How weakened Hamas faces destruction similar to LTTE in 2009

Writing for The Federal on October 15, 2023 ('Hamas offensive on Israel may bring it closer to LTTE’s fate'), I argued that while no two scenarios were absolutely comparable, it was clear that Hamas was encountering a situation similar to what the LTTE faced shortly before its end in 2009, leaving thousands dead, mostly innocent Tamil civilians.

Also read | Hamas’ offensive on Israel may bring it closer to LTTE’s fate

Weakened Hamas

From a time when it looked like Hamas and its fighters could go on and on and probably unsettle the Israeli military might (for years many read Sri Lanka’s affairs similarly), Israeli and Arab media reports today speak of a seriously weakened Hamas, which has lost thousands of original combatants besides its best known leader, Yahya Sinwar, its own Velupillai Prabhakaran.

With the US-backed Israel unrelenting in its blitzkrieg and simply uncaring about the colossal civilian casualties, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reiterated that its military offensive will continue until Hamas was destroyed.

It is evident that decimating the Palestinian outfit is more important to Netanyahu than rescuing the Israeli hostages Hamas still holds.

'Barely anything left'

A former senior officer of the rank of lieutenant colonel in Hamas, who lives in Egypt, has now grudgingly admitted that there is “barely anything left” of the group’s military structure, after 21 months of intense fighting with the Israeli military. Hamas, he said, has lost control of around 80 per cent of the Gaza Strip.

The unnamed officer, who was wounded at the start of the war in October 2023 but has kept a steady watch on the developing situation, told BBC: “Let’s be realistic — there’s barely anything left of the security structure. Most of the leadership, about 95 per cent, are now dead…The active figures have all been killed.”

He said that since the end of the latest ceasefire in March, Hamas’ security control in Gaza “has completely collapsed. Totally gone. There’s no control anywhere.”

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Pointing to the extensive looting of a Hamas complex with no intervention, he added: “So, the security situation is zero. Hamas’s control is zero. There’s no leadership, no command, no communication. Salaries are delayed, and when they do arrive, they’re barely usable. Some die just trying to collect them. It’s total collapse.”

Comparable to LTTE

The reading is eerily comparable to what the LTTE was up against in 2008-09 as it inched towards its bloody end, after waging an armed struggle for over a quarter century to break up Sri Lanka and to carve out an independent Tamil state.

At one point, Colombo, in a bind, signed a peace pact with the Tamil Tigers just as Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, had virtually come to terms with Hamas ruling Gaza and felt that it posed no serious threat to the Jewish state — until October 2023 happened.

Hamas hugely miscalculated that its October 2023 invasion – and its brutalities – would perhaps cripple Israel. True, Israel was badly shaken. But when it retaliated, it refused to make, like the Sri Lankan state earlier, any distinction between combatants and innocent civilians.

The former Hamas commander’s assessment is more generous than the one made a week ago by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), which concluded that Hamas controlled only around 65 per cent of the Gaza Strip and that the IDF was close to gaining control over three-quarters of the enclave’s ground area.

Costly miscalculations

Of course, Hamas is still out there and carrying out occasional deadly attacks on the Israeli military, at times killing soldiers.

This was also true for the LTTE, which fought till the day Prabhakaran and his last of fighters were cut down by the military on May 19, 2009, after being boxed in an area smaller than a football field.

And just as the LTTE lost all international sympathy (except from diehard ethnic fans) towards its final stages, Hamas commander admitted that a similar fate had gripped the Palestinian group. “Israel has the upper hand, the world is silent, the Arab regimes are silent,” he said.

The parallels

Like Hamas, the LTTE had at one point come to believe in its invincibility. Like its Palestinian counterpart, the Tigers had thousands of both battle-hardened and not-so-experienced fighters. Both groups commanded suicide bombers.

Hamas controlled the Gaza Strip, the LTTE’s writ ran all across (at one point) Sri Lanka’s north and east. Both had a coastline, although the LTTE’s naval wing was much more lethal. Both outfits were armed to the teeth; Hamas mainly with Iran’s generosity, the LTTE due to its own time-tested global smuggling network.

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Yahya Sinwar dreamed of destroying Israel; Velupillai Prabhakaran was convinced that Sri Lanka was already tottering. Both men hated any negotiated settlement; for Sinwar and Prabhakaran, those who believed in a dialogue with the enemy were traitors to the cause.

Suffering of innocent civilians

Just as the LTTE failed to realise the military imbalance that had quietly taken place in Sri Lanka when Eelam War IV began in 2006, Hamas hugely miscalculated that its October 2023 invasion — and its brutalities — would perhaps cripple Israel.

True, Israel was badly shaken. But when it retaliated, it refused to make, like the Sri Lankan state earlier, any distinction between combatants and innocent civilians.

In both cases, thousands of innocent civilians paid a huge price for a war they did not ask for. The suffering of the Palestinian civilians, to the point of genocide, is easy to blame on Israel. But the responsibility for the shameful death and destruction must be equally shared by Hamas. The same is true in the case of the Sri Lankan military and the LTTE, too.

Unlike in Sri Lanka’s killing fields, however, there is already discontent as well as opposition to Hamas in Gaza.

Disgust over Hamas acts

If media reports are to be believed, more and more civilians have expressed disgust over what Hamas misadventure has unleashed on them although there are any number of Palestinians who still salute Hamas for standing up to Israel.

Also read | Book excerpt: How Prabhakaran’s obsession with power destroyed the LTTE

And, in Gaza, armed clans, backed by the Israeli state, have made an appearance and started to take on Hamas gunmen. The scenario is extremely bleak for Hamas militarily.

Looking back, Yasser Arafat, the legendary secular Palestinian leader, was right in deciding to go for a negotiated two-state solution with Israel. Whatever the faults with his methods, he understood the rapidly changing world scenario and wanted to make the best out of a bad situation.

Hamas and the others who called Arafat a quisling and weakened him politically today face a situation where a belligerent Donald Trump and an unforgiving Netanyahu might simply clear the entire Gaza of Palestinians — that is whoever remains alive when the war ends.