When Israel killed the founder of Hamas with three rockets one spring morning in 2004 as he was pushed out of a Gaza mosque in his wheelchair, many Israeli analysts knew for sure: the death of the elderly Ahmad Yassin, the charismatic leader and ideological patriarch of Hamas , would herald the end of the organization.
Instead, Hamas found new leaders and won the Palestinian elections two years later. It was not so much the person Yassin or his Islamist ideology, but above all Israeli violence against the Palestinians and Hamas’ resistance to it that made the movement so popular. Whenever Israel increases its violence, Hamas can demonstrate how much it excels in one of the most important Palestinian cultural values: sumudwhich means ‘steadfastness’.
Fast forward to 2024. A Hamas leader has been killed by a drone strike in the Lebanese capital Beirut. Israel has been dropping heavier bombs on Hamas for three months than the US dropped on the Islamic State. In the Gaza Strip, Israel has already killed 24,000 Palestinians and caused more destruction than Russia and the Assad regime did in four years of bombing Aleppo. Never before has Israel used so much violence against Gaza. But as always Hamas shows sumud.
Because Hamas has not yet been defeated. The Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, may have been weakened, but they continue to fight. Moreover, Hamas’s popularity in the Gaza Strip has not collapsed and has in fact increased sharply in the West Bank. Israel’s self-proclaimed goal, ‘the total destruction of Hamas’, is still a long way off. It begs the question: is this a matter of more time and even more violence? Or is the goal itself not achievable?
Resistance is growing
“It is an illusion to think that you can eradicate Hamas militarily,” says Jeroen Gunning, professor of Middle East politics and conflict studies at King’s College London. “Hamas is not just a military organization, it is also a political party, a huge social movement and an idea. That cannot be bombed away. On the contrary: history shows that resistance against Israel only increases due to such violence.”
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According to Gunning, the fact that Israel’s allies also went along with the idea that the group should be “eliminated” after the extreme violence by Hamas on October 7 – as US President Biden also agreed – was extremely irresponsible and short-sighted, according to Gunning. “It has opened the door to a form of Israeli war violence that, according to legal experts, can be regarded as genocide,” he says. “Everyone could have seen that coming. Because if you want to eliminate a movement as deeply rooted as Hamas, you would have to wipe the Gaza Strip off the map.”
It is difficult to determine exactly what Hamas’s position is militarily. Of the estimated 25,000 to 40,000 fighters the Qassam Brigades counted prior to October 7, Israel claims to have killed 8,000. That number is difficult to reconcile with figures from the Hamas-controlled health ministry, which are also cited by the UN and have proven to be generally reliable. The ministry reports that more than 70 percent of the 24,000 Palestinian deaths are women and children. Assuming that the remaining approximately 7,000 men killed were not all combatants, you are more likely to arrive at several thousand fighters killed by Israel – although it is possible that the ministry did not count some of them. Israel itself says it has lost 187 soldiers so far, in addition to the 1,139 people (695 Israeli civilians, 373 security forces and 71 foreigners) killed in Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Although the leader of the Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif, and Hamas’ leader in the Gaza Strip, Yayha Sinwar, are still known to be alive, Israel said early this month that it had “dismantled” Hamas’s command structure in the northern Gaza Strip and to have killed many commanders. However, small groups of fighters are still fighting in the north, the Israeli newspaper reports Haaretz. In the south, Hamas has greater organizational capacity and is still able to fire rockets into Israeli territory. Those rockets are far from finished: according to the WashingtonPost Hamas has only fired more than a third of its arsenal of some thirty thousand rockets since October 7.
Guerrilla tactics
The fact that Hamas has survived for so long is mainly due to its use of guerrilla tactics. Qassam fighters hide between buildings, release hidden explosives (booby traps) behind and carry out surprise attacks by suddenly emerging from their underground tunnels and then retreating. The Israeli army has flooded some of those tunnels with seawater, but must be careful: it is expected that many of the more than a hundred hostages held by Hamas are also in those tunnels.
“Hamas’ strategy is to wear down the Israelis,” said Azzam Tamimi, a British-Palestinian academic close to Hamas. His contacts within Hamas, he says, do not yet appear desperate. “If the end was near, they would tell me,” he says by telephone. “But they sound confident. Of course they acknowledge the enormous destruction, but they say they can still make life very difficult for Israelis.”
