In an article suggestively titled “Where Is Hamas Getting Its Weapons? Increasingly, From Israel,” the New York Times reports on how Hamas is managing to furnish its rockets by recycling dud rounds fired into Gaza by Israel:
Intelligence gathered during months of fighting revealed that, just as the Israeli authorities misjudged Hamas’s intentions before Oct. 7, they also underestimated its ability to obtain arms.
What is clear now is that the very weapons that Israeli forces have used to enforce a blockade of Gaza over the past 17 years are now being used against them. Israeli and American military explosives have enabled Hamas to shower Israel with rockets and, for the first time, penetrate Israeli towns from Gaza.
“Unexploded ordnance is a main source of explosives for Hamas,” said Michael Cardash, the former deputy head of the Israeli National Police Bomb Disposal Division and an Israeli police consultant. “They are cutting open bombs from Israel, artillery bombs from Israel, and a lot of them are being used, of course, and repurposed for their explosives and rockets.”
With munitions that have between a 10 and 15 percent failure rate, Israel’s bombardments have succeeded in devastating Hamas’s above-ground abilities while simultaneously delivering to Hamas’s door enough dud rounds to facilitate return salvos.
The report continues:
A few miles away, members of an Israeli forensic team collected one of the 5,000 rockets fired by Hamas that day. Examining the rocket, they discovered that its military-grade explosives had most likely come from an unexploded Israeli missile fired into Gaza during a previous war, according to an Israeli intelligence officer.
The Oct. 7 attacks showcased the patchwork arsenal that Hamas had stitched together. It included Iranian-made attack drones and North Korean-made rocket launchers, the types of weapons that Hamas is known to smuggle into Gaza through tunnels. Iran remains a major source of Hamas’s money and weapons.
But other weapons, like anti-tank explosives, RPG warheads, thermobaric grenades and improvised devices, were repurposed Israeli arms, according to Hamas videos and remnants uncovered by Israel.
On the one hand, it’s unsurprising that a crowd-sourced terrorist organization conducting guerrilla warfare would have little issue with provoking attacks to harvest duds (never mind the civilians caught in between) while taking munition donations from some of the world’s worst governments. On the other, the theft and acquisition of Israeli materiel suggest failures in IDF logistics that cannot be allowed to continue — though the unlikelihood of Palestinians ever working on military installations again may go some way in resolving the leakage matter.
The Times coverage, and certainly its readership, will see this Hamas recycling program as a reason for Israel to cease its artillery campaigns. This is nonsensical. Israel has the choice of conducting war with men or munitions — it has picked munitions. Better to shoot artillery at Hamas, and deal with whatever duds they collect and fire back, than to conduct infantry operations without artillery support and risk higher combat casualties. It’s worth remembering who they’re fighting — Islamists so dedicated to the destruction of Israel that Hamas is snorkeling for extra stockpiles:
In 2019, Qassam commandos discovered hundreds of munitions on two World War I–era British military vessels that had sunk off the coast of Gaza a century earlier. The discovery, Qassam boasted, allowed it to make hundreds of new rockets.
One cannot reason with that level of devotion to destruction.