Unlike al-Qaeda and its acolytes that work on an ideology of holy war or jihad, the Islam-fuelled militancy of Hamas is more focused on recovering land lost to Israel.
Foot soldiers show little fear of death and the group's ideology conveys great respect on what it calls 'shaheed' or martyrs, who die for the cause.
There are a smattering of women in the police force but the rest of the police and all members of the armed wing are men.
They each carry a Kalashnikov assault rifle and have access to a modest stock of weapons including 4,000 rocket propelled grenades, hundreds of heavy machine guns and stock of about 120 tons of high explosive. They have a range of mortars and about 15 BRDM-2 armoured personnel carriers.
But perhaps their most potent weapon is their stock of rockets with which they attack Israel. As well as Qassams – rockets made mostly in workshops in Gaza – they have longer range Katyusha and Grad rockets.
The quality of the troops is questionable. In the early days after the founding of Hamas on Dec 14 1987, the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades evolved to fight not just Israel but other rival Palestinian factions.
Members of Izzedine were entirely self-taught and their fighting ability was limited.
They had no reason to run a police force as Hamas was then very much the weaker cousin in Gaza, then dominated by the rival Fatah group and other militant groups.
But when Hamas was elected to power in Jan 2006 its leaders moved to create a police force from scratch.
In May 2006, the Executive Force was born and overnight 'police' with black uniforms and hats, carrying Kalashnikovs appeared manning road junctions in the centre of Gaza City.
It soon matured, earning its stripes in June 2007 when after months of bloody clashes with Fatah it finally beat its enemy securing Hamas rule over Gaza.
Around this period a crucial change took place as senior Hamas security figures started slipping out of Gaza, using tunnels dug from Gaza into neighbouring Egypt and travelling to Iran for military training.
Israeli military intelligence were concerned the rag tag troops of Izzedine and the clownish keystone cops of the Executive Force had come of age.
The worry was the Iranian trainers would have transformed Hamas into a fighting force as potent as Hizbollahl, the Lebanese Shia militia which is also trained by Iran.
Israeli troops are currently learning firsthand the extent to which this might be true.
May Allah
