The Hamas militiamen reappeared after a few weeks, forcing the Israeli army to redeploy two of its brigades to Gaza's Al-Shati refugee camp on January 28. The soldiers hunt them down in this maze of alleyways, largely razed to the ground by the air force when the war began in October 2023. The Israeli army has instructed the surviving inhabitants in the ruins of the surrounding neighborhoods – Sheikh Radwan, Rimal, Tal Al-Hawa – to evacuate a 12-square-kilometer area.
In the western part of Gaza City, conquered by Israel in November, Hamas's al-Qassam Brigades are relaunching their war of attrition – in small numbers, far from their leaders and largely autonomously. Since mid-January, Palestinian factions have claimed responsibility for rocket and mortar attacks in the Jabaliya and Sheikh Radwan districts and in the south of the city, as well as for firing rockets into Israel from the north of the enclave.
This resurgence of Islamist fighters contradicts the rhetoric of Israeli officers who claimed, at the end of 2023, to have "cleansed" these neighborhoods and dismantled all Hamas divisions in Gaza City. They considered the "post-war period" to have begun in the city, sending almost all their reservists home and maintaining a single division in the north of the enclave. Israel's military leaders planned to carry out only targeted raids there, while a second division searched for Hamas leaders and their hostages in the south of the territory, supported by intense bombing.
'A moral and military defeat'
"Israel has deployed four divisions over the past 120 days, with the aim of destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages by force. Neither objective has been achieved. Despite its scorched earth policy, at the cost of nearly 27,000 dead and tens of thousands wounded, Hamas and the resistance [other Palestinian factions] are still standing and fighting. It's a moral, military and intelligence defeat for Israel," said General Wassef Erekat, a former fighter in the Palestine Liberation Organization, now an analyst in Ramallah.
Hamas cannot claim victory over the ruins of Gaza and the shattering of 2 million Palestinian lives. But it is fighting this war with an advantage: "It doesn't have to do much to win, it just has to survive," said Tahani Mustafa, an analyst with the International Crisis Group. As the Israeli army itself has been pointing out since mid-January, its campaign is running out of steam. The blows it can deliver are no longer so numerous. It cannot free the 136 hostages held in Gaza. Around 30 of them are thought to be dead, whether victims of their captors or Israeli bombs.
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