[richardfeynman]

It's hard to believe the earth is round, but it is.

As I mentioned above, Hamas's army was comparable to countries like Denmark (20k active soldiers), Finland, the Czech republic (27k active) and maybe even the Netherlands (40k active). Estimates of the size of Hamas's army pre October 7 range from 20k to 40k active combatants, with US intelligence estimates converging on 30k. This is looking just at fighters and excludes Hamas's political wing. They also had tens of thousands of rockets.

[ceejayoz]

I would gently suggest that the relative quality of the soldiers and their equipment is not something you can dismiss here.

A handful of Delta Force in Mogadishu shot hundreds (at least) of armed assailants, for example.

Hamas certainly doesn’t have the Leopard 2 tanks and F-35s Denmark has. Which is pretty important for the “more powerful” assessment.

[richardfeynman]

Look, I'm obviously not saying that Hamas is stronger than all European countries in every metric, and I already did mention their lack of an air force. All I'm trying to say is that by some standard ways to judge military force (e.g., number of active soldiers) Hamas surprisingly is ahead, which gives lie to the idea that it's a small force. Your position has some nuance, which I appreciate, but another commenter in this very thread wrote "This is such an insane statement that you instantly disqualify everything else you say."

It's obviously not an insane statement, given that we can debate things like the accuracy of their munitions and the lack of air power. the other commenter probably simply didn't know how many active soldiers Hamas had and how few some developed European countries have.