Hamas built an underground war machine to ensure its own survival
Vowing self-sufficiency, Hamas turned a maze of tunnels in Gaza into weapons factories and well-stocked fortifications. A year after the war began, parts of the group remain deeply entrenched.
AMMAN, Jordan — Six months before the Oct. 7 attack, Hamas’s top leader in the Gaza Strip was meeting with visiting Palestinian businessmen in the enclave when he made a shocking disclosure. Hamas was planning something big, Yahya Sinwar told his guests. “There’s going to be a surprise.”
Sinwar’s secret plan would reveal itself on a morning one year ago as waves of attackers swarmed Israeli villages and military bases, killing about 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostages. But the nature of Sinwar’s preparations — how, exactly, the group armed itself for the assault while simultaneously engineering a sophisticated, multilayered defense against the inevitable Israeli military response — would become clear only gradually, in the weeks and months of heavy fighting that followed.
Evidence accumulated over the past year has brought new clarity to Hamas’s operational planning before Oct. 7, revealing how and from where it obtained the means for both the attack itself and a carefully considered resistance phase that was designed to last up to 12 months. It shows how, despite years of isolation within a densely populated strip of land the size of Philadelphia, Hamas acquired an astonishing arsenal of rockets, explosives and small arms, while constructing the financial and defensive networks that enabled Sinwar and his followers to hold out for months under a determined assault by one of the world’s most capable militaries.