.IN THE EARLY hours of October 7th Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organisation that runs Gaza, introduced more than 2,000 rockets towards Israel. Over a thousand Hamas fighters, some in motorised gliders, crossed the perimeter between Israel and Gaza. They attacked private citizens on the streets of tiny Israeli communities and in their homes. In the upcoming 2 days they got rid of greater than 900 Israelis, an amount much outperforming the fatalities in the previous 19 years of disagreement, and also took all around 150 hostages. Israel was caught off guard to some extent due to the fact that Hamas had actually certainly never accomplished such a big assault. The country's defence business had actually assumed that in recent times Hamas had determined to avoid wide-scale battle-- and that its own capacity to do so was limited. They mistook. Just exactly how strong is Hamas?