JERUSALEM AND TEL AVIV — The military power of Hamas has been weakened and its political leadership is divided over plans for a possible cease-fire, but an Israeli intelligence official said Tuesday that the radical group remains dangerous, with 15,000 fighters, tunnels and a sophisticated arsenal of rockets and antitank weapons.
The senior official's assessment was delivered in a news briefing on a day when Israeli ground forces and Hamas militants battled in a neighborhood of high-rise apartments in southeastern Gaza City. Civilians fled as Israeli units, backed by shelling from warships near the seaside enclave, edged deeper into the city but appeared to stop short of Hamas strongholds.
Israel's push into the Tal al Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, about a mile from the city center, increased pressure on Hamas fighters and on humanitarian groups and hospitals trying to cope with rising numbers of homeless and wounded Palestinians. More than 971 Gazans, including 311 children and 76 women, had been killed and 4,418 wounded in 18 days of fighting, according to the United Nations.
Israeli forces invaded Tal al Hawa "and started to shell from the sky and from the ground," said Khader Dahdouh, whose home was badly damaged in fighting that began after midnight and lasted until dawn. "The resistance fighters were firing rocket-propelled grenades, and the soldiers took cover in nearby villas."
The Israeli intelligence official, who spoke on customary condition of anonymity because of security concerns, did not underestimate Hamas but indicated that the group had been overwhelmed by 18 days of bombardment. The official said Hamas was not significantly tapping its caches of antitank and antiaircraft missiles but was occasionally using suicide bombers to spearhead combat missions.
"The level of damage to Hamas' military wing is less than the damage" to its civil infrastructure, the official said. "I think they will try to do their best to hit us, to come up with some symbolic achievement, a suicide operation or the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier."
Hamas officials have said the Islamic militant group's fighters are resilient and that its military wing is choosing when it will engage Israeli forces.
But the intelligence official said Israeli airstrikes had destroyed much of Hamas' rocket-launching capability. Two weeks ago, Hamas was firing about 80 missiles a day into southern Israel; the number has dropped to about 20 in recent days, and on Tuesday, only two rockets were reported.
