Are certain officials exaggerating the rising threat that Hamas poses to Israel in order to impact the upcoming October elections and possibly also to push for a new invasion?
This has been a pattern since summer 2024, after Israel publicly announced that it had dismantled 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 resume 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 claiming that Hamas had risen to 27,000 armed fighters and that it 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 noise about the need to reinvade Gaza.
Several 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, talk about Hamas rearming and returning mostly fell out of media coverage.
Yet, as the newest Lebanese ceasefire of late June seems to be holding, certain officials have returned to claims that Hamas has 27,000 armed fighters, this time adding reports that it has also assembled thousands of aerial weapons of varying ranges.
Hamas fighters' numbers vary widely
The 27,000 armed fighters have already been partially debunked in the past.
Hamas may have 27,000 Gazans or even more with arms.
However, back in January 2025, some officials said that the terror groups 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 as they had been in 2023, leaving them as a much lower-scale threat, regardless of how some may 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.
They further 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 the summer of 2024 was likely around 200 Hamas fighters in a tunnel in Rafah in October-November 2025.
If the largest Hamas-organized force since summer 2024 consisted of 200 fighters in one place – which hasn’t 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” was ignoring their size and frequency or deciding they were just frequent drills for public relations.
And yet the supposed 27,000 figure is not the strangest potential exaggeration of Hamas’s power in this round of leaks by officials. Rather, that honor goes to the terror group’s supposed new rocket and mortar arsenal, with the 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 that 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 exaggerations. In actuality, the volume is less than thousands, and there may be almost zero actual rockets.
Instead, the emphasis should be placed on the 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 at Israel.
In fact, in the last two weeks, Hamas twice tried to construct a concentration of around four rocket launchers near each other, and on both occasions, the IDF destroyed them before they could even get armed with the likely still-disassembled rockets.
Alarmists, or those seeking to make the electorate fear Hamas ahead of the election, can say what they want, but the terror group has not fired rockets in any significant numbers since January 2024 and has launched only a few since May 2024, basically causing no harm to Israeli civilians over the past two-plus years.
Hamas failed to fire rockets on Israeli civilians or to mount any small, offensive into Israel even after the IDF killed its military chiefs in succession: Mohammed Sinwar, Izz al-Din al-Haddad, and Mohammed Oudeh.
There have been a few instances where a couple of 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 defended as vigilantly as ever, and Israel’s human and technological intelligence must remain focused on the Gaza terror group to keep it suppressed in the 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.