Israeli assessment: Hamas still has 20,000 fighters, though new recruits are of lower quality; has hundreds of rockets, some long-range

 As a fragile ceasefire holds in the Gaza Strip after two years of war, fresh Israeli military assessments find that the Hamas terror group still has some 20,000 members in its military wing.

According to the IDF, before the terror group’s October 7, 2023, attack, Hamas had some 30,000 fighters in the Gaza Strip, split into five regional brigades, 24 battalions, and some 140 companies.

These units have been systematically dismantled by the military over the 24 months of fighting in Gaza, though some, in the central Gaza Strip, were largely untouched.

While the IDF says it has killed over 22,000 terror operatives in Gaza during the war, Hamas has managed to recruit new fighters, according to the military. The military assesses, however, that the new recruits are of a much lower quality and have not undergone any significant training.

The army last year stated that Hamas had been defeated “militarily” across Gaza, and is now effectively a guerrilla terror group.

Also, according to the IDF’s assessments, Hamas is still believed to possess hundreds of rockets, mostly short-range but including some that could reach central Israel. Hamas also has access to thousands of small arms, the IDF believes.

Additionally, the IDF previously estimated that it had destroyed just 25% of Hamas’s tunnels across the entire Strip since the beginning of the war. However, the military argues that the main focus has been on Hamas’s attack tunnels and those used as command centers or for weapons manufacturing — the vast majority of which have been destroyed — rather than on the numerous tunnels that Hamas uses to move around the Strip, especially in areas where ground troops never operated.