Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has recruited around 30,000 young people from Gaza to join their ranks, according to a Sunday report.
The Saudi Al Arabiya channel, citing Palestinian sources, said in its report that most of the recruits had previously undergone training in secret military camps run by the wing.
The report did not clarify if the training camps were still being held during the war, or if they only took place beforehand.
However, the new recruits reportedly lack military skills beyond “guerrilla warfare,” rocket fire, and planting explosives.
The report did not mention an exact timeframe for when they were recruited, but is likely referring to a recent period in the ongoing war, which resumed last month following the collapse of the ceasefire-hostage release agreement that was signed in January.
According to the report, Hamas is short on weapons, particularly drones and long-range missiles, and has begun recycling waste from missiles, likely unexploded IDF munitions, and using it to manufacture ground-based explosive devices and other improvised weapons.
Gaza’s civil defense agency reported that Israeli airstrikes on Sunday killed at least 25 people across the Gaza Strip.
“Since dawn today, the occupation’s airstrikes have killed 20 people and injured dozens more, including children and women across the Gaza Strip,” Mahmud Bassal, spokesman for the civil defense agency, told AFP.
In a separate statement later, the agency reported that five people were killed in an Israeli drone strike on a group of civilians in eastern Rafah.
The figures could not be independently verified and do not differentiate between combatants and civilians.
Since March 18, when Israel resumed its offensive against Hamas, the IDF says it has struck over 1,400 targets in Gaza. Hamas’s health ministry has said that over 1,500 people have been killed in that timeframe, in figures that are not verified, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed in the war to over 51,000.
Israel has vowed to intensify its attacks across Gaza and seize large “security zones” inside the small coastal strip of over 2 million people, and has blockaded Gaza for the past six weeks, again barring the entry of food and other goods.
This week, aid groups raised the alarm, saying thousands of children have become malnourished and most people are barely eating one meal a day as stocks dwindle, according to the United Nations.
The head of the World Health Organization’s eastern Mediterranean office, Dr. Hanan Balkhy, on Friday urged the new US ambassador in Israel, Mike Huckabee, to push the country to lift Gaza’s blockade so medicines and other aid can enter.
“I would wish for him to go in and see the situation firsthand,” she said.
The war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, when some 5,000 Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are still holding 59 hostages — 24 of whom are believed to be alive, and 35 of whom have been confirmed dead — including 58 of those abducted on October 7.
Israel assesses it has killed about 20,000 combatants in Gaza as of January, as well as some 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the Hamas onslaught.
Israel’s toll in the Gaza ground offensive and military operations along the border stands at 410.