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How Hamas threatens to rise like a phoenix from Gaza’s ashes – Firstpost

How Hamas threatens to rise like a phoenix from Gaza’s ashes – Firstpost



“This is a generation which knows no fear. It is the generation of the missile, the tunnel and suicide operations.” — Haniyeh, January 15, 2014

The quote by the late Hamas Political Bureau chairman, assassinated by Israel on July 31, 2024, encapsulates the terrorist organisation’s fearlessness and survivability.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim last year that much of the organisation had been destroyed and that “victory was in sight” stands belied.

The latest shaky Gaza ceasefire showed two things.

First, Hamas survived Israel’s merciless carpet bombing of Gaza and its vastly superior arsenal.

Second, the aim of Israel and the West to keep Hamas out of the Gaza Strip’s governance is impossible.

The videos of the three Israeli women hostages and four Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) captives freed by Hamas showed that the terrorist organisation is alive and kicking.

In both videos, the hostages were surrounded by a swarm of gun-wielding Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades operatives in balaclavas shouting “Allahu Akbar” and cheering Gazans.

Hamas turned the hostage releases into a spectacle. It was clear that its al-Qassam Brigades members had emerged out of the massive subterranean tunnel network, or the Gaza Metro, to show they still call the shots and are deeply entrenched in the war-torn coastal enclave.

Hamas has survived Israeli onslaught

Far from being dismantled, Hamas has survived Israel’s brutal offensive.

Around a year ago, the IDF Military Intelligence circulated a document among top Israeli politicians warning that dismantling Hamas won’t mean eradicating the group. Hamas will survive as “a terror group and a guerrilla group”, the paper warned.

In January 2024, then-US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that a terrorist group’s ability to resource itself, train and recruit fighters and execute attacks can be impacted, but it “doesn’t mean that the ideology withers away and dies”.

On the anniversary of the October 7 terror attack, Khaled Meshaal said that 
Hamas would rise “like a phoenix” from the ashes despite taking the massive blow from Israel adding that recruitment continued.

Hamas’s leader-in-exile said that the group goes through phases of losses but always rises up. “We lose martyrs (victims) and we lose part of our military capabilities, but then the Palestinian spirit rises again like the phoenix—thanks to God”, he said.

The reason for Hamas’s survival is the transformation of the Palestinian national struggle into a fundamentally religious conflict via the group’s Dawa—schools, clinics, mosques and charities—and infiltration of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools.

Such schools were infiltrated by Hamas sympathisers, supporters and even operatives decades ago and school textbooks have been fuelling anti-Israeli sentiments and violence.

The radicalisation of students at UNRWA schools has triggered an avalanche of anti-Israeli sentiment and violence in the last four decades. Several students, including graduates and diploma holders, participated in the two Intifadas and terror attacks and joined the al-Qassam Brigades and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s (PIJ) Al-Quds Brigade.

A November 2023 report by the Israeli non-profit Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) titled ‘UNRWA Education: Textbooks and Terror’, lists the names of 118 such students who turned into terrorists. IMPACT-se monitors school textbooks and examines curricula worldwide to determine whether the material conforms to international standards derived from UNESCO declarations and resolutions.

The report found that some educational material at UNRWA schools either promotes anti-Semitism or encourages violence and hatred against Israel. Moreover, UNRWA doesn’t have curricula and its schools teach from textbooks of the host country—schools in Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem teach the Palestinian National Authority (PA) curriculum.

A 2016 revision of the textbooks showed their brazen anti-Semitic content and encouragement to violence and jihad. Dalal Mughrabi, an 18-year-old Palestinian refugee from Lebanon who was part of the Fatah fedayeen squad that killed 38 Israeli bus passengers, including 13 children, on March 11, 1978, is glorified in PA textbooks. For instance, fifth graders of UNRWA’s Al-Zaytun Elementary School (Gaza) were taught to glorify Mughrabi as a role model for children.

According to Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow and director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Stein Programme, on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, 
children caught up in the Hamas Dawa are “taught to recognise the virtue of death-for-Allah. Once indoctrinated into this belief system, they are more easily exploited as grade-school terrorists.”

A Palestinian student is radicalised throughout his academic career via materials “bearing the pictures of Hamas suicide bombers and others killed carrying out terrorist attacks”.

Another reason for Hamas’s survival is its recruitment. Hamas had around 20,000-25,000 fighters before the war started, per US intelligence.

On January 21, outgoing IDF Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi said that around 20,000 Hamas members had been eliminated. It is difficult to estimate the exact number of Hamas casualties as members of the PIJ, Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement and other armed groups were also killed.

Figures provided by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a nonprofit specialising in disaggregated conflict data collection and analysis, put the number of Hamas fatalities much less. Detailed IDF reports on the killing of militants containing specifics on timeframes, locations or operations. 

recorded by ACLED, account for only 8,500 deaths.

Hamas was recruiting as it was losing its fighters. “We lost part of our ammunition and weapons but Hamas is still recruiting young men and continues to manufacture a significant portion of its ammunition and weapons,” Meshaal had said.

According to an exclusive Reuters 
report, Hamas has recruited 10,000-15,000 members since the war started. US intelligence suggests that Hamas recruited around as many members as it had lost in the war, a “recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war”, then-US secretary of state Antony Blinken said in January.

Blinken’s statement confirms al-Qassam Brigades’ July 2024 claim that 
thousands of new terrorists were recruited. “We managed to recruit thousands of new fighters during the war,” al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Ubaida had said.

In December, Hamas recruited 4,000 members as Israel moved troops to fight Hezbollah in the last three months.

Hamas also recruits in the West Bank and Lebanon.

According to Levitt, Hamas recruits in a formal and structured way in the Gaza Strip for its military and intelligence wings.

