Contrary to popular belief, Hamas is not just flip-flop hijackers with rusty Kalashnikovs and suicide bombers wrapped in cheap explosives. Hamas has been busy for many years with its scientific program, which included developing weapons of mass destruction and electronic intelligence. Iran is actively helping the program, but Gaza already has many of its own engineers, trained at the local university.
In November 2012, Hamas fired rockets at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, cities approximately 80 km from the Gaza Strip, where the group operates. For the Israelis, this came as a complete surprise; no one there had imagined that such long-range weapons had appeared in Gaza. Prior to this, Hamas could only strike 40 km deep into Israeli territory – this is the distance the first-generation Fajr-5 missile supplied by Iran flew.
And Hamas never had an abundance of these Iranian missiles – due to the blockade of the Gaza Strip introduced in 2007, Fajrs, like any other weapons, were smuggled into the Gaza Strip through complex smuggling. In one way or another, intermediaries (including high-ranking ones) from Libya, Syria, Chad and a number of other states were involved in illegal supplies. One of the key participants in this complex scheme were the Bedouins of the Egyptian Sinai. It was they who were responsible for the final part of the path of the missiles, which were transported through underground tunnels dug by Hamas from Egypt to the Gaza Strip. One Fajr-5 missile weighs about a ton, which makes its clandestine delivery very difficult. Moreover, Israel and Egypt, which joined the blockade of Gaza, constantly monitored all possible smuggling routes and destroyed any cargo found.
Israeli intelligence services rushed to find out how it happened that they missed the delivery of new, much longer-range missiles. And they discovered that the rockets were assembled in Gaza itself, that only small units were smuggled into Hamas, which were very difficult or even impossible to assemble in the enclave, which was blocked on all sides. This missile, called the M-75, was believed by Hamas to be what they call a gamechanger in English, a device that completely changes the rules of the game. After all, now, thanks to the M-75, Hamas could threaten not only Sderot, Ashdod and Asheklon located near Gaza, but also the largest cities in Israel in the very center of the country.
Hamas was so inspired by this success that they erected a monument to their rocket in one of the Gaza squares.
Casualties among residents of the Gaza Strip
True, the M-75 launches did not cause much damage to Israel. Most of them were intercepted by the Iron Dome air defense system, and those that reached Israeli cities fell on empty houses, whose residents managed to go down to shelters. Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that the M-75 killed more Palestinians than Israelis. And this is not a figure of speech – the Hamas missile program, like, probably, everything connected with this organization, was the most bloody enterprise.
The M-75 rocket killed more Palestinians than Israelis
To begin with, the very construction of the workshops in which the missiles were assembled was a very risky endeavor. Hamas wisely did not dare to build these workshops on the surface – Israeli intelligence, including space intelligence, would have instantly detected suspicious objects, and they would have been destroyed even before they went into operation. So huge bunkers were dug beneath Gaza’s surface for the missile program – they became part of a system of extensive underground tunnels known as the Hamas subway.
Schoolchildren, including those from primary school, were actively involved in the work on creating bunkers and tunnels – it was easier for them than for adults to move in narrow underground adits. As of 2012 (when the first M-75 launch took place), at least 160 children died during the construction of Hamas underground tunnels, either by suffocation or being buried under the ground.
The victims of the missile program also include residents of the Gaza Strip who died as a result of epidemics of infectious diseases. First of all, cholera. The fact is that the M-75 and other Hamas rockets use water and sewer pipes as bodies. These pipes were officially supplied to the Gaza Strip by Israel, but in limited quantities. The Israelis, knowing what their supplies could be used for, carefully calculated how many pipes were needed to replace or build a sewer system in a particular area of the sector, and sent exactly as many as they calculated was needed. If these pipes were used for their intended purpose, Hamas simply would not have casings for their rockets. Therefore, all or almost all of the pipes went to the production of weapons, and the water supply and sewerage systems were not repaired for decades. Because of this, about 90% of all fresh water in the region is simply unfit for drinking, and epidemics, including deadly diseases, occurred almost every year. Exactly how many people died from diseases caused by contaminated water is unknown. The count most likely runs into the hundreds.
Hand of Iran
But, apparently, for Hamas all these deaths were acceptable losses. As well as for their Iranian partners. Iran has been Hamas’s main supporter and sponsor for many years, donating an average of $15 million a month to the organization’s needs. In addition, it was from Iran that small arms, explosives, communication devices and other military cargo came to the Gaza Strip. Most likely, it was the Iranian authorities who came to the conclusion that it was easier to teach residents of the Gaza Strip to assemble missiles on their own than to smuggle them across the entire Middle East, risking being left without valuable cargo at any moment.
It is known that the notorious M-75s were assembled according to instructions written by Iranian specialists. They also supervised the construction of assembly shops and the training of workers involved in missile production.
