Hamas operatives planned an attack using pen, paper, and a digital tablet to draw maps of where they wanted to plant roadside mines. “We ask, O Lord, for the ambush to achieve its goals — let us kill your enemies, the Jews,” the narrator of the video says, according to the Times.
Next, Hamas terrorists, wearing civilian clothes, are seen laying those explosives in the rubble of a ruined neighborhood. Then, the video cuts to what appears to be the planned ambush. A group of Israeli soldiers were making their way through the rubble when they were hit by gunfire. That attack brought an Israeli relief squad to the scene, and the arrival of those rescuers appeared to trigger the laid-out mines. This footage was taken by hidden cameras in the area.
“This is a miniature sample of what their defeated army is suffering in the mire of Gaza,” the narrator concluded in the video.