With Gaza war on hold, Hamas lets the world know it has not been defeated
- Share via
TEL AVIV — This past weekend, as Hamas paraded a trio of emaciated Israeli hostages who were about to be freed following more than a year of captivity in the Gaza Strip, the militant group seized the chance to direct a personal gibe at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
With news cameras in southern Gaza lingering on a knot of masked fighters, a Hebrew-language banner was clearly visible behind them, superimposed with the prime minister’s face.
“Total victory,” it read — mocking the refrain often invoked by the Israeli leader during nearly 16 months of brutal warfare in the coastal enclave, now paused by a truce.
Embarking on a round of highly charged new talks over the next phase of the cease-fire, both Hamas and Israel are trying to paint themselves as victors, even as Gaza lies in ruins.
A Palestinian woman who lost 10 children and her husband shelters in her shattered Gaza home, where four of her youngest remain buried under rubble.
While Hamas sustained heavy blows in a withering campaign of Israeli bombardment coupled with a months-long ground offensive, some observers believe the group is scoring significant propaganda points — because it can point to its mere survival as a triumph.
Hamas fighters largely vanished from public view during the Israeli offensive. But throngs of them wearing crisp uniforms and bristling with weaponry have been a prominent feature at hostage-handover ceremonies that have been periodically taking place since the cease-fire began last month.
Sixteen Israelis and dual nationals, plus five Thai citizens, have been freed in five separate batches, the latest of them Saturday, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
“Absolutely, it’s theatrical,” Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, said of the elaborate displays by the group during hostage releases. “It’s to show the world that Hamas is still relevant, still exists.”
In Washington last week, President Trump and Netanyahu — the first foreign leader to be received at the White House since Trump took office for the second time — sought to present a united front in rejecting any role for Hamas in postwar Gaza.
But their joint appearance was dominated — hijacked, even — by Trump’s abrupt and startling declaration that the United States would take “ownership” of the territory and preside over the creation of resort-style development — a “Riviera of the Middle East,” as the onetime real-estate developer put it.
The president subsequently said his plan would not involve Washington paying reconstruction costs or sending any troops, but in the face of vociferous criticism over what critics said amounted to advocating ethnic cleansing, he insisted he had meant what he said.
Ted Sasson, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security at Tel Aviv University, wrote in a Times of Israel blog that Trump’s seemingly chaotic riffing on the envisioned depopulation of Gaza contained an explicit message to Hamas.
Sasson said the point being made by both leaders was that if Hamas did not relinquish its grip on Gaza, “‘we will transfer every Palestinian from Gaza until we get to you.’”
The war that Hamas ignited with its deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel — in which its fighters killed about 1,200 people and seized some 250 hostages — brought enormous suffering to Gaza. By the count of Palestinian health officials, the confirmed death toll in the territory exceeds 48,000, with thousands more corpses buried in rubble. Gaza’s Health Ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
A year after the Oct. 7 attack that spurred the Gaza war, Israelis and Palestinians reflect. In their voices, they chronicle a devastating day, tragic year.
Hamas’ numerical strength has always been extremely difficult to assess, because of its secretive nature and lack of reliable intelligence from inside Gaza. Before the current war, official U.S. figures put the number of its fighters at between 20,000 and 25,000.
Israel says it has killed thousands in the course of the fighting, but U.S. intelligence believes that there have been nearly equal numbers of new recruits.
Despite the loss of its chieftain Yahya Sinwar and scores of commanders inside Gaza — plus the killing, in Tehran over the summer, of its political leader Ismail Haniyeh — Hamas has managed to remain a force to be reckoned with, said Israeli analyst Michael Milshtein, a former senior military intelligence officer.
“It’s not the same Hamas — they don’t have the same power as they did before, but they are still the preeminent player in Gaza,” said Milshtein, who directs the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University.
The group continues to attempt to bolster its prestige among ordinary Gazans. Polling suggests Hamas is more popular in the West Bank than it is in Gaza, but while some in the territory blame the group for bringing suffering and death by starting the war, most Palestinians place the blame squarely on Israel.
On Sunday, it publicly gloated as Israeli forces carried out an agreed-upon pullback from a narrow, 4-mile long corridor that divides the south of Gaza from the heavily populated north.
A Hamas spokesman, Abdel Latif Al-Qanoua, crowed that the withdrawal was proof that the group had “forced the enemy to submit to our demands.”
Israeli troops still remain within Gaza, along its borders with Egypt and with Israel. A full withdrawal is meant to be the main subject of delicate second-phase negotiations of the cease-fire, along with the release of remaining hostages.
Israeli media reports have speculated that Netanyahu, who put any substantive new talks on hold until he returned to Israel over the weekend, will probably try to stymie progress in indirect talks going forward, in the gulf emirate of Qatar.
Over the course of the war, public opinion has hardened on both sides. In that sense, Hamas has already achieved a prime goal: to continue fighting Israel, rather than allow a broader accord that could empower its West Bank-based rival, the Palestinian Authority. Israel’s far right — on which Netanyahu’s ruling coalition rests — continues to clamor for a continuation of the war.
“Israeli society, just like Palestinian society, has had a rightward shift that is very pronounced,” said analyst Alkhatib, a native of Gaza.
The hostage homecomings of the last three weeks have brought public rejoicing in Israel — but also roused fresh fury against Hamas. Israelis watched in horror late last month as one young female hostage was herded by her captors through a huge, jostling crowd in southern Gaza as she was being freed, and Netanyahu termed “shocking” the gaunt, haggard state of the three Israeli civilian men released Saturday.
On the Palestinian side, the poor physical condition of some of the hundreds of prisoners and detainees released from Israeli jails — including cases of visible illness or malnourishment — revived human rights groups’ accusations of widespread mistreatment behind bars.
When it comes to understanding Hamas, the past may be an ominous precedent. Milshtein said that misreading of the group’s aims over a period of many years led to the Oct. 7 debacle, and that fresh miscalculation over how Hamas would react if Trump seeks to empty the territory of its Palestinian population could once again produce disastrous results.
“I think Hamas right now is taking into consideration the announcement of Trump,” he said. “If they arrive at this juncture and understand that he is serious, they would prefer to return to war, commit suicide, suffer more dramatic damage in Gaza — but not to give up.”
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
