Guerrilla war in Gaza: Hamas is resurfacing in territories Israel thought it controlled

When Israel confirmed on Friday evening that it had killed Ayman Showadeh, nicknamed Abu Ahmed (Ahmed’s father), one of the Hamas leaders in the Shujaiya neighborhood (Gaza City), Palestinian social networks had been flooding with condolences, praise and tributes for more than a day. Some, the Israelis, declared victory for having managed to eliminate an enemy commander. Others, the Palestinians, also, because a new martyr from the cause had already made the leap to “paradise”.

For some, Showadeh was the deputy commander of the armed group in that area, a “terrorist” who has carried out numerous attacks against Israeli troops and, in addition, participated at the leadership level in the massacre of some 1,200 people on October 7 in Israeli territory. For others, he was a historic fighter against the occupation who, in fact, participated in the October murders, a “venerable gentleman” son of a former Minister of Justice, a “feared hero” who has “fought in the alleys (of Shujaiya) until he met God.”

After more than nine months, the war, the longest and deadliest in Gaza, seems to have become chronic. Hamas battalions are reappearing in places where they had been considered liquidated. At the same time, the Israeli army has installed bases and built infrastructures that indicate that it does not plan to leave in the short and medium term. Until now, there has only been one ceasefire and it was the last week of November, at the beginning of the conflict.

“For Israel, this is already a disaster,” says military analyst Jesús Manuel Pérez Triana. He believes that the Jewish state started with the wrong strategy from the beginning, set itself unattainable goals, had no timetable or withdrawal plan, and is now paying for it. “The only way for Israel to plan a victorious campaign was to set limited objectives. We are going to bring all the hostages home again. We are going to significantly reduce Hamas’s infrastructure, resources, and capacity, but knowing that it was always going to be a limited objective,” he said in a telephone conversation.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted and continues to insist that he seeks to completely eliminate all military and political capacity of Hamas, something that even his own army believes is not feasible. Therefore, Pérez Triana believes that the problem does not come only from the capacity of the Palestinian resistance, but from the fact that Israel “should have ended this war a long time ago.”

In these alleys of Shujaiya, sometimes riddled with tunnels like much of the Strip, fighting has been intense over the past two weeks. The Israeli army, which appears to have withdrawn in recent hours, was forced to return to the neighbourhood after having eliminated the local Hamas battalion, which has ended up re-emerging and facing them with numerous ambushes. The same has happened in other parts of Gaza that, in recent months, had been considered subdued. Shujaiya is one of the bastions of resistance where Hamas faces an army that far outnumbers it in men, weapons and technology. But the tactics of guerrilla warfare in an urban environment that the locals know like the back of their hand mean that, at times, the forces are not so disparate.

“A false sense of control”

For Pérez Triana, the army ends up having “a false sense of control for a week. Then, through the gaps, they (the militants) sneak back in and then the drip of a bomb here, a sniper there and the casualties start.” He gives as an example the battle of Fallujah fought in Iraq by the US occupation troops two decades ago.

Palestinian militants, like Israeli soldiers, film their attacks against the occupation troops every day in a propaganda operation that has a great impact, especially in Arab media – which do not exist for Israeli media – and on social networks, with the consequent impact that this has on future generations of activists. They are seen preparing bombs that they bury in the streets or place in buildings and then detonate as tanks, bulldozers, enemy armored vehicles or infantry soldiers pass by.

They also locate flats and buildings where Israeli snipers are hiding and focus on them before firing at them with rifles or grenade launchers. They can even be seen standing in the rubble wearing flip-flops and T-shirts, toasting bread on a precarious fire and sharing tea between operations. They adorn these videos with a bombastic soundtrack, and distort the voices and hide the faces of the protagonists in an attempt to make things easier for the Israeli secret services.

“Snipers, ambushes, buildings filled with explosives that are detonated when Israeli soldiers enter and the building collapses. In short, it is not surprising that this type of thing happens in urban combat,” says Pérez Triana. He believes that it is very difficult to consolidate control “house by house and neighborhood by neighborhood” in an area as densely populated as Gaza. He also recalls the vulnerability to the action of resistance from tanks and armored vehicles in these narrow areas of the cities, as can be seen in Hamas videos.

Coinciding with the ninth month of war following the Hamas attack that killed some 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, the group’s spokesman, Abu Obeida, said that they are maintaining resistance throughout the entire Gaza Strip. The battle for Rafah in the south and Shujaiya in the north are, according to him, examples of this. He added that, despite the casualties, they continue to recruit thousands of fighters and even reuse unexploded enemy weapons. He also said that he has documents that will one day, when published, do harm to Israel and that the Israeli hostages in Gaza have become a “plaything” in Netanyahu’s hands.

With more than 38,400 dead and a huge level of destruction in Gaza, the conflict is now in its tenth month. In this time, Israel has not managed to defuse the Palestinian armed resistance, led by the brigades of Ezedin Al Qassam, the military wing of Hamas to which Showadeh belonged.

The group’s top leaders in the Gaza Strip, led by Yahia Sinwar, have yet to be captured or killed. Israel said the target of Saturday’s attack, which killed at least 71 people in the civilian camp of Al Mawasi in the southern Gaza Strip, was Mohamed Deif, the group’s military commander in the Palestinian enclave. There is no confirmation that he is among the dead or wounded.

Authorities in Gaza, where Hamas has ruled for nearly two decades, do not distinguish between militants and civilians in their list of local casualties, though they insist that most of the victims are women and children. Israel also does not give an exact figure for how many Palestinian militants it has killed, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu estimated in May that the number was about half of those killed by his troops in Gaza.

Tel al Hawa is another of the Gaza City neighbourhoods where fighting has been intense in recent days. In what appears to be a new withdrawal by the occupation troops, emergency services, as in Shujaiya, have found dozens of bodies in streets and buildings, according to the Civil Defence corps.

Hamas’s armed wing is joined by other smaller groups, but also with experience in previous wars in the Strip. The main one is the Al Quds Brigades of the Islamic Jihad group. These factions also collaborated in the attack on October 7 and in the maintenance of the 250 hostages captured that day, of which more than 100 remain in the Strip, although at least 40 are believed to be dead.

“There must be an exit plan,” says Jesús Manuel Pérez Triana, insisting on Israel’s lack of planning. That is why, now, with Hamas still facing the army and more than a hundred hostages in Gaza, it seems that Israel “is lowering its own expectations and seeking not a victory, but a consolation prize.”

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