Gaza militants regroup and rearm, raising threat of a long war

Barrage of missiles into Israel and fight for Gaza City neighborhood point to a protracted conflict.

Displaced Palestinians leave Khan Younis area. Picture: AFP

Palestinian militants fired one of the largest barrages toward Israel in months on Monday while Israeli forces re-engaged with Hamas fighters in a Gaza City neighbourhood they had previously invaded, signs the conflict risks becoming a protracted war of attrition as militants regroup and rearm.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, said it fired rockets at southern Israel, an attack the Israeli military said was largely intercepted, caused no damage and comprised 20 projectiles that came from the area of Khan Younis, where ­Israel carried out a months-long operation against militant groups that ended in early April.

The barrage reinforced the challenge for Israel as it seeks to pursue a counterinsurgency campaign against militants who retain rocket and mortar firing capabilities almost nine months into the Israeli campaign to destroy them.

“We are nearing the end of the stage of the destruction of Hamas’s terror army and will have to target its remnants going forward,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, in a sign that Israel is preparing to move to a new phase in the fighting.

Mr Netanyahu has said he wouldn’t end the war without “total victory” over Hamas. The ­Israeli military said last month that the group’s total destruction was an unachievable aim.

The Israeli military’s incursion into Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighbourhood, which began last week and sent Palestinian families running for their lives, also demonstrates how hard it is proving for Israel to achieve the government’s stated war aim of eradicating Hamas from the enclave.

The operation in Shuja’iyya is the latest in a series of raids in which Israeli forces had to return to an area from which they had withdrawn, because Hamas had regrouped and reasserted some control.

Hamas says it is fighting back in Shuja’iyya.

Israeli forces have returned to a number of areas they had earlier invaded in Gaza, including Jabalia in the north of the enclave, as well as the strip’s largest hospital, al-Shifa, which the military accused of being a Hamas command-and-control centre. Security analysts say Israel risks sinking into a long-term conflict with Hamas, which has demonstrated an ability to survive as an insurgent group, drawing on some support from the broader population in Gaza.

“It’s a quagmire. It’s going to be a low-intensity conflict for a long time,” said Joost Hiltermann, the program director for the Middle East and North Africa at International Crisis Group.

“You can use military operations to push Hamas into various pockets of Gaza but eventually they filter back through the tunnel system or overland. They are gaining new recruits every day. Young people who have lost their families, they’re going to sign up.”

The Israeli military also warned Palestinian civilians in a swathe of southern Gaza to leave, including areas of Khan Younis and Rafah, possibly presaging further Israeli operations in areas the military had taken earlier in the war.

An Israeli tank on the move in the Gaza Strip. Picture: IDF via AFP

Though Hamas’s military capabilities have been diminished by the Israeli offensive, the group has shown a sustained ability to attack Israeli forces, often operating in smaller groups of fighters and using the hit-and-run tactics of an insurgent group. The organisation’s military wing also has significant stockpiles of weapons, according to a US intelligence assessment.

A separate, public assessment from the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in February that Israel was likely to face “lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come”. ­ Israel says that it is choking off Hamas’s ability to smuggle additional weapons into the strip after Israeli forces seized control of Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Israeli military officials have signalled they are nearing an end to major combat operations in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, that ­Israel said was Hamas’s last redoubt. Mr Netanyahu said in ­recent months that the Rafah operation was essential to his vision of total victory. After Rafah, the military is expected to shift to a new stage of lower-intensity fighting comprising intelligence-based raids.

Israel invaded northern Gaza in October in ­response to Hamas’s October 7 ­attack in southern Israel, in which 1200 Israelis – mostly civilians – were killed and 250 people were taken hostage. The war has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to figures from the Palestinian authorities that don’t say how many were combatants, while Israeli bombing has reduced much of the enclave to rubble.

The Wall Street Journal