"Since the IDF started withdrawing from parts of Gaza where it had taken apart Hamas’s battalions in the late winter and early spring, the Gaza terror group has been using innovative ways to rebuild its combat forces and to keep the broader population dependent on its rule.
In recent months, the IDF’s commando unit – composed of the Duvdevan, Egoz, and Maglan special units – has taken on many unique missions in Gaza, beyond the standard clearance of a certain sector of terrorist operations carried out by the regular IDF infantry.
The commando unit is run by Col. Omer Cohen, with whom The Jerusalem Post was embedded in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza in December.
During an operation in Tel el-Awa in northern Gaza near Shifa Hospital last Friday, the IDF said that Cohen’s commandos had uncovered a new Hamas headquarters within a UNRWA building.
What the IDF did not disclose until Monday, however, was that Hamas was using the UNRWA building as one of its critical centers for recruiting new fighters, drone-makers, and bomb builders.
After a firefight and the killing of a number of Hamas operatives inside, the IDF also took apart a series of stations at the UNRWA building, which included: Hamas controlling food aid right next to a station for signing up to its combat units, right next to a workshop for building drones, right next to a separate workshop for building improvised explosives.
Recruitment methods exploit current humanitarian disaster
In other words, Hamas used an UNRWA facility where all civilians would need to come to receive food, to juxtapose all of its various fighting needs and connect Gazan civilians’ conception of their future to Hamas first in terms of food, and then in terms of terrorism.
This new method of recruitment can sidestep significant periods of ideological orientation by using the current humanitarian disaster in Gaza as the main motivation for getting civilians to join Hamas and immediately also learn how to build threatening weapons.
Near the UNRWA facility, the commandos also found a rocket-making seminar concealed in a university..."