Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday revealed a letter from a senior Hamas commander to the terror group’s leader Yahya Sinwar detailing the massive damage the organization has sustained due to the ongoing war with Israel.
The letter was written by the commander of Hamas’s Khan Yunis Brigade, Rafa’a Salameh, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Al-Mawasi in the Khan Yunis area in mid-July. The head of Hamas’s terror army, Mohammed Deif, was killed in the same strike.
Quoting figures from the letter, Gallant said, “Seventy percent of the weapons were destroyed. Ninety-five percent of the missiles were destroyed. Fifty percent of the terrorists were killed or wounded and many escaped,” adding that according to Salameh, only 20% could still fight.
Gallant revealed the letter in a video statement from an Israel Defense Forces intelligence base in central Israel where sensitive Hamas documents and other evidence from Gaza have been collected and analyzed since the beginning of the war.
On Monday, Gallant asserted that Hamas is no longer capable of maintaining an organized fighting force in the Gaza Strip after more than 11 months of war.
“Hamas as a military formation no longer exists. Hamas is engaged in guerrilla warfare and we are still fighting Hamas terrorists and pursuing Hamas leadership,” he told foreign journalists at his office at Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv, according to AFP.
In July, the Israel Defense Forces said that half of Hamas’s military leadership in Gaza had been killed or arrested, and some 14,000 of its fighters killed, since the start of the war. Among Hamas’s losses were six brigade commanders, over 20 battalion commanders and roughly 150 company commanders, the IDF said at the time.
“Hamas is in real trouble from the junior to the senior level,” Gallant said on Wednesday, adding, “we will continue the effort and reach everyone.”
Since Israeli forces began the Gaza campaign in response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on the northwestern Negev, approximately 40,000 targets have been hit from the air. The IDF has also struck more than 25,000 terror infrastructure sites and launching sites.
Sinwar is Gaza’s Osama bin Laden
In another X post, speaking in English instead of Hebrew, apparently for an American audience on the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, Gallant showed a picture he said had recently been found by the IDF in a tunnel in Khan Yunis of Muhammad Sinwar’s children posing against the backdrop of a depiction of “the evil event of Sept. 11.”
“This picture shows what we have been fighting since Oct. 7. Islamic State, Al Qaeda and Hamas, they are all the same. Yahya Sinwar is the new Osama bin Laden. He is the Osama bin Laden of Gaza. We will locate him, engage him and bring him to justice—[he will be] dead or in prison,” said the Israeli defense minister.
