Armed Strength
Since its establishment in December 1987, the military capability of the brigades has increased markedly, from rifles to Qassam rockets and more.
The brigades have a substantial weapons inventory of light automatic weapons and grenades, improvised rockets, mortars, bombs, suicide belts and explosives. The Brigades fire Qassam rockets and mortar shells into Israel on a regular basis. The group engages in military style training, including training which take place in Iran and Syria on a range of weapons designed to inflict significant casualties on civilian and military targets.
While the number of members is known only to the Brigades leadership, in 2011 Israel estimated that the Brigades have a core of several hundred members who receive military style training, including training in Iran and Syria. Additionally, the brigades have an estimated 10,000 operatives "of varying degrees of skill and professionalism" who are members of the internal security forces, Hamas and their supporters. These operatives can be expected to reinforce the Brigades in an "emergency situation".
According to a statement by CIA director George Tenet in 2000, Hamas has pursued a capability to conduct attacks with toxic chemicals. There have been reports of Hamas operatives planning and preparing attacks incorporating chemicals. In one case, nails and bolts packed into explosives detonated by a Hamas suicide bomber in a December 2001 attack at the Ben-Yehuda street in Jerusalem were soaked in rat poison.
Read more about this topic: Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigades
Famous quotes containing the words armed and/or strength:
“There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our stupidity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)