Palestinian militant group Hamas has been significantly battered by 15 months of war in Gaza but has not suffered the eradication that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intended, experts say.
After sparking the deadliest war in the Palestinian territory’s history, Hamas now faces questions over its legitimacy and whether to stick to its policy of armed resistance.
“Hamas has been extraordinarily weakened, its military capacity and its leadership very damaged,” said Sanam Vakil, director of Chatham House’s Middle East programme.
However, “those challenges are also opportunities for Hamas”, she told AFP.
Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by Israel in a Tehran bombing last July, and Israeli soldiers killed his successor and Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar some weeks later.
The group’s armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, has continued fighting in Gaza but has suffered heavy losses.
“Hamas is under pressure,” said Hugh Lovatt, a researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
He pointed to the suffering of the population, as well as the decision by Hamas’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah to sign its own ceasefire deal with Israel in November despite the Gaza war continuing.
However, a senior Hamas leader said the organisation “represents an idea aimed at liberating Palestine, not just a group of people that the enemy can eliminate”.
“The resistance will continue for so long as the occupation exists”, he told AFP.
– Support grown –
Despite the devastation of both Hamas and the Gaza Strip since October 2023, the group has achieved some successes, experts said.
With Netanyahu having declared the annihilation of the group to be a war aim, Hamas sees “its survival as a victory in itself”, said Jamal al-Fadi, a Palestinian political scientist.
Lovatt said that support for Hamas had grown and that in the occupied West Bank “clearly, many people feel aligned with their ideas”.
In the most recent study by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, published in September, Hamas had the highest support of any party at 36 percent, although that represented a four-point fall from July.
Yasser Abu Hein, another Palestinian political scientist, said that the October 7 attack had “elevated Hamas to global relevance” and gained the sympathy of people worldwide, “even Americans”.
That said, experts pointed out that Hamas’s support among Palestinians exists in the unique context of Gaza and the West Bank, where there have been no elections for nearly two decades and political outlets are extremely limited.
The majority of Palestinians do not support any political group, said Lovatt, be it Hamas, its main rival and dominant force in the Palestinian Authority Fatah, or any others.
Joost Hilterman of the International Crisis Group said popular support for Hamas “as a group pursuing armed struggle against the military occupation” by Israel, stemmed from a lack of political alternatives.
He said the war had also allowed Hamas to find new recruits, “as so many young Palestinians in Gaza have been orphaned”.
That was a sentiment backed up by top US diplomat Antony Blinken, who said this week that during the war, “Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost”.
He called this “a recipe for enduring insurgency and perpetual war”.
– ‘Hamas 2.0’ –
While Hamas may have survived Israel’s military onslaught and gained some support in doing so, Vakil said it actually found itself in a crisis of legitimacy.
Many “Palestinians see Hamas as part of the problem”, she said.
The group “can only be seen to be legitimate if it manages to restore governance and accountability and to become… a representative voice for Palestinians”.
Many experts have said that during the ceasefire negotiations, Hamas made compromises but was unwilling to bend on the return of displaced Gazans and an increase in humanitarian aid to the besieged territory.
“Their desire to put an end to the war led them to show some flexibility but they remain steadfast in their principal objectives,” above all the fight against Israel, Lovatt said, adding that the group could regenerate its military capabilities.
Vakil said it would “be important to assess how Palestinians themselves will assess the landscape for Hamas”, pointing out that Hamas shared responsibility for the destruction wrought by the war.
The greatest unknowns remain how Hamas will choose to operate in any post-war period and how it will try to portray the October 7 attack and its consequences.
While it could make compromises to remain relevant, Vakil said it was possible to “imagine a Hamas 2.0 emerging, more radicalised and perhaps motivated by the events since October 7”.
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