Hamas after the ceasefire: The dominant Palestinian Authority in Gaza is weakened but still dominant

Rearming is likely to pose a greater challenge for Hamas, which has exhausted many of its ammunition and has no easy way to resupply its ammunition stockpile, especially in light of the extreme weakness of its external supporters.

But if Israel decides to return to war, it may continue to weaken the group, remove its new leaders and target what remains of its government.

Under this scenario, Israel could find itself moving toward occupying Gaza, which would “isolate Hamas but antagonize everyone in the public,” said Tamer Qarmout, a professor of public policy at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

Some former Israeli security officials said that the agreement leaves Hamas in a stable position regardless of whether Israel returns to war or not.

“Hamas gained a lot of points with this deal,” said Michael Milstein, a former military intelligence analyst who specializes in Palestinian affairs. “They got the two things they had long demanded written into the agreement: the end of the fighting and Israeli withdrawal.”

Milstein said that if Israel resumes the conflict, it will enter into a “war of attrition that has no light at the end of the tunnel.” Hamas is ready to drag Israel back into the mud of Gaza.”

However, Hamas will likely need to make some concessions if it wants enough aid to rebuild Gaza to flow into the Strip. And even now Hamas leaders They expressed their readiness To abandon civilian rule in Gaza, but without dismantling its military wing — a dynamic that analysts said would be similar to Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon before Israel struck.

“I think everyone, including Hamas, realizes that solving people’s problems requires Hamas to move away from the forefront,” Al-Qarmout said, adding that it needs to reach an agreement with the internationally accepted Palestinian Authority to share power.

While Hamas supporters acknowledged that the October 2023 attack caused enormous suffering to Palestinians, they refused to express regret over the attack that left 1,200 people dead, most of them civilians. They highlighted how the ensuing Israeli bombing of Gaza revived global interest in the Palestinian issue and damaged Israel’s reputation.

Saudi Arabia, which was close to establishing diplomatic relations with Israel before the war, presented the establishment of a Palestinian state as a prerequisite for reaching an agreement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Galant are wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. The state is accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice. Israel vehemently denies both charges, but its international reputation has been tarnished like never before.

“Before the war, no one was following what was happening in Palestine,” said Fouad Khafash, an analyst close to Hamas based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “Now everyone is watching,” he added.

In a speech on Wednesday, Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s chief negotiator, described the October attack as a “military achievement” that will remain “a source of pride for our people.”

For many civilians, the future with both Israel and Hamas in the picture is bleak.

Akram Atallah, a Palestinian columnist from Gaza, said: “We are talking about a people caught between a state that is willing to act with complete brutality and a group that is willing to provoke that state to act with complete brutality.”

Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Puckerman He contributed reporting to this article.