Hamas is a shadow of what it was

How does a gaggle that has ruled the Gaza Strip for nearly 20 years, ruling two million Palestinians with an iron rod and preventing Israel in repeated wars, immediately lay down its arms and relinquish management?

Judging by a gradual stream of ugly photos rising from Gaza because the ceasefire got here into impact on 10 October, Hamas appears intent on reasserting its authority.

Its masked males, again on the streets, have been seen beating and executing opponents. Impromptu firing squads have dispatched kneeling males they are saying are members of rival teams, together with a few of Gaza’s highly effective clans.

Different victims, cowering in terror, are shot within the legs or crushed with heavy golf equipment.

A few of these now being attacked by Hamas had been a part of teams concerned in looting and diverting help, in response to one help employee I spoke to, exacerbating the humanitarian disaster. The UN has additionally accused legal gangs of stealing help.

This isn’t but a world wherein, as US President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan envisages, Hamas fighters flip over their weapons, undergo an amnesty, go away Gaza and hand over to a global stabilisation pressure.

For his half, President Trump initially appeared ambivalent in regards to the brutality.

On his solution to Israel on 13 October, he signalled the US had given Hamas – designated a terrorist group by the US, UK, Israel and others – a inexperienced mild to revive order.

“We’ve given them approval for a time period,” he informed reporters aboard Air Drive One.

Three days later, he hardened his tone. “If Hamas continues to kill folks in Gaza, which was not the Deal,” he wrote on Fact Social, “we can have no alternative however to go in and kill them.”

So, the place does this example on the bottom in Gaza right now go away Hamas?

And in the end, after two years of war that has resulted in unparalleled struggling for its personal folks and the violent loss of life of most of its key figures, what, if something, does the longer term actually maintain for the group?

For a lot of Gazans, traumatised and exhausted by two years of perpetual struggling – and a struggle that has killed 68,000 folks in Gaza in response to the Hamas-run Well being Ministry – this ugly endgame is nerve-wracking, however would not come as a shock.

Of the Gazans I spoke to – amongst them, help employees, legal professionals, in addition to a former adviser to a Hamas chief – every has a distinct tackle the probability of Hamas laying down its arms and relinquishing management.

And certainly – given the scenario on the bottom – whether or not now’s the time for them to take action.

“It has been two years with a whole lack of legislation and order,” help employee Hanya Aljamal says from her house in Deir al-Balah, in the midst of the Gaza Strip. “We’d like somebody to take over.

“As unqualified as Hamas is to rule the Strip, they’re a greater possibility than the gangs.”

Dr Ahmad Yousef, a former advisor to Ismail Haniyeh, who was Hamas’s political chief, is of the opinion {that a} agency grip is required at current.

“So long as there are nonetheless individuals who attempt to take the legislation into their palms, we’d like any individual to scare them and squeeze them to the nook,” says Dr Yousef, who now runs a Gaza suppose tank and stays near the Hamas management.

“It will take time. Not a very long time. Inside a month we’ll host these police forces and troopers from Turkey and Egypt,” he continues, referring to the worldwide stabilisation pressure for Gaza, outlined within the peace plan, that might be composed of troops from Egypt and Turkey, amongst others.

“That is the second the place they’ll set their weapons apart.”

Different Gazans are extra sceptical, and fearful. Some aren’t satisfied that Hamas will hand over their energy – or weapons in any respect.

Moumen al-Natour, a Gaza-based lawyer imprisoned a number of occasions by Hamas, is considered one of them.

He has been in hiding since July, when he says masked Hamas gunmen got here to his Gaza Metropolis residence and ordered him to report back to al-Shifa hospital for interrogation.

“Hamas is [sending] a message to the world and to President Donald Trump… that they’ll neither relinquish energy nor hand over their weapons.

“If I fell into Hamas’ palms now, they’d make a video and kill me on the street with a shot to the pinnacle,” he says in considered one of a sequence of movies despatched to us from an undisclosed location within the Gaza Strip.

The wall behind him is riddled with bullet holes.

“It’s a gang, not a authorities,” he says of Hamas.

“I do not need them to stay in Gaza… I do not need them in authorities, and I do not need them in safety. I do not need to see their concepts unfold in mosques, within the streets, or in colleges.”

Mr al-Natour has his personal tackle what Gaza might appear like.

The disparate array of militias now underneath Hamas assault might, in his view, be built-in a brand new safety equipment. However with their competing agendas, typically murky pasts and, in some instances, controversial hyperlinks to the Israeli navy, it is a problematic proposition.

“The actual fact is – and typically it is very onerous for Israelis to confess this – that Hamas nonetheless exists and is the dominant participant in Gaza.” says Dr Michael Milshtein, a former head of the division for Palestinian Affairs in Israeli Navy Intelligence.

“Counting on suspicious gamers – clans, militias, gangs, lots of them criminals, lots of them affiliated with ISIS [the Islamic State group], lots of them concerned in terror assaults in opposition to Israel – and contemplating them as a sort of various to Hamas is an phantasm.”

