The deadly Hamas assault on southern Israel caught the country’s security apparatus unaware and brutally exposed the Jewish state’s vulnerability to militant attacks, despite boasting the Middle East’s most sophisticated military.
Some fear Saturday’s mass incursion, which left more than 700 Israelis dead, risks escalating into a broader conflict, drawing in other militant movements and even foreign powers.
Here are the threats Israel faces from militant groups and non-state actors in the region.
Hamas
The Islamist movement, which has run Gaza since 2007, was founded in 1987 during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising.
It began life as an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood and has previously fought four wars with Israel, launching barrages of rudimentary, homemade rockets over the border, while using a network of tunnels deep beneath Gaza to smuggle arms and provide sanctuary to its fighters.
Before Saturday’s attack, the most recent round of serious fighting was an 11-day conflict in 2021, when Hamas surprised Israel with the scope and scale of its attacks as the militants fired more than 3,700 rockets at cities and towns across Israel.
Hamas enjoys support from Iran and from Hizbollah, the powerful Lebanese group, but its relationship with the Shia Islamic republic is not straightforward.
As a Sunni movement, Hamas rejects Iran’s religious leadership. Hamas’s relations with Iran also became strained when it displayed sympathy for the opposition that rose up against President Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian civil war. Tehran and Hizbollah have been key backers of the Assad regime, intervening militarily to support Damascus.
Yet several senior Hamas leaders reside in Lebanon and the group’s military development is also in large part due to Iranian and Hizbollah patronage. That includes rockets, the technology needed to build them, and the training and organisation required to fire them at mass, according to Israeli officials.
In Saturday’s attack, Hamas claimed to have fired 5,000 rockets in a single day, more than it fired during the whole 2021 conflict. This “would very probably have required external help from Iranian and Hizbollah advisers, to build that big an arsenal,” said Emile Hokayem, senior fellow for Middle East security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank.
The Israel Defense Forces said Hamas had sent 1,000 fighters across the border, surprising the Jewish state with its ability to plan and execute such a multidimensional assault.
Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US and the EU, is a rival to Fatah, the Palestinian faction that controls the West Bank.
Hizbollah
The powerful Lebanese Shia movement was founded in 1982, the year of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, as a “resistance” movement to the Jewish state. Led by cleric Hassan Nasrallah since 1992, it has evolved into the world’s most heavily armed non-state actor and a dominant political force in Lebanon.
Hezbollah’s military wing consists mostly of light infantry and it was able to withstand a month-long war with Israel in 2006. It controls southern Lebanon which borders the Jewish state, and its fighters have gained additional battle experience after being deployed in Syria to support the Assad regime during that country’s civil war.
Nasrallah said in 2021 that he had some 100,000 fighters, but analysts estimate the true size at 20,000-50,000, including reservists. The group has an arsenal of attack drones, small arms, artillery, tanks, as well as an increasingly accurate portfolio of missiles that includes tens of thousands of Soviet-made Katyusha rockets and Zelzal missiles produced in Iran.
Nasrallah has boasted that these can reach anywhere in Israel, including its nuclear reactor in the south of the country. Israeli officials say Hizbollah has become a full-fledged “terror army”, and has capabilities that exceed those of most state militaries.
The fear in Israel is that Hizbollah could follow Saturday’s Hamas assault to open up a second front on the northern border. Hizbollah militants fired mortars towards Israel on Sunday and were met with a response, although the exchange appeared designed not to trigger an escalation.
Several Gulf states consider Hizbollah a terrorist organisation because of its “incitement” in Syria, Yemen and Iraq. In Lebanon, however, the group’s vast network of social services help it maintain support from both Shia and non-Shia Lebanese.
Lebanon is home to thousands of Palestinians, the descendants of those who fled in 1948, many of whom live in refugee camps where different Palestinian factions compete for influence.
Palestinian fighters were heavily involved in Lebanon’s 1975-90 civil war, using it as a launch pad for attacks on Israel throughout, which ultimately led to the expulsion of their political leadership from Lebanon in the 1980s.
Historically, Fatah has been the dominant player, particularly in the refugee camps. But Hamas and other Islamist factions also maintain a presence there. The camps are restive, with occasional outbursts of fighting, most recently this summer when scores of people were killed in clashes at the Ain el-Hilweh camp. Analysts suggested these incidents aimed to weaken Fatah’s control in Lebanon, in favour of Hamas.
In the past couple of years, Palestinian factions have taken on broader and more belligerent roles, with some reportedly launching rocket attacks against Israel from southern Lebanon.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad
Palestinian Islamic Jihad is the second-largest and most prominent of the militant “rejectionist” factions that, like Hamas, has its stronghold in Gaza. It also has a presence in Lebanon.
The Iran-backed Islamist movement has claimed its forces were part of Saturday’s cross-border assault, with video it subsequently released showing its gunmen inside Israeli communities. The group has claimed it alone is holding some 30 Israelis captive inside Gaza.
Founded in Gaza in 1981, PIJ drew its ideology from the Islamic Revolution in Iran and to this day is fully funded and allied with Tehran, according to Israeli intelligence and independent analysts. The group’s secretary-general, Ziad Nakaleh, is based in Damascus and meets regularly in both Tehran and Beirut with Iranian and Lebanese Hizbollah leaders.
PIJ’s operatives were responsible for deadly suicide bombings inside Israel throughout the 1990s targeting buses and cafés, which ultimately derailed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
More recently, it has established itself as the junior partner inside Hamas-controlled Gaza, working in tandem with the larger and more powerful group as part of a joint command room during escalations with Israel.
Unlike Hamas, however, PIJ does not have any civilian governance responsibilities and often played the “spoiler” in past efforts by Israel and Hamas to reach a more durable arrangement over Gaza. In this manner, PIJ has fought three multi-day campaigns with Israel since 2019 — the last in May this year — during which Hamas stayed out.
Estimates vary as to PIJ’s strength, with analysts believing it has some 15,000 men-under-arms and thousands of rockets and mortars. PIJ also maintains a strong presence in the northern West Bank, primarily in the Jenin refugee camp, where it often operates in tandem with the Jenin Battalion group.
Lion’s Den
Lion’s Den is a relatively new Palestinian militant group originally based in the occupied West Bank. It rose to prominence in 2022 as it carried out a series of shooting attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians, effectively using social media platforms to promote its message.
It launched the attacks as the West Bank was enduring its worst violence since the end of the second intifada in 2005, with almost daily Israeli raids into the Palestinian territory.
The group is known to consist of younger militants, based in and around Nablus, that take pride in their lack of official affiliation with longstanding Palestinian factions. Many are former members of Hamas and especially Fatah that grew alienated with the traditional groups, although Israeli intelligence maintains that Lion’s Den willingly accepts arms and funding from other militant factions.
The group’s military capabilities are believed to be limited, consisting primarily of shooting attacks on West Bank highways and, to a lesser extent, improvised explosive devices. A concerted Israeli counterterror operation late last year killed some of the group’s leadership. Others took up the offer by the Palestinian Authority of “protective custody”. The group’s strength, analysts contend, lies not in its numbers — estimated by Israeli intelligence at several dozen to, at most, several hundred loosely organised operatives — but rather its brand of popular defiance against both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Read the full article here