In the West Bank, Hamas has several cells which recruit operatives in religious settings. In southern Lebanon, members are hired from refugee camps.

Moreover, Israel’s military operation against Gaza has enraged a new generation of Gazans who might be future terrorists—thousands of orphans.

The toll has crossed 47,200 with more than 38,000 children orphaned, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Around 32,151 children lost their fathers, 4,417 lost their mothers and another 1,918 lost both parents.

These children and teenagers are a fertile ground for Hamas radicalisation and recruitment. Hamas will easily tap their rage and frustration against Israel. According to the United Nations, around 50 per cent of Gazans are under the age of 18.

In January 2024, the IDF presented images showing 
Hamas and PIJ indoctrinating children and training them to shoot guns, navigate tunnels, confront tanks and engage in simulated soldier kidnappings. Hamas also uses children to transport ammunition and relay information from combat zones to terrorists hiding in shelters, per the IDF.

The war is part of a broader narrative dating back to the Nakba (Catastrophe) in 1948. The high number of casualties caused by the Israeli invasion, more than thrice the number of dead in the Nakba, has ensured that Hamas will continue to recruit youngsters devastated by the loss of their families. Now, Israel faces thousands of angry young Palestinians who can take up arms.

On March 11, 2024, then-director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, told a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing for the Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community that the “Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism”.

The Hamas tunnel network also ensured the group’s survival. The re-emergence of terrorists during the hostage releases showed that much of the Gaza Metro was intact.

Before the war, the massive warren of tunnels was more than 720 km long. One of the tunnels located 1,310 feet from the Erez Crossing measured four km.

In January 2024, The Wall Street Journal 
reported that after 114 days of fighting, around 80 per cent of the tunnel system could have been intact. A New York Times 
report last year estimated the same length of the tunnel network, much higher than the IDF’s assessment.

The incessant aerial and artillery bombing flattened much of Gaza but the tunnel network wasn’t destroyed.

Yoni Ben Menachem, from the Jerusalem Centre for Security and Foreign Affairs, estimates that 40 per cent of the tunnel network—hundreds of kilometres—is intact. Some of the tunnels are very long and haven’t even been discovered.

The IDF’s failure to locate the hostages confirms that the tunnels haven’t been destroyed completely. Some of the seven women hostages released by Hamas were held inside the tunnels for eight months.

“There are still very long tunnels that Israel has yet to have located—some of them with hostages inside. This requires a very big operation and a massive amount of explosives that Israel currently does not possess,” Ben Menachem said.

The existence of tunnels exposes the IDF’s failure to plan a strategy that should have targeted the tunnel network. “There are places in Gaza, especially in the centre, which the Army has not entered yet,” added Ben Menachem.

Hamas might not have the same firepower and strength as before the war but the ceasefire would give it a chance to increase recruitment and survive. As the guns have fallen silent, Hamas will waste no time to regroup, strategise and continue its fight against Israel.

Mashal had mentioned the same point. Since Israel doesn’t have a plan for Gaza when the war ends, Hamas would re-establish itself although not with the same strength or in the same form as before, he had said.

Hamas will remain part of Gaza’s governance

The United States (US) wanted the Mahmoud Abbas-led PA to govern both the West Bank and Gaza after the war. In an opinion piece in The Washington Times in November 2023, then-US President Joe Biden wrote: “As we strive for peace, Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalised Palestinian Authority, as we all work towards a two-state solution.”

The PA governed both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip until Hamas took over the enclave’s control in 2007. The US wanted a reformed PA that could also govern Gaza after the war.

President Abbas, who has ruled out any Hamas participation if a new government is formed, tried to appease the US by appointing his longtime economic adviser Mohammad Mustafa as the PA’s prime minister in March 2024 and asked him to form a new government.

However, the PA and Abbas are unpopular among Palestinians, who feel they are corrupt and didn’t stand up for them during the war. Neither the PA provided an alternate model to govern Gaza after the war, which alienated Gazans further.


survey conducted by Ramallah-based Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) in Gaza and the West Bank between November 27 and December 2, 2024, showed that 57 per cent found the PA’s performance in supporting Palestinians in Gaza was very unsatisfactory.

On the other hand, around 66 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank prefer Hamas to be part of or even lead a Palestinian unity government. And 17 per cent still favour only Hamas rule. In fact, West Bank residents support Hamas more (25 per cent) than the PA (10 per cent).

Polling by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Research in Gaza and the West Bank in September 2024 showed 57 per cent saying that Gaza will remain under Hamas’s control after the war and 58 per cent preferring the group’s return.

In December, Hamas and Fatah agreed to form a committee of politically independent technocrats to administer post-war Gaza that would report to the PA. Later, Fatah opposed the agreement arguing that it was against two administrations and suggested that the PA should also govern Gaza.

Excluding Hamas from Gaza is impossible as the group is part of Gaza’s social fabric.

The hostage releases showed the group’s iron grip on Gaza. Soon after, the al-Qassam Brigades started guarding the aid convoys, the Civil Police patrolled the streets and Hamas officials supervised the clearance of rubble.

Hamas is deeply involved in running the enclave—from running ministries and agencies to paying salaries and providing basic services.

Hamas has released a 200-page document titled ‘
Gaza Phoenix’ detailing its official reconstruction plan, making it clear that it will be part of any future government. The plan includes putting up displacement camps, repairing hospitals, clearing rubble and restoring law and order.

Even the reconstruction plan has Hamas’s sinister design of continuing to build its tunnel network. A section named ‘Wartime resilience’ suggests constructing “an underground connecter” between all Gaza cities.

Gaza’s governance faces a dilemma—neither Hamas can manage the enclave alone even if it assumes full control nor the PA will be able to govern it without the terror group.

The writer is a freelance journalist with more than two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.





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