Can Hamas’s Qassam Brigades stand against Israel’s ground offensive?

Israeli security forces ranging from its intelligence arms, Mossad and Shin Bet, to the army have long been proud of its operational prowess and intelligence gathering.

But all this Israeli pride has sunk into a sinkhole in the face of Qassam Brigades’ swift attack that stunned the Israeli security establishment as the fighters associated with the armed wing of Hamas entered military bases and towns surrounding Gaza on October 7.

As Israeli security forces faced heavy casualties and struggled to regain control of military bases for several days following the Hamas attack, Tel Aviv is now in the midst of preparing for a risky ground offensive, calling 300,000 people to draft for military service.

Israel’s main goal is to completely eliminate Hamas from Gaza. To do that, Israeli military first needs to defeat the Qassam Brigades led by Mohammed Deif, a Gaza-born refugee, who has survived several assassination attempts and lost one of his eyes, legs, arms while fighting the Israeli army in various battles.

“For them [Qassam Brigades] — and objectively — the October 7 attack is the most successful attack in the history of the Palestinian resistance movement,” says Omri Brinner, a researcher and lecturer at International Team for the Study of Security (ITSS), an Italian think-tank based in Verona.

“If they outlive Israel (even if in a hundred years time), then they will point to this attack as the tipping point, and it was Deif who orchestrated it,” Brinner tells TRT World.

Alon Liel, the former director general of the Israeli foreign ministry, shared a similar view.

“They won the war”, Liel told TRT World, referring to Hamas’s Saturday attack. He also believes that not only Hamas but also a state actor should be behind the Saturday attack.

Edward Erickson, a former American military officer and a retired professor of military history at the Department of War Studies at the Marine Corps University, echoed a similar view as Brinner and Leil’s, saying that Hamas must have prepared for the attack for quite a while.

“The Qassam brigades have demonstrated tactical capability and also that they can use technology effectively. What they did, militarily, was not easy and they carried it off quickly and purposefully. It is extremely difficult to surprise the IDF. Yet the Qassam brigades did it successfully - that success speaks for itself,” Erickson says.

Qassam vs Israeli Army

Erickson says that after the Qassam Brigades’ “deliberately planned operation that is designed to elicit an immediate and predictable reaction from Israel”, the armed group is waiting for the Israeli army to come to Gaza, an “open-air prison”, to fight them in a complex urban setting.

“There is no question in my mind that the Qassam brigades are ready to fight and that they will fight hard with the objective of inflicting very heavy casualties on the IDF,” says the American military analyst, who has written numerous books on war strategy and history.

Analysts estimate the fighters strength of Qassam Brigades between 30,000 and 50,000. The Brigades is named after Izz ad-Din al Qassam, an anti-colonialist Muslim preacher, who lived in Palestine during the British mandate. Al Qassam formed the Black Hand, a resistance group, to fight the developing Zionist movement in the Holy Land under British rule.

The Qassam Brigades will survive the Israeli attacks because they are an armed group not a state, which “depends on its institutions”, says Brinner. The Brigades is not even a conventional army, he adds. “For their survival, they only need to have as many militants alive and active.”

On the other hand, despite having a powerful army and many allies, Israel has its own disadvantages.

The military Center of Gravity of Israel is its Jewish population and its unwillingness to take heavy casualties, says Erickson, adding that “Hamas understands that and will leverage Israeli rage into forcing the Israeli army into hasty attacks.”

If Israel invades Gaza, Qassam Brigades will employ every possible tactic from using IEDs to kidnapping Israeli soldiers into tunnels, according to Brinner.

“When Israel declares that it will wipe Hamas (thus the AQ Brigades) off the face of the earth, it aims at an impossible target. Hamas will not be destroyed, but significantly weakened,” says the Israeli analyst.

Can Israel handle Deif?

Beside the military capabilities of Qassam, there is another big problem for Israel: Deif, the group’s mysterious leader, who lost not only parts of his body but also his wife and two kids including an infant son to Israeli attacks. During the most recent escalations, he also lost his father, brother and two close relatives targeted by Israeli bombing.

"Mohammand Deif is an experienced and capable military leader. We might even say that he has a talent for war. He is a survivor. Moreover, he understands the Israelis and he understands the military capability of Hamas,” says Erickson.

“He will employ asymmetric warfare to draw the Israeli army into a costly urban warfare fight. I believe Deif is counting on the Israeli army to make a lot of mistakes in its haste to eradicate Hamas. We should not underestimate this man.”

Brinner has a similar view to Erickson. He is “more dangerous to Israel and its allies” than Hamas’s political leaders, “for the simple reason that his philosophy is based on an armed struggle against the Israeli state,” says the analyst.

Unlike Hamas’s political leaders like Ismail Haniyeh, who resides abroad, Deif has stayed in Gaza for all his life alongside his family members most of whom were killed by Israelis. This is also a factor along with his body and family injuries, which turns him into a symbol of Palestinian suffering and resistance creating an image of a semi-mythical person, according to analysts.

“We don’t even know how alive he is,” said Dina Lisnyansky, a lecturer at Israel’s Reichman University.