The people of Gaza are tired and sad. For months, they have been on the run, and despite glimmers of hope from possible ceasefire announcements, an end is still not in sight. After the first weeks of the war, hundreds of thousands fled from Gaza City to the south to Rafah. Now, after Israel’s army has also invaded parts of the city on the Egyptian border, many have fled back to the north. “It feels like being chased back and forth pointlessly,” they say.
They are the ones angry at Israel and Hamas, whose terror attack on October 7 brought so much suffering and destruction to the Gaza Strip. “Hamas is a mafia. They don’t care about us at all,” can be heard in many places. After more than eight months of war, numerous displacements, and tens of thousands of deaths, many Palestinians in Gaza are at their wits’ end. Hamas is feeling this too.
Before the Israeli invasion of Rafah, there were repeated small demonstrations against the Islamist group, and those who speak with people from the Gaza Strip repeatedly hear curses. Few, however, want to talk openly about Hamas. “When I am out of Gaza, I will gladly talk about it,” someone told a journalist from Europe. “But now it’s too dangerous. I don’t want to end up with a bullet in my head.”
Even after months of war, Hamas remains present in the Gaza Strip. Although many of its fighters have been killed in Israeli airstrikes, their troops still engage in a cat-and-mouse game with the army: as soon as the Israelis secure an area, Hamas fighters appear elsewhere as if from nowhere. The leadership around Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar, as well as the remaining hostages, have not yet been located by Israel.
Hamas is omnipresent – even if you hardly see their fighters, says a man from Gaza. This is due to the numerous tunnels the terrorist organization has dug under the coastal strip’s cities – but also because the Islamists are deeply rooted in the population and can move unnoticed among the masses. For almost twenty years, they have ruled here, permeated bureaucracy and society, silenced dissenters, and executed alleged collaborators.
This is still the case today, say Palestinian political scientists. Hamas still controls the administrative apparatus or what is left of it. The organization has managed to maintain its authority despite the incessant Israeli attacks. “No aid comes into the Gaza Strip without Hamas’s permission to this day.”
Hamas’s ability to exert control from the underground is not only due to intimidating the population. The Islamist movement, which won the last Palestinian elections in 2006, can still count on support within the population, writes a Palestinian think tank that regularly conducts surveys in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In the last such survey two months ago, it found that support for Hamas in Gaza had decreased in the face of the war’s destruction. They lost around 25 percent of their supporters. “At the same time, however, a large majority of Palestinians say that the Hamas attack on October 7 was justified,” with 70 percent supporting the action.
October 7 was an act of resistance, says a woman who fled Gaza, her family is still in the war zone. She bears no anger towards Hamas either. Politically, she has nothing to do with the Islamists. But the fighters of the Qassam Brigades – the military arm of Hamas – are defenders of Palestine. “They are the sons of our land, and we stand behind them,” she told a journalist.
The continued strong support for Hamas is due to two things, experts from the region believe: on the one hand, people are angry at Israel and the war. On the other hand, there are no alternatives to Hamas. Thus, support for the Islamists’ terrorist act also stems from disappointment with the other major Palestinian party, Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah. Fatah is considered corrupt and is downright hated by the population. Hamas, on the other hand, has brought the Palestinian issue back into the spotlight with the brutal attack on Israel. This is credited to them. That Fatah – as discussed by the Americans and Gulf states – should take power in Gaza in the future seems completely unrealistic to Palestinian observers. It is not a realistic option; Hamas is too powerful there. They could undermine a new administration even from the underground.
There is only one way to actually displace the Islamists from power. It requires a completely new Palestinian leadership, elected in general elections and thus possessing genuine legitimacy. But so far, neither Israel’s right-religious government under Benjamin Netanyahu nor the Fatah cadres clinging desperately to their power around the aging Abbas have been willing to consider this.
Hamas’s leadership seems aware of this. This is why the bosses in exile are now more confident than they were a few weeks ago when they were almost desperately pushing for a ceasefire. Thus, the head of the political bureau, Ismail Haniya, announced in Qatar that his movement expects to continue to exercise power in Gaza in the future. It is unlikely that Israel will allow this. The terrorist group has also lost support in the Arab states since October 7. However, there is no plan for a post-war order in the Gaza Strip. Although the members of the Arab League agreed at a meeting in Bahrain to call for the deployment of a peacekeeping force, without a prior commitment by Israel to a two-state solution, the Arab states will never engage in Gaza. The Netanyahu government rejects this – but it has no plan for what should happen to the Gaza Strip in the future. Instead, Israeli politicians are now publicly attacking each other. The chaos and indecision on the Israeli side benefit Hamas, which can reposition itself.
For the civilians in Gaza, peace seems a distant prospect. At least now, after weeks of construction, the floating port on the Gaza Strip’s coast is in operation, with which the Americans want to deliver aid to the starving population. However, many are fatalistic given the constant bombardment and tens of thousands of deaths. Many expect the fighting to continue into the next winter. “It’s a guerrilla war – and it will last forever.”
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