The assassination of Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut on January 2 has raised concerns among Hamas members that Israeli infiltrators are reporting their locations, according to Tamimi. That is why Hamas leaders in Qatar, Beirut and Turkey, among others, are currently more cautious than usual, he says, although Tamimi doubts that Israel’s pursuit of them will hinder Hamas’s functioning. “If a leader is taken out, there is always someone ready to take over,” he says. “That’s how Hamas is designed.”
Israel often recalls that Western countries also flattened Raqqa and Mosul to bring the Islamic State to its knees or killed IS leaders with drone strikes. Israel does the same, because, as Netanyahu and many other Israeli officials emphasize, “Hamas is the same as IS.”
However, that comparison is flawed, says Joas Wagemakers, an Islamologist at Utrecht University. Although he emphasizes that the October 7 attack was undoubtedly an act of terror, he believes it is incorrect to identify Hamas with organizations such as the Islamic State or al-Qaeda. “Hamas comes from the Muslim Brotherhood and is in conflict with these types of jihadist groups,” he says. “Although Islam is important to Hamas, the organization is primarily driven by Palestinian nationalism. Hamas is not a terrorist entity separate from the Palestinian cause, it actually arises from that Palestinian cause.”
According to Wagemakers, that is precisely the reason why Israel’s desire to ‘eliminate’ Hamas militarily is so unrealistic. “In effect, Israel is deploying military resources on a political problem,” he says. “Even if it kills all Hamas leaders or dismantles the organization, the pursuit of a Palestinian state that Hamas created will continue. As long as Israel does not provide meaningful space for this, it will also have to deal with new organizations a la Hamas after this war.”
Little indoctrination
There is a good chance that the anti-Israel resistance of the future will be even more radical, says Tristan Dunning, Hamas expert and political scientist at the University of Queensland in Australia. “Israel always says that civilians in Gaza allow themselves to be ‘indoctrinated’ by Hamas,” he says by telephone. “But after the slaughter that Israel is now causing among civilians, they will need little indoctrination to join radical resistance movements in the future.”
Israel’s hope that Gazans would turn en masse against Hamas as a result of the war has not yet come true, according to Dunning. The political scientist points to a recent poll by the renowned Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), which shows that political support for Hamas in the Gaza Strip has actually increased slightly: from 38 percent in September to 42 percent in December. Moreover, 57 percent of them say Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on October 7, despite the war that followed, was the right one. In the West Bank, the latter percentage is as high as 82 percent and support for Hamas has tripled (from 12 to 44 percent).
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Peace with enemies
However, it is unlikely that Netanyahu’s government will go along with this – Netanyahu is even against governance in Gaza by the current PA. However, according to Dunning, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s proposal to work together with Palestinian families who are sympathetic to Israel after the war in Gaza is doomed to failure. “Israel tried something like that in the 1970s and 1980s and it didn’t work then,” he says. “You make peace with your enemies, not with your friends.”
If Israel does want to sit down with Hamas, Hamas would certainly be very willing to do so, all academics say. Although a Hamas spokesman said shortly after October 7 that Hamas would carry out the attack again and called Israel illegitimate, Azzam Tamimi argues that in reality the Hamas leadership recognizes that Israel is a de facto reality and is eager to negotiate. Ismaïl Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political department, even called in November for talks on a two-state solution – with Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. Israel will not agree to that, by the way.
A more realistic option, Tamimi says, is something Hamas has advocated many times in the past: one hudna. That Islamic concept refers to a long-term ceasefire, much longer than a regular ceasefire, which allows time for hostilities to subside until real peace can be negotiated.
But Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose post-war political future hangs in the balance, promises “a long war” and says he will stick to his goal of ‘eliminating’ Hamas. It is highly questionable whether his successors are interested in dialogue. After what Hamas did on October 7, the consensus in Israel is that there is no more talking to Hamas.
“But is it possible to talk to Israel after what it is doing in Gaza?” says Gunning. “The Palestinians will have great difficulty with that as well. However, there will have to be talks, because this conflict has no military solution.”