How Hamas Is Fighting in Gaza

Hamas overwhelmed Israel’s border in October with something like a conventional military maneuver. Now, it acts as a guerrilla force, its fighters often disguised as civilians.

They hide under residential neighborhoods, storing their weapons in miles of tunnels and in houses, mosques, sofas — even a child’s bedroom — blurring the boundary between civilians and combatants.

They emerge from hiding in plainclothes, sometimes wearing sandals or tracksuits before firing on Israeli troops, attaching mines to their vehicles, or firing rockets from launchers in civilian areas. Sometimes, [Hamas terrorists] have hid among the few civilians who decided to remain in their neighborhoods despite Israeli orders to evacuate, or accompanied civilians as they returned to areas that the Israelis had captured and then abandoned.

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At the start of the war, Hamas and its allies fired a barrage of rockets toward civilian areas of Israel, including roughly 3,000 on Oct. 7 itself, often using launchers hidden in densely populated civilian neighborhoods in Gaza. The Israeli Army captured and destroyed scores of launchers, including some it said it found near a mosque and a kindergarten, bringing the rocket fire to a near halt.

After Israeli ground troops invaded in late October, Hamas went further in transforming civilian areas of Gaza into military zones, setting traps in scores of neighborhoods and creating confusion about what a combatant looks like by dressing its fighters as civilians.