After 15 months of war, Hamas still rules over what remains of Gaza

Fighters from the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, control the crowd as Red Cross vehicles manoeuvre to collect Israeli hostages to be released under a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, in Gaza City, Sunday, Jan. 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Abed Hajjar)

As a ceasefire brought calm to Gaza’s ruined cities, Hamas was quick to emerge from hiding.

The militant group has not only survived 15 months of war with Israel — among the deadliest and most destructive in recent memory — but it remains firmly in control of the coastal territory that now resembles an apocalyptic wasteland. With a surge of humanitarian aid promised as part of the ceasefire deal, the Hamas-run government said Monday that it will coordinate distribution to the desperate people of Gaza.

For all the military might Israel deployed in Gaza, it failed to remove Hamas from power, one of its central war aims. That could make a return to fighting more likely, but the results might be the same.

There was an element of theater in Sunday’s handover of three Israeli hostages to the Red Cross, when dozens of masked Hamas fighters wearing green headbands and military fatigues paraded in front of cameras and held back a crowd of hundreds who surrounded the vehicles.

The scenes elsewhere in Gaza were even more remarkable: Thousands of Hamas-run police in uniform re-emerged, making their presence known even in the most heavily destroyed areas.

“The police have been here the whole time, but they were not wearing their uniforms” to avoid being targeted by Israel, said Mohammed Abed, a father of three who returned to his home in Gaza City more than seven months after fleeing the area.

“They were among the displaced people in the tents. That’s why there were no thefts,” he said.

Other residents said the police had maintained offices in hospitals and other locations throughout the war, where people could report crimes.

Israel has repeatedly blamed Hamas for the heavy civilian death toll and damage to infrastructure because the group’s fighters and security forces embed themselves in residential neighborhoods, schools and hospitals.

A deeply rooted movement

Opinion polls consistently show that only a minority of Palestinians support Hamas. But the Islamic militant group — which does not accept Israel’s existence — is deeply rooted in Palestinian society, with an armed wing, a political party, media and charities that date back to its founding in the late 1980s.

For decades, Hamas functioned as a well-organized insurgency, able to launch hit-and-run attacks on Israeli forces and suicide bombings in Israel itself. Many of its top leaders have been killed — and quickly replaced. It won a landslide victory in 2006 parliamentary elections, and the following year it seized Gaza from the Western-backed Palestinian Authority in a week of street battles.

Hamas then established a fully-fledged government, with ministries, police and a civilian bureaucracy. Its security forces quickly brought Gaza’s powerful families into line and crushed rival armed groups. They also silenced dissent and violently dispersed occasional protests.

Hamas remained in power through four previous wars with Israel. With help from Iran it steadily enhanced its capabilities, extended the range of its rockets and built deeper and longer tunnels to hide from Israeli airstrikes. By Oct. 7, 2023, it had an army of tens of thousands in organized battalions.

In the surprise incursion that triggered the war, its fighters attacked southern Israel by air, land and sea, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Hamas-led militants abducted 250 others.

A war like no other

In response, Israel launched an air and ground war that has killed over 47,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, and has reduced entire neighborhoods to fields of rubble. Some 90% of Gaza’s population has been displaced, often multiple times.

Nearly every day of the war, the Israeli military announced that it had killed dozens of fighters, or taken out a midlevel commander, or dismantled a tunnel complex or obliterated a weapons factory. Israeli forces killed Hamas' top leader, Yahya Sinwar, and most of his lieutenants. But the exiled leadership is mostly intact and Mohammed Sinwar, his brother, has reportedly assumed a bigger role in Gaza.

The military says it has killed over 17,000 fighters — roughly half of Hamas' estimated prewar ranks — though it has not provided evidence.

What Israel said were carefully targeted strikes frequently killed women and children and in some cases wiped out entire extended families.

The military blamed civilian casualties on Hamas. But survivors of the bombardment, crammed into tents after their homes were flattened, were a pool of potential recruits.

Earlier this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a prepared speech that Hamas had recruited nearly as many fighters as it lost during the war.

Michael Milshtein, an Israeli expert on Palestinian affairs and former military intelligence officer, said Hamas no longer has the ability to launch an Oct. 7-style attack but has returned to its insurgent roots, using creative tactics like harvesting unexploded Israeli ordnance for homemade bombs.

“Hamas is a chameleon. It changed its colors according to the circumstances,” he said.

“The war is ending with a strong perception of success for Hamas,” he added. ”The enlistment capabilities will be crazy. They won’t be able to handle it.”

Israel ensures there is no alternative

Palestinian critics of Hamas have long said there is no military solution to the Mideast conflict, which predates the birth of the militant group by several decades.

They argue that Palestinians would be more likely to break with Hamas if they had an alternative path to ending Israel’s decades-long occupation, which has further entrenched itself during the war.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government is opposed to Palestinian statehood, has ensured they do not.

He has rebuffed proposals from the United States and friendly Arab countries for a reformed Palestinian Authority to govern both Gaza and parts of the occupied West Bank ahead of eventual statehood. Instead, he has vowed to maintain open-ended security control over both territories.

Avi Issacharoff, a veteran Israeli journalist — and co-creator of the Netflix hit “Fauda” — said Netanyahu’s refusal to plan for the day after was the “biggest debacle of this war.”

“Israel is waking up from a nightmare into the very same nightmare,” he wrote in Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper. “Hamas is going to remain in power and will continue to build more tunnels and recruit more men, without the emergence of any local alternative.”

Netanyahu has threatened to resume the war after the first six-week phase of the ceasefire if Israel’s goals are not met, while Hamas has said it will not release dozens of remaining captives without a lasting truce and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

There’s no reason to think another military campaign would bring about a different result.

In early October, Israeli forces sealed off the northern towns of Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and Jabaliya, barring nearly all humanitarian aid, forcing thousands to flee and destroying nearly every structure in their path, including schools and shelters, according to witnesses who fled.

The army had carried out major operations in all three places previously, only to see militants regroup. At least 15 Israeli soldiers have died in northern Gaza this month alone.

When residents returned to Jabaliya on Sunday, they found a sprawling scene of devastation with only a few tilted shells of buildings in a sea of gray rubble.

Dozens of Hamas police kept watch over their return.

Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Tia Goldenberg in Tel Aviv, Israel contributed.

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Samy Magdy And Joseph Krauss, The Associated Press