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:
“Behold now this vast city; a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and hands there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)