Are certain officials exaggerating the rising threat that Hamas poses to Israel in order to influence the upcoming October elections and possibly also to push for a new invasion?
It has been a pattern since summer 2024 after Israel publicly announced that it had taken apart the last of Hamas’s 24 battalions, the final ones in Rafah.
Whenever certain officials wanted to reinvade or ramp up attacks on Gaza, they leaked out reports about Hamas rearming and making a major comeback.
Some of these reports were absolutely true, and it was arguably necessary, short of reaching an earlier ceasefire or some other solution, to reinvade or ramp up attacks on Gaza at various times after summer 2024.
However, there have been instances where numbers were exaggerated by officials likely to justify a desire, ideological or political or both, to heat up the Gaza front again.
Leaked reports claim Hamas reinforcing its ranks, rearming
Already in mid-April, only a week after the Iran ceasefire, officials started to leak that Hamas had risen to 27,000 armed fighters and was reassembling rockets, which would constitute a rise from an estimated 25,000 pre-October 7.
This occurred at a time when various government officials started to make noises about the need to reinvade Gaza.
A number of commentators pointed out that if Iran and Lebanon went quiet (at the time the Lebanon front was also calming down), Gaza would be the only front where the government could continue the war, if it believed doing so was in its political interest.
Shortly after the Lebanon front heated up again, and talk about the threat of Hamas rearming and returning mostly fell out of the media coverage.
Yet, as the newest Lebanese ceasefire of late June seems to be holding, certain officials have returned to the story about Hamas’s 27,000 armed fighters, this time adding in a report that Hamas has assembled thousands of pieces of varied ranges of aerial threats.
Hamas fighters’ numbers vary widely
The claim that there are 27,000 armed fighters has already been partially debunked.
Hamas may have 27,000 Gazans or even more with arms.
However, back in January 2025, some officials were saying that Hamas had as many as 23,000 fighters, while some placed the number closer to 12,000.
More importantly, apolitical defense officials said that the 12,000 were not organized experienced battalions the way they had been in 2023, leaving them as a much lower scale threat, regardless of how someone might want to inflate the numbers.
In fact, when the final permanent ceasefire kicked in in October 2025, IDF officials told the Jerusalem Post that around 7,000 Hamas fighters fanned out throughout the Gaza Strip to reinstate its order and control.
A far cry from 27,000, 23,000 or even 12,000.
Further, IDF officials told the Post that the number of real fighters ready to engage in combat with the IDF, as opposed to oppressing unarmed Gazans, was likely closer to only a couple of thousand at most.
The largest battle the IDF has had with a single Hamas group since summer 2024 was likely around 200 Hamas fighters in a tunnel in Rafah in October-November 2025.
If the largest Hamas organized force there has been since summer 2024 was 200 fighters in one place, and that has not even happened in nine months, then what exactly does it mean that Hamas has an “army” of 27,000 fighters?
Leading up to October 7, Hamas’s 24 battalions regularly drilled with several hundred or more fighters in many different places at a time. Israel’s big “miss” on this was ignoring their size and frequency, deciding that they were just frequent drills for public relations.
And yet the supposed 27,000 armed fighters are not the strangest potential exaggeration of Hamas’s power in this round of leaks. Rather, that honor goes to Hamas’s supposed new rocket and mortar arsenal, with a latest leak saying Hamas has thousands of pieces of rockets and mortars of varying ranges.
This could be reasonably misread to suggest that Hamas has 3,000 rockets or around 20% of its pre-2023 arsenal, a very sizable and real threat which could allow them to fire on Israel for weeks or months.
Regarding the aerial threats, the Post double-checked with IDF sources and both the volume and presentation of the threat were viewed as an exaggeration.
In actuality, the volume is less than thousands, and there may be almost zero actual rockets.
Instead, the emphasis should be on pieces of rockets. If Hamas has hidden a thousand pieces of rockets disassembled in many houses, that means that it cannot just snap its fingers and start firing large volumes of rockets on Israel.
In fact, in the last two weeks, twice Hamas tried to construct a concentration of around four rocket launchers near each other, and twice the IDF destroyed them before they could even get armed by the likely still disassembled rockets.
Alarmists or those seeking to get the electorate afraid of Hamas pre-election can say what they want, but Hamas has not fired rockets in any major numbers since January 2024 and has essentially not fired more than single digits of rockets since May 2024, basically causing no harm to Israeli civilians for the last two plus years.
Hamas failed to fire rockets on Israeli civilians or to mount any even small offensive into Israel even after the IDF killed its military chiefs in succession: Mohammed Sinwar, Iz-al-Din al Hadad, and Mohammed Oudeh.
There have been a few instances where a couple dozen Hamas fighters stormed small IDF positions in Gaza and managed to kill or wound a single digit number of soldiers, and even that has not happened since the October 2025 ceasefire.
This does not mean the IDF should get complacent about Hamas.
The Gaza border, with the new security zone, must be as defended as ever, and Israeli human and technological intelligence must stay all over the Gaza terror group to keep it down for real and long-term.
But trying to convince the public that Hamas may be able to stage another October 7 by land and air would be completely divorced from the facts that apolitical IDF officials are presenting.
