Quadcopter combat drones among Hamas’s new tactics for Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza

Quadcopter combat drones that drop grenades on the enemy are among new capabilities developed by Hamas that Israel can expect to face during a ground invasion into the Gaza Strip.

Militants in Gaza have watched and learnt from conflicts including the Ukraine war, clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh and the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, according to experts, and are likely to employ new tactics and weaponry alongside tried-and-tested strategies including suicide bombings, snipers and booby-traps.

Fighting in the densely packed streets and labyrinthine tunnels that snake beneath the city all point to what experts expect will be a destructive and bloody battle.

Islamic State converted commercially available drones to drop bombs and grenades during the Battle of Mosul back in 2016-17, significantly slowing the advance of government forces. More recently, Ukrainian and Russian forces have made effective use of quadcopter strike drones in Ukraine.

Such equipment is relatively cheap, can be bought from shops and is easy to convert for use in battle. It is also simple to operate via remote control, dropping explosives onto targets from afar.

Hamas’s terrorist attack against Israeli civilians on 7 October successfully deployed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), taking out communications and gun towers on the border, and dropping an explosive onto an Israeli Merkava 4 tank.

Previous reports have suggested some limited use of drones against Israel by Hamas. The full extent of Hamas’ arsenal today remains unknown, but experts expect it will be extensive.

Raphael Cohen, director of the strategy and doctrine programme at the Rand Project global policy think-tank, said: “There are reports of Hamas using commercial drones to a far greater extent than they have in the past. That would be something you would expect – they will continuously innovate relative to what they see vis-a-vis the Israelis but also vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

“The quadcopters you see on the Ukrainian battlefield are cheap and can be quite effective, especially if you’re dealing with close quarters where you don’t have to fly long distances.”

Quadcopters are a specific type of uncrewed rotary wing aircraft with four rotors. In any invasion of Gaza, experts predict that drones will play a significant role in battle. Bilal Saab, founding director of the defence and security programme at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, said: “This is not exactly the most sophisticated technology. This is now mainstream. This is very trendy.”

Experts believe Hamas also has “kamikaze” or “suicide” drones manufactured for military purposes, which can loiter until a target is spotted. These drones are likely to have been provided by their Iranian backers and smuggled in through tunnels into Gaza.

“Israeli soldiers will not just have to look to their sides or above to buildings where snipers will be but also to the sky, where Hamas will be operating surveillance and strike drones,” according to Dr Frank Ledwidge, a former military intelligence officer and senior lecturer in strategy at the University of Portsmouth.

But drones will only exacerbate the many difficulties posed already by urban warfare, one of the most challenging terrains an army can face. Gaza is one of the most densely populated regions on earth, with about 2.3 million inhabitants packed tightly into about 140 square miles.

Hamas claims to have 40,000 fighters in its armed wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, although Israeli intelligence puts this at 30,000. Hamas militants will be well-versed in the urban landscape and able to hide among tightly packed buildings and the civilian population, staging snipers in high-rises and laying the ground with traps. Israeli troops are likely to have to advance slowly, street by street and block by block.

The above-ground fight will be “chaotic”, says Dr Cohen. “Cities by their nature tend to swallow armies wholesale.”

But some of the fight is expected to take place underground in the extensive network of tunnels and bunkers. Hamas has been building and entrenching itself here for years. The tunnels, which allow militants to move easily between different parts of the strip, are believed to stretch to hundreds of miles.

This “negates one of Israel’s key advantages which is command of the air, an overhead platform can’t see what’s underneath the ground quite as easily as above ground”, says Dr Cohen. Subterranean battles will be “quite destructive and quite bloody”. The tunnels also “include a lot of the military capabilities Hamas has put underground, be that the rockets, the munition stores, potentially the hostages as well, so there’s going to be a fairly substantial subterranean fight,” he adds.

The tunnels are also integrated with hospitals, homes and schools, Mr Saab points out, “so it’s going to make it incredibly challenging from an operational point of view for the IDF to destroy all of it. I don’t think it’s a realistic objective.”

Israeli troops are likely to face various types of booby-traps in the tunnels, in buildings and in the streets. These might consist of trapdoors that can be used to capture lone soldiers and take them underground, or different types of IEDs [improvised explosive devices], whether pressure-detonated, tripwires, infrared-detonated munitions, or grenades left under bodies.

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“There will be weaponry we didn’t know they had or didn’t appreciate the quantity, operational and tactical surprise,” says Dr Ledwidge. We can expect to see endless variations, the kind of thing we had in Afghanistan, and Hamas will have learnt from that.”

While careful to point out that experts can only speculate, Dr Ledwidge suggests that, based on the brutality inflicted on Israeli civilians by Hamas already, we could see a recurrence of atrocities of the kind staged by Isis, which including the live-streamed murder of aid workers and journalists. Hamas has already threatened to broadcast the execution of Israeli hostages. “The corralling of young women, the separation of men from women, the use of bodies. I think we’re only seeing the start of that.”

Hamas has also relied on suicide attacks attacks in the past. “They’ve shifted away from that for a host of reasons, but in the nature of this pending operations I wouldn’t be surprised if you see a return of suicide attacks in some way shape or form,” says Dr Cohen.

Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, warned last week that Israel was walking into a “trap” to provoke Israel into an open-ended ground invasion of Gaza “because of the scale and intensity of conflict that that would entail, and the loss of innocent life that would inevitably follow and the radicalization that would engender”.

Dr Ledwidge believes that the upcoming invasion could look similar to the fight against Isis, in which many thousands of civilians died. “This is exactly what is going to happen in Gaza. You’re dealing with a similar enemy, far better prepared I think because they’ve been preparing this fight for years, but so has Israel. This is going to be a very bloody fight.”

Mr Saab said: “They are trained precisely for that kind of stuff. They really have nothing to lose.

“They really want the ground incursion, in order to incur as many casualties as possible… and the goal for that would be not just to hurt and kill, but to try to influence Israeli public opinion and try to force concessions.”