The IDF’s overwhelmingly likely (but not yet 100% confirmed) killing of Hamas chief Mohammed Sinwar on May 13 did not break Hamas, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
In fact, not only did that likely assassination not break Hamas’s fighting spirit, but the IDF said on Sunday that there is no longer any one potential center of gravity, whether a person, military headquarters, or territorial area, which the IDF could strike or take over and which would instantly lead to the terror group collapsing.
Rather, the IDF is now pursuing a strategy of attrition using a mix of attacking any Hamas fighters who are still trying to fight back or stay organized, while taking over most of Gaza and taking control of food distribution in Gaza as part of a longer-term strategy to break down all the various elements of Hamas’s power and control of its population in order to slowly convince Gazans that they can break free of the fundamentalist terror group.
Part of the difficulty in finishing Hamas off in one fell swoop is how deep various aspects of its power are, even as all of them have been hit hard by the IDF during this war.
If pre-war Hamas had 15,000 or more rockets, it now has only dozens to hundreds of medium to longer range rockets, none of which it has managed to fire in recent months, and only hundred to a couple thousand mortars, of which it has managed to fire a few dozen at most over recent months.
Activities of Division 162 forces in the Gaza Strip. (CREDIT: IDF SPOKESPERSON)
Broadly, Hamas ceased to be a strategic rocket threat by around January 2024, but the fact that it still has many rockets and rocket parts hidden throughout the Strip means it is hard to utterly quash that threat by one operation.
Likewise, the IDF refused to give updated numbers of Hamas forces on Sunday, but recently defense sources placed Hamas fighters at around 20,000-25,000, which is not far off some estimates it had at the start of the war.
Once again, these forces are much more poorly armed and are poorly trained and have no real ability to coordinate their efforts, but they also are hard to just remove from the board since they are mostly anonymous and in hiding in humanitarian zones among the civilian populace.
Further, the Hamas tunnels greatly allow them to continue to hide and move in parts of Gaza without being tracked.
While the IDF has destroyed enormous amounts of Hamas’s tunnels and all or most of its strategic tunnels, the military continues to find new, unexpected tunnels on an almost daily basis, and not long ago, some estimates were that 75% of Hamas’s tunnels may still not be destroyed. It is possible that all of its larger strategic tunnels, which had been used for communications, intelligence, and weapons manufacturing, may be destroyed.
On May 13, the IDF dropped a large number of bombs on a tunnel hideout under a hospital in Gaza in order to target Mohammed Sinwar.
Mohammed Sinwar has been the leader of Hamas, and in particular, in control of the remaining 58 Israeli hostages (around 21 of which are believed to be alive) since mid-October 2024, when his brother, October 7 architect Yahya Sinwar, was killed by military forces in Rafah.
Without Sinwar, Gaza City Brigade commander Az-adin-al-Hadad would be the last remaining living member of the pre-war original five Hamas brigade commanders, which defense sources have told the Post would make him Hamas’s next military chief.
With so many Hamas commanders killed, the IDF was asked if it was possible that if al-Hadad is killed that there would no longer be a senior Hamas official capable of coordinating a full hostage release deal, given that many hostages are held separately by small disconnected Gazan terror cells.
The IDf said it believed that Hamas had a significant capacity to maintain coordination of that issue, since it is its main and sole remaining card to hold over Israel, though no specific evidence was presented of who the next level down of officials would be who could maintain command over all of the disparate groups holding Israeli hostages.
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