While Gazans suffer, Hamas reaps the benefits
Much of Gaza is in ruins, the population has been driven from their homes by Israeli bombardments and the death toll continues to rise. On the ground, Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for 16 years, has largely disappeared except when its fighters emerge to attack Israeli tanks or fire rockets into Israel.
But the group is still reaping the benefits of its October 7 surprise attack on Israel. It is considered the only Palestinian faction in many years to extract concessions from Israel. It has given a bloody twist to Israel’s plans to improve relations with its Arab neighbors and forced the Palestinian issue back onto the agendas of world leaders.
Two months into the war, despite vows by Israeli officials to destroy Hamas, Israel is still unable to assassinate its top leaders, free the remaining 137 hostages or provide convincing evidence that it can achieve its goal of eliminating Hamas achieve without astronomical human costs.
In Hamas’s cynical calculation, the loftiness of Israel’s goals is an asset. While Hamas sticks to its long-term goal of destroying the Jewish state, it can declare victory simply by surviving and fighting another day.
“There will always be an advantage that an unconventional force will have, especially if it is as ruthless as Hamas and does not really care about harming local civilians,” said Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Middle East policy analyst. grew up in Gaza. “Israel will be trapped in this unwinnable war that will cause massive death and destruction.”
What exactly Israel can achieve remains an open question. But simply prosecuting the war could ultimately damage Israel’s economy and international standing, while encouraging a new generation of Palestinians to hate Israel – all benefits for Hamas.
The Hamas-led surprise attack on October 7 was the deadliest day in Israel’s history, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and capturing 240. Israel responded with military brutality not seen in decades, dropping thousands of bombs on Gaza and launching a ground invasion aimed at destroying Hamas’s military and government structures.
The war has been catastrophic for Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. About 85 percent have fled their homes and now face a growing challenge of finding food, water, shelter and medical care. According to the area’s health authorities, more than 15,000 people have been killed, more than two-thirds of them women and children. They do not report how many of the dead were combatants.
The war has also taken its toll on Hamas. The group has largely left control in Gaza, although remnants of police still work in the south, and medics in hospitals overseen by the Health Ministry are struggling to treat the flow of injured patients. Otherwise, the residents of the strip will be increasingly left to their own devices.
Israel has blown up many of the tunnels that Hamas has built over the years to move stealthily through the area, hold prisoners, manufacture weapons and plan attacks.
Hamas is estimated to have 25,000 fighters, and Israeli officials estimate that several thousand of them have been killed in Gaza, in addition to the approximately 1,000 in Israel as of October 7. Both Israel and Hamas have released the names of Hamas military figures killed in Gaza. the war. On Thursday, Israel published a photo allegedly showing eleven Hamas commanders meeting in a bunker. Five of them were marked with red circles that read “Eliminated.”
But fighters from Hamas and other armed groups continue to attack Israeli forces in Gaza and have killed more than 90 soldiers since the start of Israel’s ground invasion, including the son of Israel’s former chief of staff.
Israel has yet to find and kill top Hamas leaders in Gaza, including Yahya Sinwar, the highest-ranking Hamas official in the area, and Mohammed Deif, who heads the group’s armed wing. Israel views both men as architects of the October 7 attack and the fighting in Gaza since then.
Mr Sinwar has not appeared in public since the start of the war. Only one hostage, Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old peace activist, told an Israeli newspaper after her release last month that Mr Sinwar had come to the tunnel where she was being held. She said she asked him if he was ashamed that he had done something like that to people who supported peace. Mr. Sinwar did not respond, she said.
Coordination between Hamas members inside and outside Gaza continues, allowing leaders in Qatar to negotiate the hostage-for-prisoner exchange, which Hamas in Gaza subsequently carried out. The group’s media teams publish news updates, statements from leaders, and videos of attacks and civilians killed in Israeli strikes. Hamas officials in Turkey and Lebanon communicate their views to journalists and diplomats, and the group’s leaders in Qatar regularly meet with mediators from Qatar and Egypt about possible ceasefires and prisoner exchanges.
At a restaurant in Beirut last week, Hamas hosted a public seminar to assess the “achievements and challenges” of the war so far.
Ahmad Abdul-Hadi, a Hamas representative, told the dozens of attendees that the battle marked a “qualitative shift” in the fight against Israel, and that Hamas and the Palestinians had accepted the sacrifices necessary to keep the Palestinian cause alive.
“The Palestinian people and their resistance had to make a costly strategic decision because the costs of liquidating the Palestinian cause and squandering Palestinian rights would be much greater,” he said.
Of course, Gaza’s citizens had no say in Hamas’s decision to attack Israel, and some have complained that they are paying the price despite the high risk of speaking out against the group.
“Why are they hiding among people?” said an unknown man covered in dust in a hospital during an interview with Al Jazeera. “Why don’t they go to hell and hide there?”
But gauging the magnitude of such criticism is difficult, and it pales in comparison to Palestinian anger at Israel’s fighting.
“There is a lot of horror surrounding the reaction, but despite this, Hamas is now undoubtedly the leader of Palestinian nationalism,” said Abdaljawad Hamayel, a lecturer at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank. “It is now whoever holds the cards.”
By carrying out such a dramatic attack and freeing 240 Palestinians from Israeli prisons in exchange for 105 people kidnapped on October 7, Hamas had eclipsed the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, Mr Hamayel said.
Although Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and other countries, the Palestinian Authority recognizes Israel’s right to exist and has limited powers in parts of the West Bank. But it has come under increasing criticism from Palestinians who see the body as corrupt, undemocratic and compromised because its security forces work with Israel to arrest Palestinian fighters.
President Biden and other US officials have fully supported Israel throughout the war. But in recent weeks they have combined that support with concerns that the massive destruction and high death toll could undermine Israel’s broader goals. They have also renewed calls for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians as the only path to long-term peace. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel heads a right-wing government with members who openly disdain the idea.
Other observers have suggested that leaders in Israel and the West have been too quick to assume that Israel can actually destroy Hamas.
A month after the start of the war, Jon Alterman, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, published an analysis entitled “Israel could lose.” He did not argue that Hamas would turn the tables and destroy Israel, but that the war could serve Hamas’s long-term goals by siphoning support from the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. That, in turn, would increase Israel’s isolation from countries in the Arab world and developing countries and complicate its relations with the United States and Europe.
That outcome was still a risk, Mr. Alterman said in an interview last week.
According to Hamas, this is the necessary first step to reverse the power that Israel gains from its integration into the region and the world.
There are also few historical examples of Israel successfully using overwhelming force to destroy its enemies.
In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization, which it considered a terrorist organization. The war was long and deadly, failing to destroy the PLO while paving the way for the rise of Hezbollah. (Israel signed peace agreements with the PLO in 1993).
In 2006, Israel again went to war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which has come back stronger in the years since.
Israel has also fought three major wars against Hamas in Gaza since 2008, which have not stopped the group from rearming and preparing for the October 7 attack.
Mr. Alkhatib, the Gaza policy analyst, recalled the string of Hamas leaders that Israel killed around the time he left Gaza in 2004.
“All these great, great leaders were killed, so I had the impression that Hamas was a weakened organization,” he said.
He was wrong, Mr. Alkhatib added, because he has learned over the years that Hamas considers its commanders expendable and sees a resentful population in Gaza as a way to secure future recruits.
“I never thought Hamas would reach this level of power,” Mr. Alkhatib said. “But it points to how resilient they are, how they can adapt and how they will somehow find a way to recover, even outside Gaza.”
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.