You’ve probably seen the videos by now of Hamas militants who came across the fence separating Gaza from the rest of Israel and began shooting people at random. Usually they seemed to operate in groups but in the clips I’ve seen there were never more than a dozen visible at one time. So it was somewhat surprising to hear that the IDF was reporting they had killed 1,500 Hamas terrorists over the past three days, not including those killed in airstrikes inside Gaza.

The Israel Defense Forces said it had finally regained control over its suddenly porous border with the Gaza Strip Tuesday morning, some 72 hours after Hamas terrorists blew through sections of the barrier and launched an invasion that saw over 1,000 Israelis slaughtered or kidnapped…

The IDF estimates that there are a small number of terrorists still hiding in Israeli territory. Overnight, Israeli security forces killed at least one Palestinian terrorist near Kibbutz Sa’ad. Troops also exchanged fire with terrorists in Kissufim and Monday night saw police kill another terror suspect near Mishmar Hanegev, some 24 kilometers (15 miles) inside Israel.

Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said the bodies of 1,500 terrorists had been located around southern Israel. Hundreds more have been killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza, according to Hamas health officials.

That’s a pretty significant number of armed killers. It raises an obvious question: How many Hamas terrorist are there? NBC News says the main force deployed against Israel was fairly small and made up of Hamas’ best fighters.

To carry out Saturday’s attack, the militant group used some of its most elite forces, namely the Nakba unit, which has 3,000 to 5,000 fighters, according to Michael A. Horowitz, a geopolitical and security analyst who is the head of intelligence at Le Beck consultancy.

“So this means between half to around a third of some of Hamas’ elite commando force has been killed,” he said.

But Hamas itself is somewhat larger and those additional terrorists could come into play if, as expected, Israel decides on a ground invasion of Gaza.

In 2021, The Times of Israel quoted an unnamed senior Israeli commander as saying that Hamas had an army of 30,000 men, replenished since its 2014 war with Israel. NBC News is not able to confirm those numbers, and Hamas does not disclose that information.

One problem with these estimates is, it’s not exactly clear what constitutes a Hamas fighter.

“Is that counting people who have held a gun, or only those who have received a degree of training?” Borck said. “Israel’s objective now is to destroy Hamas’ military capability. The problem with that statement is we don’t know what Hamas’ military capability is.”

Two caveats here. First, Israel seems to have underestimated Hamas’ strength pretty significantly this week, so maybe those number are out of date. Second, even if those numbers are roughly accurate now, they could change dramatically as the bombing of Gaza continues. There are 2.1 million people living in Gaza many of whom seem to have a strong animus toward Israel. Sending in tanks to clear out Hamas may be necessary but it will likely also prompt more fighters to join their cause.

But it clearly is time to put an end to Hamas. As this article published in the Atlantic points out. Hamas has been clear about it’s intent to murder Jews from its founding.

Released on August 18, 1988, the original covenant spells out clearly Hamas’s genocidal intentions. Accordingly, what happened in Israel on Saturday is completely in keeping with Hamas’s explicit aims and stated objectives. It was in fact the inchoate realization of Hamas’s true ambitions.

The most relevant of the document’s 36 articles can be summarized as falling within four main themes:

1. The complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law (Sharia),
2. The need for both unrestrained and unceasing holy war (jihad) to attain the above objective,
3. The deliberate disdain for, and dismissal of, any negotiated resolution or political settlement of Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land, and
4. The reinforcement of historical anti-Semitic tropes and calumnies married to sinister conspiracy theories.

In 2017 the Hamas charter was revised. Is the revised version any better?

In fact, the new document differs little from its predecessor. Much like the original, the new document asserts Hamas’s long-standing goal of establishing a sovereign, Islamist Palestinian state that extends, according to Article 2, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and from the Lebanese border to the Israeli city of Eilat—in other words, through the entirety of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. And it is similarly unequivocal about “the right of return” of all Palestinian refugees displaced as a result of the 1948 and 1967 wars (Article 12)—which is portrayed as “a natural right, both individual and collective,” divinely ordained and “inalienable.” That right, therefore “cannot be dispensed with by any party, whether Palestinian, Arab or international,” thus again rendering negotiations or efforts to achieve any kind of political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians irrelevant, void, or both. Article 27 forcefully reinforces this point: “There is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital.”

The most striking departure from the 1988 charter is that the 2017 statement of principles and objectives now claims that Hamas is not anti-Jewish but anti-Zionist and, accordingly, sees “Zionists” and not “Jews” as the preeminent enemy and target of its opprobrium. The revised document therefore modulates the blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric of its predecessor but once again decries Zionism as central to a dark, conspiratorial plot of global dimensions.

So the language is less religious and more political but the goal is the same. There’s no chance for peace with Palestinians so long as Hamas and their supporters exist in Gaza. Israel is very aware of this now.