Does Hamas have capacity to recruit more men?
Details on UNRWA members tell lots about demographics of terror group but also leaves unknowns
On Friday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant shared details about the 12 UNRWA employees accused of participating in the October 7 massacre attack on Israel. These details shed some significant light on their background, as well as key aspects of how they were connected to the attack, possibly revealing further light of a larger story about all those who took part.
“In addition to these 12 workers, we have significant indications based on intelligence, that over 30 UNRWA workers participated in the massacre, facilitated the taking of hostages, looted and stole from Israeli communities, and more,” Gallant said. This undercuts UNRWA’s legitimacy, Gallant said, as he “instructed the defense establishment to begin transferring responsibilities related to the delivery of aid, to additional organizations.”
Israel alleges that out of its 13,000 UNRWA employees, 12% are affiliated with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with “185 UNRWA workers active in the military branches of Hamas and 51 active in the PIJ military branch,” Gallant said. Hamas has exploited this to use UNRWA institutions to store weapons and has also built tunnels underneath them.
What might these details expose about the larger picture of October 7? Assuming that UNRWA employees can be seen as a sample size, to some extent, of the wider society in Gaza, then is it possible to extrapolate and conclude to conclude that Hamas has fully infiltrated around 10% of it? Certainly, Hamas, when there were Palestinian elections, polled larger than 10%, but it didn’t always poll so high.
There was a time when the extremist Islamist group had only a small number of hardcore supporters. Therefore, it may be reasonable to conclude that removing Hamas from Gaza, or at least removing it from being embedded into civilian society, is possible – because disentangling it from the 90% who are not connected to it is likely possible.
Gallant said Israel believes that there are 1,468 members of UNRWA active in Hamas or PIJ. Of those, a total of 185 are involved in the “military branch” and 51 are part of PIJ, statistics show that even within those who are members of Hamas, only around 10% are fighters.
There are around two million people in Gaza; half of them are men, and while women are active in Hamas, the terrorists in the battalions are men. So, if there are a million men in Gaza, half under the age of 18 – according to most demographics reports – there are 500,000 potential adult male recruits for Hamas.
SOME OF these men are too old – the UNRWA list of 12 men shows that many were
born in the 1970s and 1980s – so perhaps a more realistic recruiting number would be around 300,000. Hamas recruits teenagers and children through summer camps, but it is hard to know how many teens might be members of the fighting group.
Ten percent of the potential 300,000 recruits leaves around 30,000, which is the actual estimate used for the size of Hamas battalions. So, has Hamas successfully recruited 105 military-age men in Gaza? Perhaps. But the UNRWA numbers show that in places where civilians do actively support Hamas, up to 20% could be part of its terrorist squads.
What this might point to is that Hamas doesn’t have a huge pool of recruits. The IDF estimates that it eliminated around 10,000 Hamas fighters and wounded another 10,000, representing about 18 of the 24 Hamas battalions in Gaza. Many of those battalions began the war with around 1,000 men and have lost several hundred in battle, with another few hundred wounded – meaning they are down to just a third of their original strength.
How would Hamas fill these ranks again? It would have to resort to pressing teenagers into its ranks or going deep into the battling order by recruiting older civilians who
support Hamas but chose not to be fighters.
The men identified as UNRWA employees who participated on October 7 were mostly in their 40s, born between 1974 and 1983; only a few were younger. Many are accused of being active in various Hamas units, having played key roles, such as platoon and company commanders.
On October 7, one of them received hostages, and one was involved in a kidnapping while his son assisted. Three received an SMS on the morning of October 7 calling them to muster to a station where Hamas was bringing men to carry out the attack.
Many were educators and did not work for UNRWA just as a way to have a fake day job while working for Hamas fulltime. Meaning, that they were not involved in what is called “disguised unemployment,” where large organizations are encouraged to employ large numbers of people who don’t do anything at work. A math teacher, for instance, would likely be missed at school if he didn’t teach math. Of course, it’s possible that he was simply paid as a “teacher” and never showed up. One of the men was a deputy school principal, which would likely require him to be at work.
HOWEVER, THE large number of men who were educators and also active in Hamas, including its fighting squads, would point to a larger problem in Gaza of education being infiltrated by the terror group. Hamas has the goal of shaping the next generation of Palestinians in its vision. That way, even if it loses the war, the ideology lives on.
Since many of these men were in their 40s, it stands to reason that they joined Hamas around the time that Hamas took power in Gaza, in their teenage years, but also that they may have seen a career opportunity after 2007 to join Hamas and also be employed at UNRWA, the best of both worlds. These men also survived previous wars with Israel in 2009, 2012, and others, meaning their “military” role in Hamas didn’t expose them to actual combat.
The demographics of these men point to something else as well: Why are there so few young men? Is it because the generation born around 2000 who came of age when Hamas ran Gaza, didn’t join it or work in UNRWA? Either is plausible, and it may mean that Hamas has problems recruiting younger men, especially over the last four months when it has lost so many fighters.
Most of the 12 men were listed as being from Nuseirat, one of the central refugee camps in Gaza. Hamas has always performed well in some of the refugee camps in Gaza, which are its roots and make up its shock troops. It could also point to some other type of bias in the information being released: Were men from Nuseirat simply more likely to be caught on October 7 and left their phones on during the attack, a failure of operational security from Hamas’s perspective? Or is Nuseirat simply overrepresented because UNRWA in Nuseirat has been deeply infiltrated by Hamas?
There is a lot unknown about Hamas’s entrenchment in Gaza and how UNRWA plays a role. As the late Donald Rumsfeld was fond of saying, “There are known unknowns and unknown knowns.” The demographics of the Hamas members of UNRWA likely reveal a lot about Hamas in Gaza but leave us with a lot of known unknowns. Defeating Hamas will mean getting to them.