Hamas has suffered casualties in Gaza since the surprise attack on Israel on October. The overall number of Hamas casualties is impossible to know. Israel has put out various estimates on the number of Hamas members eliminated in certain areas or units. In general the IDF puts out details on number of targets struck. For instance on Thursday the IDF said that “during IDF activities in the Gaza Strip over the last day, aerial strikes were carried out on over 300 Hamas terror targets, including military command centers, underground terror tunnels, weapon storage facilities, weapon manufacturing sites, and anti-tank missile launch posts.”
Can Hamas recover from the losses it has suffered since October 7? Hamas units in northern Gaza have been surrounded. They have been pushed out of numerous neighborhoods such as Sheikh Ijlin, Shait, Beit Hanoun, Rimal, parts of Zaytun and Jabalya; as well as Beit Lahiya. Hamas has lost most of its territory in northern Gaza. The units that tried to stand and fight were eliminated.
The question about Hamas survival in the face of these losses revolves around many factors. Other terror groups, such as ISIS, have shown they can fight to the end, basically to the very last man. ISIS in Mosul fought to the last man, basically. In other cases ISIS members tried to surrender. For instance near Tal Afar some of them surrendered. They also tried to surrender near Baghouz on the Euphrates river in 2019. Therefore there are mixed examples of what happens when terror groups are surrounded.
Hamas has no way to replace its fighters in northern Gaza. The ceasefire will leave the men surrounded. They have short interior lines and can shift units around, but it unlikely they can regrow their units. A study conducted in 1986 about combat casualties and whether units remain effective may shed light on what comes next for Hamas. First, we need to understand how Hamas is organized. It isn’t just a terrorist group with cells and rabble. It has become a kind of terror army because it ran Gaza since 2007 and had to turn its terror cells into a kind of fighting force. It may have learned how to do this from other Iran-backed groups such as Hezbollah, Iranian militias in Syria, or Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq.
Reports on November 13 suggested that ten Hamas battalions in northern Gaza had been degraded. This means many of their commanders had been eliminated. Hamas has around 24 battalions in Gaza. In all Hamas is estimated to have 140 companies within these battalions. A company of men usually up to 100 fighters. A battalion can be several hundred. Hamas had around 30,000 fighters on October 7. Some of them were killed invading Israel. Some have been detained. Some special units, such as Hamas naval commandos, have been eliminated.
Hamas main fighting unit is the battalion level. It has “brigades” as well that include the battalions. The brigade level will include anti-tank missiles, snipers and rockets and mortar arrays.
Some Hamas battalions in Gaza appear to have been completely shattered. The Shati battalion was badly mauled because it fought the IDF not only in the area of Shati, near the beach northwest of Gaza City, but also around Shifa hospital. It was hammered by IDF units in this area and apparently lost 200 terrorists according to estimates.
The relationship between battle losses and performance
A report in 1986 compiled by Leonard Wainstein at the Institute of Defense Analysis near Washington, DC analyzed the “relationship of battle damage to unit combat performance.”
He surveys western armies in his discussion of whether units will break down when they suffer high casualties. It is generally assumed a unit in a western military that suffers a certain percent of losses, such as fifteen percent or twenty percent. “The impact of those casualties on the cutting edge–the rifle companies, tank crews, assault engineers–has clearly grown with time as the number of men in the cutting edge shrank and support echelons expanded. The capacity of the armies of the First World War to absorb tremendous losses and yet continue to function was due in part to the larger proportion of fighting men in the total,” writes Wainstein.
Another unclassified study from the 1950s for the US army asks “does a unit lose its combat effectiveness because it lacks a certain requisite number of bodies, each type of breakpoint being caused by a given depletion in numerical strength? If this be true, the arrival of sufficient replacements should restore the unit’s ability to carry out its mission. But intuition suggests that, in addition to numerical strength, certain psychological factors closely related to losses also to length of time in combat, factors termed attrition.”
Wainstein argued that morale of units can be affects by various things. “It can also be influenced by the awareness of the individual soldier of the personal well-being and fate of his immediate comrades. This need not always be negative. The most cogent example is obviously the effect on the individual of the sight of dead and wounded comrades. Casualties are certainly the most visible and forceful indications of the latent horror of combat. Soldiers not exposed to casualties close to them can view battle of the most savage degree in a somewhat detached manner, but the realization of the danger they face will be brought home vehemently when casualties begin to occur among their immediate ranks. The corrosion of motivation then begins,” he writes.
His conclusion is that “where morale of troops is high, even very heavy casualties will not put the formation ‘out of action.’” There are many complex elements involved. The overall sense when looking at casualties is that casualties alone will not determine whether Hamas continues to fight and whether it can recover quickly from the blows it suffered since October 7. The group has shown in the past that even if it suffers losses, it continues to exist. For instance during the Second Intifada Israel targeted Hamas leadership. Palestinian terror groups in Gaza have also been defeated in the past, such as operations in the 1970s, only to reappear decades later.
Terrorist groups can be defeated. Hamas may suffer some kind of organizational collapse if the pressure on its units becomes too high. If Hamas sought over the years to create a more disciplined force, with command and control, it will suffer if the command and control and commanders of units are eliminated. This appears to have happened to some degree in northern Gaza. Nevertheless the group is still there and holds ground in Gaza City itself. It doesn’t have very many civilians to use as human shields because
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