Hamas Turns Targeted Killings Into Recruitment Fuel: The Al-Qassam Martyrdom Machine

The Israeli military’s claim on September 26 that it killed two al-Qassam Brigades members in airstrikes targeting the Nasser refugee camp and Khan Yunis ^[1][2] was, by the metrics of this war, unremarkable. What was notable was how quickly and how predictably the Brigades’ information apparatus responded – not with grief or denial, but with a commemorative architecture that appeared nearly pre-fabricated. That is the pattern that has been building for weeks, and it reveals something important about how Hamas has adapted to sustained attrition.

The Israeli military identified the two men killed on September 26 as Ibrahim Fawzi Ismail Mohsen, described as a platoon commander in an elite unit operating in the Nasser area, and Mohammed Kamil Suleiman Mohsen, identified as a member of Hamas’s military wing in Khan Yunis ^[3][2]. According to local reports, the strikes targeted two separate areas of central and southern Gaza simultaneously. The IDF framed the strikes as part of its ongoing campaign to degrade Hamas command structures – a campaign that, by late September, had claimed a string of senior figures across multiple brigades.

That string is worth tracing carefully. According to local reports citing Israeli media, the preceding weeks had seen the elimination of Mohammed al-Yazouri, commander of the Khan Yunis Brigade, and Nail Abu Abid, commander of the Rafah Brigade, along with a figure identified as Huthaifa Abu Maamar ^[4]. These were not low-level losses. The Khan Yunis and Rafah brigades represent Hamas’s core military infrastructure in the southern Gaza Strip, the area that Israeli ground operations have most intensively targeted since late 2023. Losing their commanders in close succession would, in most military organizations, produce visible disruption.

Hamas’s public posture has been the opposite of disrupted. Israeli security officials quoted in local reports attributed this to damaged military capacity – Hamas, they suggested, simply lacks the means to respond. But sources described as close to the movement offered a different explanation: restraint is a deliberate strategic choice, intended to deny Israel a pretext to escalate further ^[4]. Both explanations may be partially true. What is harder to dispute is that Hamas has converted each loss into an ideological event with a consistency that suggests institutional design rather than improvisation.

The commemorative machinery was visible well before the September 26 strike. On or around September 20, the Brigades issued a call to arms in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), using the slogan ‘Ya Nabda al-Dhafah, la tihda’ – roughly, ‘O pulse of the West Bank, do not cease’ – signaling an explicit effort to extend their resistance narrative beyond Gaza’s borders ^[5]. This was not a battlefield communiqué. It was a piece of ideological outreach, timed to follow a period of significant commander losses, aimed at demonstrating organizational continuity and geographic reach.

Days earlier, the Brigades had marked the first anniversary of the martyrdom of Huthaifa Samir Al-Khalil, identified as the first spokesperson for the organization ^[6]. The commemoration was structured, public, and designed to function as a loyalty-reinforcing event – a reminder to both internal audiences and external observers that the Brigades’ dead remain active participants in the movement’s story. Al-Qassam’s spokesperson Abu Ubayda has himself become a central figure in this system: a voice without a confirmed face, whose continued broadcasts after the deaths of commanders serve as proof-of-life for the organization as a whole ^[7].

This is not a new tactic. Hamas has long understood that martyrdom – shahada – carries theological and political weight in Palestinian society that Western security frameworks tend to underestimate. What has changed is the industrialization of that understanding. The Brigades have developed what amounts to a martyrdom production system: a killed commander becomes a named martyr within hours, his biography is circulated, his operational history is catalogued, commemorative graphics are distributed, and his death is explicitly framed as a reason to continue fighting rather than a reason to doubt the cause ^[7][6]. The September 26 strikes, like those before them, fed directly into this system.

The question Israeli planners have to answer is whether killing commanders faster than Hamas can replace them operationally is offset by the fact that each killing generates a new ideological asset. The evidence from this period suggests the answer is genuinely uncertain. On the operational side, the loss of brigade-level commanders does appear to have degraded coordination – there has been no significant Hamas military response to the string of assassinations, and Israeli forces have continued to operate with relative freedom in Khan Yunis and surrounding areas ^[4]. On the ideological side, the Brigades’ messaging has not shown any signs of strain. If anything, the volume and sophistication of martyrdom-themed content has increased as the military pressure has intensified.

The West Bank dimension adds a layer that deserves separate attention. The September 20 call to arms was not the first time Hamas has attempted to leverage Gaza’s suffering to activate networks in Judea and Samaria (West Bank). As reporting on this beat has tracked, the Brigades have been systematically cultivating West Bank audiences throughout this period, using religious symbolism – particularly references to the Temple Mount – to frame the conflict as a pan-Palestinian and pan-Islamic cause rather than a localized Gaza insurgency ^[5]. Whether that messaging is producing operational results in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) is a different question, and one that Israeli security forces are clearly tracking closely given the pace of operations there.

There is also a longer-horizon concern embedded in Hamas’s commemorative strategy that goes beyond the current conflict. A report published in September noted that Hamas has been given platforms to cultivate ideological affinity among Turkish students, suggesting the organization is investing in the next generation of sympathizers well beyond the immediate theater ^[8]. The martyrdom narratives circulating in Gaza are not contained to Gaza. They travel through diaspora networks, social media, and – as that report suggests – institutional channels in countries with significant Muslim populations. The al-Qassam Brigades are not just fighting a military campaign; they are building a brand whose raw material is their own dead.

The IDF’s claim about the September 26 strikes named specific individuals and specific units ^[3][2], which is consistent with Israel’s broader effort to demonstrate accountability and precision in its targeting. That specificity also, perhaps unintentionally, feeds the Hamas commemorative cycle – named individuals become named martyrs more readily than anonymous casualties. It is a dynamic neither side has fully resolved.

What the past several weeks have demonstrated is that Hamas has built a system capable of absorbing significant command-level losses without visible ideological collapse. Whether that resilience reflects genuine organizational depth or a performance of resilience designed to mask internal strain is a question that the public record cannot yet answer. Israeli officials believe the former is eroding; Hamas’s public behavior suggests the latter remains intact. Both cannot be fully right – but in the fog of an urban war fought partly through propaganda channels, the gap between military reality and projected image can persist for a long time. Hamas has learned to make that gap work for them.