Hamas has gotten plenty of help from Iran, but much of its arsenal is now homegrown

In terms of pure firepower, Hamas is no match for the Israel Defense Forces, one of the world’s best-funded and most technologically advanced militaries. The war in Gaza is a classic “asymmetric” conflict, in which a non-state terrorist group employing hit-and-run tactics and knowledge of the terrain tries to draw a more powerful army into a prolonged, bloody, and politically unsustainable conflict.

That being said, thanks to international support–largely from Iran–and increasingly sophisticated homegrown manufacturing capabilities, Hamas has built a formidable arsenal of rockets, drones and high-tech weaponry, to the point where experts say it now fights more like a state army than a traditional terrorist group.

These capabilities allowed Hamas to surprise and overwhelm Israel’s defenses during the attacks on Oct. 7. One month into Israel’s war against the group, Israeli soldiers are coming face to face with the Hamas arsenal in Gaza.

Rockets

When Hamas first introduced the Qassam rocket in 2001, during the second Intifada uprising against Israel, it was a game-changer in the group’s conflict with Israel. Though the first Qassam had a range of only about five miles, it allowed Hamas, for the first time, to strike at Israeli towns from behind the barrier separating Gaza and Israel.

Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar said in a 2007 interview that the group had come to prefer rockets to suicide bombings because rockets "cause mass migration, greatly disrupt daily lives and government administration, and make a much [larger] impact...We have no losses, and the impact on the Israeli side is so much."

By 2021, Israeli authorities estimated that Hamas had about 30,000 rockets available in its arsenal. Though Hamas has received some rockets from Iran, the vast majority of the weapons it fires today are produced locally. Some are built out of pipes and telephone poles.

Hamas’s rockets are still notoriously inaccurate, but they have gotten more advanced in both their range and payload. The Ayyash rocket, introduced about two years ago, has a range of more than 150 miles. This could be considered overkill considering the size of Israel–Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are less than 50 miles from Gaza–but they show Hamas’s expanding capabilities. Hamas has used the Ayyash several times in this war; the group fired one at Eilat, Israel’s southernmost city, on Nov. 4. (It was intercepted by Israeli air defenses.)

Israel has countered the rocket threat by developing the “Iron Dome” interceptor system, which began operating in 2011 and now claims a success rate of more than 90 percent. Hamas has responded to Iron Dome by simply building more rockets. Hamas fired roughly 3,000 rockets between 2001 and 2006; during the brief 2021 conflict with Israel, it fired more than 4,000; on Oct. 7 alone, it’s believed to have fired more than 2,500.

Advanced as Iron Dome may be, the system was simply overwhelmed.

Drone weapons

Hamas has also been investing in improving the accuracy of its attacks by building GPS-guided weaponized drones. During the Oct. 7 attacks, Hamas used drones to destroy Israel surveillance equipment, communications, and remote-controlled guns along the Gaza border.

The group’s drone fleet includes loitering munitions, also known as suicide drones, designed to slam into their target and explode. These appear to be based on older Iranian models–precursors to the deadly Shahed drones now used extensively by Russia in Ukraine. Hamas has also adapted small commercial quadcopter drones for battlefield use.

Footage posted online showed an off-the-shelf quadcopter dropping an explosive on an Israeli battle tank, completely destroying it, a tactic used widely by Ukrainian forces. In the IDF assault on Gaza, many Israeli tanks are now equipped with metal “cope cages” above their turrets, meant to guard against these attacks.

An Israeli soldier displays a Hamas made RPG during a presentation of military equipment and ammunition that Hamas and Palestinian militants used in Oct. 7 attacks.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s fellow Gazan militant group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, appears to be operating a dedicated drone command center somewhere in the territory.

Anti-tank, air defense and ground combat

Hamas forces are also equipped with anti-tank missiles, based on Russian and Iranian designs, and North Korean-made F-7 rocket propelled grenades, a system that has turned up on battlefields in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. It also has its own, locally produced anti-tank rocket known as the Al-Yassin.

The group also has some rudimentary air defense capabilities, including the Strela 2M, a Russian-designed shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile, and a locally developed air defense system called the Mubar 1. These systems are not particularly advanced and don’t appear to have posed much of a challenge to Israel’s historically massive air campaign, though an Israeli transport helicopter was struck by an explosive (without causing any injuries) on Oct. 7.

As with militant groups throughout the world, the AK-47 rifle, in several varieties and adaptations, is the weapon of choice for Hamas fighters. According to the open-source website Militant Wire, some of Hamas’s AK-47s appear to be Chinese rifles smuggled in from Libya. Footage has also shown Hamas fighters using a Soviet-model heavy machine gun rigged to be operated from the back of a pickup truck.

The limits of tech

Rockets built using plumbing pipes, drones that are normally sold online as expensive toys, Soviet-era surplus gathered from the Middle East’s various battlefields: None of this sounds like an arsenal that ought to challenge a military the size of Israel’s, particularly considering that the Israeli military is backed by the world’s top military power. (Over the weekend, the U.S. acknowledged flying MQ-9 Reaper drones, more than $30 million each, over Gaza to assist in hostage rescue).

A growing number of analysts in Israel and the United States are now arguing that Israel’s technological edge, including the Iron Dome and world-renowned cyberwarfare capabilities, led to a false sense of security. That sense was shattered on Oct. 7.

Joshua Keating

In Gaza War, Hamas Arsenal Includes Rockets, Anti-Tank Weapons and ‘Suicide Drones’