Apparently, the Iranians also helped in the development of Hamas’s military doctrine, which until October 2023 assumed, first of all, multi-day rocket attacks on its cities, accompanied by targeted terrorist raids, that would exhaust the enemy. The bet was that the Israelis, tired of constant danger, would demand that the government stop the shelling and attacks, albeit through some concessions to the terrorists.
The same doctrine prescribed the need to kill as many Israeli troops as possible, even if this meant sacrificing the lives of Hamas militants. It’s all about the reverent attitude of Israelis towards their military, which is well known in the Gaza Strip. The deaths of soldiers made the government more accommodating, which gave Hamas the opportunity to achieve a temporary easing of the blockade and demonstrate to the population of Gaza another victory over the Israelis, which was presented as every truce or ceasefire agreement.
The version that Iran was directly involved in the development of this doctrine is supported by the fact that Hezbollah, which is actually a branch of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Lebanon, acted in exactly the same way in 2006 during the Second Lebanon War.
Personnel education
Iran also took part in the development of educational programs for educational institutions in the sector, including the main university there, the Islamic University of Gaza. In addition to Islamic theology itself, there were also applied faculties, such as engineering, construction, computer technology and even archeology. What united all these faculties was the compulsory teaching of Hamas ideology, which instilled in students an absolute rejection of Israel.
It is curious that the Islamic University of Gaza was created in the late 1970s with an eye on the leading Western universities of that time. One of the most striking examples of Western borrowing was the creation of an elected student council, whose members took an active part in the management of the university. University elections have long been the only permitted form of political activity in the Gaza Strip. Not only students and teachers, but also other residents of the region watched them with interest.
For a long time, university elections were perhaps the only permitted form of political activity in the Gaza Strip.
The author of these lines several years ago found himself in Gaza just on the days of the student council elections. The students, supported by Hamas, won then by a huge margin over their competitors. And, judging by the fact that rallies in support of these particular candidates attracted real crowds of supporters, the elections were held fairly, without obvious fraud or stuffing.
Hamas indeed enjoyed the support of a significant part of the population of the Gaza Strip, and of Palestine as a whole. Although anonymous public opinion polls recorded occasional drops in the movement’s popularity, the figure for its popular support never fell below 35%. At least half of the Palestinians eligible to vote would have voted for one of the Hamas leaders, Ismail Haniyeh, in the presidential elections, if such had taken place .
It is clear that with this level of support, Hamas had no problems recruiting engineers, builders and other specialists it needed into its ranks. Moreover, deprived of the opportunity to find work abroad due to the blockade of the Gaza Strip, these specialists were simply forced to work for Hamas – the largest, and in the case, for example, with engineering specialties, perhaps the only employer in the region.
In general, Hamas’s focus on training its personnel, rather than outsourcing tasks to foreign engineers and developers, has clearly benefited the movement. Abroad, specialists could become easy targets for Israeli intelligence services, assassins, or could simply hand over secrets to Hamas for a reward. Having grown up in Gaza, raised from childhood to hate Israel and unable to leave the region, local scientists turned out to be a godsend for Hamas.
Whether they knowingly helped Hamas or were forced to do so, engineers and developers made a significant contribution to the activities of terrorists. Thus, programmers from Gaza created several applications for mobile phones that collected data about Israelis, including military personnel, which could be used to organize terrorist attacks. The most famous such application was the online dating program GlanceLove. Hiding behind photographs of beautiful girls, Hamas lured Israeli military personnel who wanted to meet them with information about their military units, weapons and supplies.
Programmers from Gaza wrote a dating application through which Hamas extracted information from the Israeli military
Another example of intelligence work was the Golden Cup app, which masqueraded as the official program of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Hamas updated match statistics in real time, posted tournament tables and fresh photos from the stadiums. At the same time, the application collected and sent data from the mobile phones of users who installed the malicious program to the Hamas data center. As in the case of GlanceLove, the main targets of the Golden Cup were soldiers and officers of the Israeli army.
Israel’s struggle
Most likely, the data center where applications were developed and spy information was collected has already been destroyed by Israeli bombing. Just as the Islamic University of Gaza and several other universities affiliated with Hamas were destroyed. With a high degree of probability, it can be assumed that a ground operation by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip will soon begin, one of the main goals of which will be the discovery and destruction of underground tunnels and bunkers with all weapons and equipment for their production hidden there.
Will this end Hamas? Hardly. In the early 1990s, Hamas, as its leaders later admitted, had at its disposal only two dozen machine guns and a few hand grenades. Most of the organization’s terrorist activities at that time consisted of attacks on Israelis by militants armed only with knives. By the fall of 2023, the organization already had at its disposal hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of missiles, tens of thousands of small arms and entire underground research institutes working for Hamas in several shifts. Even if it loses all its arsenals and production facilities, Hamas will still have its main weapon – the ideology of hatred of Israel.
“There is no other solution to the Palestinian question other than jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are a waste of time and effort,” says Hamas’s founding document, known as the “Testament of the Islamic Resistance Movement.”
And although the “Testament” was rewritten several times, the point about the lack of alternative to jihad always remained unchanged.