While top man Yahya Sinwar slithers from tunnel to tunnel to stay alive, the IDF has been relentlessly killing Hamas’ top leaders and commanders with surgical strikes.
This from frontpagemag.com.
To wit:
– On July 13, the long-sought military commander of Hamas in Gaza, Mohammed Deif, was assassinated,
– On July 31, the head of Hamas’ political wing, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed when a bomb exploded in his room at a heavily-guarded guesthouse in Tehran, and
– Another dozen Hamas commanders, just below the top level, have been killed during the Gaza campaign.
Only Yahya Sinwar, the man mainly responsible for the October 7 attacks, has still managed to stay alive, continuously moving from tunnel to tunnel underneath Gaza, bringing with him Israeli hostages whose proximity, he assumes, will preserve him from an IDF attack.
Hamas fighters are being kept constantly on the run, defeated in one city after another, and forced to keep moving, if they can, from cities that the IDF has announced it has targeted to the “safe” areas it has warned civilians to move to. The pressure never ends. The IDF sometimes will clear an area, and then returns if it detects Hamas operatives have been regrouping there.
Many of the Hamas operatives appear to be living in squalor in the tunnels underneath Gaza. The IDF can rotate out its troops for rest and recuperation, but the Hamas combatants don’t have that luxury. They must continue to fight, from their hideouts in civilian apartments, schools, and mosques, or emerging from the network of tunnels in attempts to ambush IDF soldiers.
Their morale is low; after all, they have seen half of their original number killed, and an unknown number of wounded operatives are being treated in wretched conditions. Hundreds of the tunnels have been destroyed.
Their weapons hideouts have been uncovered and are being systematically destroyed; every day they lose more weapons that are found and seized by the IDF. The IDF has also taken control the Philadelphi Corridor, a strip of land inside southern Gaza on the border with Egypt, and has ended all smuggling of weapons into Gaza both above ground and through the tunnels, now destroyed, that formerly snaked underground from Egypt into Gaza.
Of the 35,000 operatives Hamas had in Gaza before October 7, almost half—17,000—have been killed, and many (no one has publicly speculated as to how many, but ordinarily in wars the wounded far outnumber the dead) have been wounded and are now hors de combat.
