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.

Many analysts had believed that Hamas was heavily dependent on Iran and had smuggled in large shipments of Iranian-made rockets and missiles while making new ones in large underground factories. Yet a year later, IDF investigators in Gaza have turned up surprisingly few Iranian-made weapons, and no large-scale factories for mass assembly of rockets and missiles. Instead, they mostly found small workshops where metalworkers with simple lathes turned scavenged pipes and agricultural chemicals into components for explosive projectiles to be lobbed into Israeli villages.

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Source:The Washington Post


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