Made in Gaza: the local origin of Hamas weapons

The attack in southern Israel led on October 7 by the armed wing of the Palestinian Hamas movement, the Ezedín al Qassam brigades, caused enormous shock, mixed with confusion, due to its scope and sophistication. The group carried out an unexpected display of capabilities that very few expected, and one of the elements that generated the greatest surprise was the quantity and variety of weapons that the militiamen used in their raid, which caused 1,200 deaths.

The Gaza Strip, densely populated and with few resources, has been subject to a strict land, sea and air blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt for more than 16 years. During the same period, it has suffered multiple Israeli military operations, especially in the form of intense bombings, which have been devastating. And it remains under a strict surveillance regime by the occupation forces. But even so, Hamas's armed wing has been able to compose a significantly larger and more advanced arsenal than previously assumed, including a wide range of rockets and light weapons.

Senior officials in the political and military arms of Hamas assure that the majority of weapons at its disposal, including light weapons, ammunition, rockets and other explosive devices, are locally produced. The enigmatic spokesman for the Al Qassam brigades, known by the nom de guerre Abu Obaida, explained in early January in a speech broadcast on the Qatari channel Al Jazeera that all weapons used in combat are domestically manufactured, from bullets to rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank systems.

“In general, Hamas' weapons development is quite surrounded by mystery,” acknowledges a researcher from Caliber Obscura, a platform specialized in the analysis of weapons in the Middle East, who still believes that the group has the capacity to at least manufacture devices. improvised explosives, rockets, suicide drones and rocket launchers.

Al Qassam's factories in Gaza are believed to be largely fueled by materials from the extensive destruction of infrastructure in the Strip, including homes and roads, caused by successive Israeli attacks, which the group is then able to reuse. Furthermore, a significant number of Israeli bombs and artillery shells launched into Gaza fail to detonate, allowing the group to recycle their explosive component and give new life to the other materials in their own rockets.

“Some weapons [de Hamás] They come from smuggling. But many have been manufactured locally,” estimates Gazan writer and analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who has studied the group's weapons development. “That's the only way to get them,” he says.

The Israeli army itself has hinted at these domestic production capabilities of Hamas's armed wing during its current military operation in Gaza. In mid-October, he released a video on social media in which he showed what he claimed was part of the weapons used by the Al Qassam brigades in their attack in Israel, and noted that “everything is homemade.” In November, the Israeli military also announced that a major arms manufacturer in the group had been killed. And in January he organized a press trip to what he described as the largest weapons manufacturing complex found since the beginning of his invasion of Gaza, located in the center of the enclave. The Israeli military declined a request from this newspaper to talk about other similar findings.

Smuggling and experience

In addition to domestic production, a significant number of the weapons used by Hamas's armed wing in combat—including bullets, guns and grenades—come from stockpiles stolen from Israeli army military bases that are then smuggled into Gaza or West Bank, according to a report from Israel's military ranks recently obtained by the American media The New York Times.

Senior Israeli political officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as some experts and research institutes in the country, have insisted since October that a significant portion of the Al Qassam brigades' weapons reach Gaza through tunnels that They connect with the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, through the only border of the enclave that is not directly controlled by Israel. And although analysts like Alkhatib consider that it is likely that this smuggling exists on a small scale, especially to introduce precursor materials, Egypt denies this and assures that in the last decade it has sealed the border, through which a large number of weapons, particularly between 2011 and 2013.

“This is basically a political maneuver by Israel; It is another way of trying to avoid their complete failure against Hamas,” considers Mohannad Sabry, an Egyptian researcher specialized in the Sinai. “Over the past few years, Israel has had no idea how to evaluate the evolution of Hamas and the growth of its military capabilities,” he notes.

Activity on the border between Gaza and Egypt is a particularly sensitive issue because Netanyahu has reiterated that he wants to exercise greater control, or directly occupy, the narrow passage that separates the Sinai from the Strip, known as the Philadelphi or Salah El Din corridor. However, in a statement at the end of January, the head of the Egyptian State Information Service, Diaa Rashwan, who acts as a kind of official spokesperson, dismissed as false claims about the existence of smuggling operations in the area and accused its promoters from looking for “an external person responsible” for their own mistakes.

In this sense, Rashwan assured that, within the framework of the extensive anti-terrorist campaign of the Egyptian army and security forces in northern Sinai in the last decade, 1,500 tunnels were destroyed, a five-kilometer-wide buffer zone was created in the border, and the border wall separating Egypt from Gaza was reinforced. The senior Egyptian official also pointed out that “many” weapons in Gaza are “smuggled from inside Israel.”

From the outside, Iran acknowledges that it finances Hamas and helps train members of the group to make weapons autonomously and domestically. And while Tehran also supplies them with weapons, the delivery channels are less known. Egypt, for example, claims that most of this smuggling actually occurs by sea, with clandestine shipments dumped miles off the Israeli-controlled coast of Gaza.

“In recent years, Hamas has manufactured a lot locally, but for the technical knowledge of manufacturing, and the technical capabilities to use different doctrines in the way of fighting, they had the support of [la milicia libanesa] Hezbollah and Iran,” says Alkhatib.

In parallel, recent investigations into the weapons currently used by Hamas brigades in Gaza and Israel have been able to identify weapons apparently manufactured by Iran, China, Russia, North Korea and Bulgaria. However, it is not clear in which cases they have been provided by these countries and in which they come from the black market.

Despite having demonstrated higher military and weapons production capabilities than previously estimated, the Israeli army has an enormously superior and much more destructive force and arsenal. In the ongoing military offensive on
Gaza, the Israeli army has killed more than 27,000 Palestinian citizens, according to the Strip's Health Ministry, while the armed wings of the Palestinian resistance movements have killed 222 Israeli soldiers, according to the Israeli army.

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