Hamas officers have mentioned the group is prepared handy over political management of Gaza. The Trump ceasefire plan, to which it gave its certified help, envisages “momentary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee”.

However even when the group is prepared to step again from a political position – one thing many Palestinians and Israelis nonetheless doubt – persuading its battle-hardened fighters to put down their weapons is a giant step for an organisation whose energy, even earlier than October 2023, relied closely on the pressure of arms.

To start to reply the advanced query of what could occur to Hamas subsequent requires delving backwards into how precisely it consolidated energy within the first place.

From its origins within the Nineteen Eighties as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and a rival to the secular Palestine Liberation Group (PLO), Hamas morphed right into a violent militant group answerable for the deaths of Israeli civilians.

Initially, Israel supplied discreet help to Hamas, seeing it as a helpful counterweight to the PLO and its dominant faction, Fatah, led on the time by Yasser Arafat.

“The main enemy was Fatah,” says Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel’s home safety service, Shin Guess, “as a result of they had been the individuals who demanded a Palestinian state.”

However when Hamas launched lethal suicide bomb assaults within the Nineties and 2000s on Israelis, Israel responded with a sequence of high-profile assassinations.

A violent energy wrestle with Fatah left Hamas, which received a 2006 election, in sole control of the Gaza Strip.

Eighteen years of Hamas rule have adopted, characterised by an Israeli navy and financial blockade, and bouts of armed battle in 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2021.

Regardless of Israeli claims since October 2023 that “Hamas is ISIS”, the federal government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has beforehand satisfied itself that Hamas didn’t pose a strategic risk.

“His was a coverage of managing the battle,” says Mr Ayalon. “He mentioned we’re not going to unravel it and we’re completely in opposition to the truth of two states, so the one means is to divide and management.”

With Hamas in management in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, ruling in a part of the occupied West Financial institution, the Palestinians remained hopelessly divided, enabling Israel to argue that it had no unified management to barter peace with.

“[Netanyahu] did every thing with the intention to help Hamas in Gaza,” Mr Ayalon says. “He let Qatar ship them… greater than $1.5bn.”

The cash from Qatar was meant to pay the wages of civil servants and help the poorest households, however safety chiefs feared it was getting used for different functions.

Mr Ayalon provides: “It was clear to the director of the Shin Guess and the pinnacle of Mossad that this cash would go to navy infrastructure.

Netanyahu has defended permitting funds to Hamas, saying it was meant to help the civilian inhabitants.

As 7 October brutally revealed, Hamas was all the time making ready for struggle. Nowhere was this extra apparent than in its elaborate community of tunnels.

Tunnels had already been used to mount assaults on Israeli military positions through the second Palestinian rebellion, or “Intifada” that started in 2000.

In 2006, Hamas fighters used a tunnel underneath the border with Israel to assault a navy put up close to Kerem Shalom, killing two Israel troopers and kidnapping a 3rd, Gilad Shalit.

He was held for 5 years till his launch, in 2011, in trade for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, together with Yahya Sinwar, who would go on to mastermind the Hamas assaults of October 2023.

Over time, Hamas’ tunnel community expanded, to incorporate workshops, weapons-manufacturing websites and command centres.

Regional developments additionally performed a job. In 2012, after the autumn of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and the transient rise to energy of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas was capable of smuggle more and more refined weapons into Gaza, together with sniper rifles, cellular rocket launchers and tools for the manufacture of long-range rockets.

Hamas is assumed to have benefitted from the assistance of technicians and fighters with expertise of tunnelling in places like Lebanon and Iraq.

Iran was additionally a key supporter, seeing Hamas as a pure part in its “Axis of Resistance,” a unfastened coalition of militant teams throughout the Center East with a shared antipathy in direction of Israel and america.

In 2020, a US State Division report mentioned that Iran was offering round $100m a yr to Palestinian militant teams together with Hamas.

Some tunnels had been reportedly dug as deep as 230ft (70m) beneath floor, took years to construct and price tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} every. These had been designed to guard senior Hamas commanders and home long-range weapons.

A neighborhood skilled with in depth information of the tunnels informed the BBC the price of the whole mission totalled roughly $6bn (£4.5bn).

Exact figures are onerous to come back by, nevertheless it’s thought that the scattered community prolonged for as a lot as 250 miles (400km), in a strip of land simply 26 miles lengthy and, at its widest, seven miles throughout.

Public dialogue of the tunnels – their location or price – might expose Gazans to accusations of espionage, resulting in arrest and worse. However many knew what was taking place.

Native residents would see the tell-tale indicators: sand and clay being eliminated, new entrances showing unexpectedly and equipment being introduced in underneath cowl of darkness.

What started as an opportunistic response to Gaza’s isolation turned, over the span of three many years, a multi-layered subterranean industrial and navy advanced.

It emerged later that a lot of it was hid underneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, together with hospitals, colleges and, within the case of a tunnel containing a Hamas knowledge centre, the headquarters of the UN Aid and Works Company (UNRWA) in Gaza Metropolis.

