Hamas is a pale shadow of what it was - but it could yet reinvent itself

"If I fell into Hamas' hands now, they would make a video and kill me in the street with a shot to the head," he says in one of a series of videos sent to us from an undisclosed location in the Gaza Strip. In 2012, after the fall of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and the brief rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas was able to smuggle increasingly sophisticated weapons into Gaza, including sniper rifles, mobile rocket launchers and equipment for the manufacture of long-range rockets. It emerged later that much of it was concealed under Gaza's civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and, in the case of a tunnel containing a Hamas data centre, the headquarters of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza City.