Hamas has huge arsenal of weapons

Hamas has built up a vast range of missiles, rockets and suicide drones from its own covert workshops hidden in the overcrowded city of Gaza but with Iranian technical assistance and smuggled Iran-supplied parts. The militant Hamas military wing had to forego its longstanding smuggling system for Iranian weaponry when a combination effort by Israel, Egypt and Sudan closed down the well-used route. The smuggling route went from Tehran to Sudan by ship, then to warehouses in Khartoum run by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, and finally through 1,200 secretly-dug tunnels under the Sinai Peninsula border into Gaza. Most of the tunnels were destroyed by Egypt between 2013 and 2014. As a result, although Hamas had begun building its own basic rocket, the Qassam 1, as far back as 2001, the main effort switched to domestically-produced weaponry. Smuggling still continues but Hamas uses the so-called “ship-to-shore” route with Iranian freighters or fishing vessels dropping sealed capsules into the sea to be picked up by Hamas frogmen in boats which have to evade the watchful eyes of the Israeli navy. However, Hamas created its own missile research and development facilities located in different parts of the Gaza Strip. Israel has successfully destroyed some of them with airstrikes. But the rocket production line in Gaza has survived, and the inventory has increased in both quality and quantity. The arsenal of weapons is estimated to total between 7,000 and 10,000 rockets and munition-carrying drones, with launch ranges varying from just a few miles to more than 150 miles. Some of them have an Iranian imprint such as the Fajr-3 and Fajr-5. Russian-made Grad rockets are among the mix of home-grown and foreign weaponry. Fabian Hinz, a missile expert at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, highlighted two rockets which he said demonstrated the progress Hamas had made in the last two years: the R-160 with a range of about 100 miles, and the Ayyash-250 with a range of 155 miles. “They don’t need that sort of range [Gaza to Jerusalem is just 48 miles) but it may be about prestige. Hamas has also demonstrated the dramatic improvements they have made in terms of missile quantity and launch rate,” he said. The one riddle is why there has been no evidence yet of Hamas developing or acquiring precision-guided systems. Hinz said Iran was working closely with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon to develop precision-guided missiles but it wasn’t clear whether Tehran had also collaborated with Hamas to develop the same systems. It would require smuggling guidance kits to Gaza for fitting in the workshops. “Maybe Iran has supplied these kits but Hamas has chosen to hold them back for the moment,” he said. Compared with the more advanced weaponry developed by Hezbollah, Hinz said the Hamas rockets were largely “low-tech”. This is underlined by the appearance of the first Hamas air-defence system, the Mubar-1. It has no guidance system and it looks like it uses a basic artillery rocket to try and hit incoming Israeli aircraft or drones.