After 7 October 2023, when Hamas fighters stormed into Israel, killing round 1,200 folks and taking 251 hostage, it additionally turned an enormous underground jail. Not all of these held hostage had been hid in tunnels, however many had been, particularly because the struggle floor on.

Eli Sharabi, who turned probably the most excessive profile of these taken, was first moved from a secure home right into a tunnel after 52 of his 491 days in captivity.

“They tied us with ropes in our legs and palms,” he informed the BBC earlier this month. “I fainted once in a while from the ache. One time they broke my ribs.”

By the point he was launched, in February, he had misplaced greater than 30kg (4st 10lb).

Hamas used the hostages as bargaining chips, to safe ceasefires or the discharge of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. As negotiations over their destiny continued, Hamas drip fed the Israeli public with a merciless sequence of movies, typically displaying the hostages in conditions of utmost misery.

Finally it was, says Dr Yousef, inner and exterior stress that pressured Hamas to desert the technique.

“Qatar, Egypt and Turkey and in addition the folks right here in displacement camps despatched a powerful message to Hamas leaders outdoors that sufficient is sufficient.”

Within the meantime, Israel continues to destroy what it could possibly of the tunnel community, typically demolishing civilian neighbourhoods above within the course of.

And the job is way from finished.

“In keeping with publications from the defence institution, estimates converse of injury to between 25% and 40% of the tunnels,” says Yehuda Kfir, an Israeli civil engineer and underground warfare researcher at Haifa’s Technion College.

“Little doubt [Hamas] aspires to rehabilitate the infrastructure, together with restoring tunnels that had been handled in numerous methods by the IDF.”

Restoring tunnels is one factor. Reconstituting the organisation is one other. After the occasions of the previous two years, Hamas’ management is in tatters.

Israel has gone to huge lengths – in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and Qatar – to eradicate the group’s key political and navy figures.

From its finest identified, internationally recognisable leaders, travelling the world to advertise their trigger, to its battalion commanders on the bottom in Gaza, Hamas has misplaced nearly everybody of consequence.

Israel assassinated Hamas’s highly effective chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran in July 2024.

Three months later, Haniyeh’s successor, the elusive Yahya Sinwar, was killed within the ruins of a home in Rafah.

Regardless of the lack of these main figures – and hundreds of members of its armed wing – the group battled on, recruiting a recent technology of radicalised younger fighters and splintering into small cells intent on finishing up hit-and-run guerrilla-style operations.

However Hamas in October 2025 is a pale shadow of the organisation that carried out the assaults of seven October. Immediately’s leaders are much less well-known and, crucially, have little political expertise.

Ezzedine al-Haddad, who’s 55, now heads the five-member navy council that instructions Hamas’ armed wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

Outdoors Gaza, the remnants of the group’s political management embrace Khaled Meshaal (the topic of a botched Israeli assassination try in Jordan in 1997), Khalil al-Hayya and Muhammad Darwish.

All are believed to have escaped loss of life on 9 September, when Israeli jets attacked a constructing in Doha, Qatar, the place they had been assembly to debate the most recent US ceasefire proposals.

Regardless of the violence nonetheless raging in Gaza, the previous Hamas adviser, Ahmed Yousef, says the group is uninterested in struggle.

With out mentioning 7 October straight, he describes the reason for the struggle as a “horrible mistake” and {that a} “completely different strategy” is required.

“I am speaking to lots of them they usually have mentioned that they aren’t curious about ruling Gaza anymore,” he says.

“However Hamas has greater than 100,000 members and people persons are not going to vanish.”

Hamas, he suggests, is trying to rebrand itself with the intention to proceed to play a political position sooner or later, a course of he likens to the ANC’s transition from guerrilla warfare to political rule in post-apartheid South Africa.

“If tomorrow there [are] elections,” he says, “I am certain Hamas will come underneath completely different names, giving the impression it’s extra peaceable and extra prepared to be a part of political life.

“Violence will not be going to be a part of any political get together.”

Dr Milshtein is uncertain.

“Even when there shall be a brand new native regime in Gaza, after all behind the scenes Hamas would be the dominant participant,” he argues.

Disarmament, he continues, is even much less doubtless: he predicts one other Gaza struggle throughout the subsequent 5 years.

However Ami Ayalon, the previous Shin Guess chief, believes Israel ought to discover one other solution to deal with its enemy.

“Until we defeat the ideology, they’ll flourish,” he says.

“The one solution to defeat the ideology is by creating and presenting to the Palestinian and the Israeli folks a brand new horizon. A horizon of two states.”

For now, that horizon doesn’t exist, maybe making Dr Milshtein’s prediction extra doubtless than Ami Ayalon’s imaginative and prescient of a shared future.

However Hamas, nevertheless diminished, is way from a spent pressure. A method or one other, Israel could need to cope with it for a while to come back.

Prime image credit score: Getty Pictures

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