Hamas has opted not to respond militarily to Israel’s recent killing of its Rafah and Khan Younis brigade commanders, fearing that retaliation could prompt the Israel Defense Forces to resume wider combat operations and push beyond the “Yellow Line” in Gaza, Channel 12 reported on Thursday.
The report also cited a new survey by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre, or JMCC, a Palestinian research and media organization, which found limited support for armed confrontation with Israel. Just 13% of Palestinians surveyed backed such a course, including fewer than 10% of respondents in Gaza.
Israel said on Tuesday that the IDF killed Nael Abu Obeid, the Hamas commander of the Rafah Brigade, in a strike in southern Gaza. The IDF and Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) said in an earlier joint statement on Sept. 11 that Muhammad Yazouri, commander of Hamas’s Khan Yunis Brigade, was killed in a strike in the southern Gaza Strip the previous night. The IDF also announced this week the assassinations of other key Gazan terrorists, including a Palestinian Islamic Jihad cell commander who infiltrated the Kibbutz Kissufim area during the cross-border Hamas-led invasion into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“The explicit decision made by the terrorist organization stems from serious concern over an Israeli response,” Channel 12 reported. “Hamas understands that the IDF has the upper hand on the battlefield and therefore does not want to give it a pretext to renew the war and launch a ground incursion beyond the Yellow Line. It has therefore decided to absorb the operations that led to the elimination of numerous senior figures.”
The survey pointed to a broader preference for political rather than military means. Overall, 55.8% of Palestinians said negotiations were the best way to achieve the goals defined in the poll as ending the occupation and establishing a state. Support for negotiations was higher among Gaza respondents, at roughly 65%.
A further 17.8% of respondents favored a nonviolent, popular intifada, including 21.3% in Gaza, according to the JMCC. Taken together, the findings suggest that armed confrontation currently has far less public support than either negotiations or nonviolent mass action.
Maj. Gen. Yaniv Asor, head of IDF’s Southern Command, said on Tuesday that Iranian-backed Hamas enjoys widespread support in the Gaza Strip. Palestinians who oppose the terror group are “unable to influence reality,” he said.
Asor spoke at a ceremony marking the start of the Hebrew new year. Division and brigade commanders attended, along with heads of local authorities in the Western Negev, according to the IDF.
Hamas prepared for its Oct. 7, 2023, massacre “in the heart of a population that supports it, sympathizes with it and identifies with it,” Asor told attendees, stressing that “Hamas is not a ‘foreign entity’ in Gaza.”
The terror group “grew from within it, developed and was educated there, inside a radical and murderous Islamic culture,” he said.
In a joint statement announcing the killing of the Rafah Brigade commander, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said that “our message is clear: No terrorist is immune—and Hamas will not be in Gaza.”
