The leaders of both Israel and Hamas seem content for the war in Gaza to grind on into the indefinite future. Such is the upshot of their ambiguous, but essentially negative, responses to President Joe Biden’s peace proposal, which is now fully backed by the United Nations Security Council. And the reasons are obvious.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have concluded that the best way to stay out of prison on corruption charges is to stay in office, and the best way to do that is to keep the war going. Hamas, meanwhile, believes that it is winning. On October 13, I wrote in these pages that Hamas had set a trap for Israel. The trap has sprung; Israel is fully enmeshed in it, with no evident way out, and Hamas is getting exactly what it hoped for.
Biden’s three-phase proposal was meant to end the war and establish an unspecified postconflict reality in Gaza. Phase 1 involves a 42-day cease-fire and the release of hostages held by Hamas and prisoners held by Israel, as well as negotiations for a complete end to the fighting. Phase 2 includes, as its centerpiece, a permanent cessation of hostilities. According to Biden’s plan, if the talks at the end of Phase 1 don’t produce a clear understanding of how to implement Phase 2, negotiations would then continue for as long as both parties abide by their Phase 1 commitments. The trouble is that this would, in effect, indefinitely freeze the war at its current stage.
Netanyahu won’t accept that. On May 31, Biden declared, “It is time for this war to end.” Netanyahu effectively replied that this is no time for the war to end, and has insisted that the war will continue until Hamas is destroyed.
By saying that the war must continue until his poorly defined military and political objectives are achieved, while at the same time saying that he is open to the 42-day cease-fire of Phase 1, Netanyahu is signaling that he would like to pocket the release of Israeli hostages and then return to conflict—exactly the scenario Biden seeks to avoid. Hamas, too, might eventually agree to try to implement Phase 1, in order to gain the release of some Palestinian prisoners and regroup its remaining forces for the next round of fighting. But neither has any real interest in the all-important Phase 2.
Hamas leaders know that they can’t put themselves on Biden’s side against Netanyahu, but they hope to seize on the disjuncture between the two allies by saying that they will accept the agreement “providing Israel agrees to end the war.” A Hamas spokesperson, Sami Abu Zuhr, said that the group accepts the plan in principle, and is ready to negotiate the details, but no word has come from the group’s senior leaders in Gaza. Like Netanyahu, in other words, Hamas hasn’t said no but has avoided a clear yes, not least by making Biden’s ultimate goal, which Israel has bluntly rejected, its starting demand.
So why would Hamas possibly want the war to continue, given the devastation of Gaza and its beleaguered Palestinian population, and the decimation of the group’s organized military strength? The answer is that Hamas leaders in Gaza almost certainly believe that the war is going according to plan.
Hamas has never really hidden its motivations. The October 7 attack proved even more devastating than Hamas surely anticipated, and afterward, the group’s leaders repeatedly insisted that they would have continued such assaults until they produced “a state of permanent warfare” with Israel. But what could they have meant by “permanent warfare”? Hamas surely understood that its civic power, military infrastructure, and above all its organized paramilitary forces stood no chance against the Israeli military. The group’s leaders knew that practically everything tangible they possessed would be smashed in relatively short order by the Israelis. And that’s essentially what has happened, although some important tunnels apparently remain, along with, reportedly, three or four battalions in Rafah.
The scale of the destruction can’t be a surprise to Hamas. Provoking the Israelis and luring them into Gaza was in fact Hamas’s intent. Once Israel blundered into reoccupying the Strip’s urban centers, its forces could serve as a lightning rod for a long-term insurgency, which was what Hamas was counting on all along.
While the world’s attention is focused on Rafah, the low-level but potentially “permanent” insurgency against Israeli forces has already begun in the cities of Gaza and Jabalia, and other parts of the northern and central Gaza Strip that Israel supposedly “pacified” and rid of any capable Hamas military forces. Hamas fighters even attempted another infiltration of Israel near the Kerem Shalom border crossing. That Israeli leaders have expressed surprise at this development suggests that they never really understood what kind of war the enemy had in mind. Hamas undoubtedly took steps in advance of October 7 to prepare for the insurgency that appears to have started.
American and Israeli policy makers tend to ignore internal Palestinian politics, but to understand Hamas’s choice—to trade its stable and limited rule over Gaza for a state of “permanent war”—requires taking seriously the struggle for power among Palestinian factions. In the Palestinian nationalist movement, the Islamists of Hamas have always played second fiddle to the secular nationalists of Fatah and the two institutions they dominate—the Palestinian Authority, which governs the small, autonomous Palestinian areas in the West Bank, and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which speaks for the Palestinians on the world stage. Of these, the latter is the more significant, really the crown jewel of the Palestinian nationalist project since it was reconstituted after the Six-Day War in 1967.
Through the PLO, the nominal State of Palestine not only participates in the UN General Assembly as a “nonmember observer state” but has gained membership in most significant multilateral institutions. South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice is predicated on the State of Palestine’s having subscribed to the ICJ Statute, which Israel (like the United States) has not. Similarly, potential actions against Israeli and Hamas leaders by the International Criminal Court are predicated on the State of Palestine’s having signed the statute guiding the ICC. This gives both courts jurisdiction over Gaza, a presumptive part of the State of Palestine (which is really the PLO). Yet Hamas has never been a part of the PLO and is a bitter rival of the secular nationalists who control it. Any time a Palestinian rises at an international forum, including the Arab League, to speak on behalf of the nation, it is a Fatah voice that resonates, with no input whatsoever from Hamas.
Hamas leaders evidently concluded that their fiefdom in Gaza had become more of a trap than a launching pad. Controlling Gaza wasn’t going to help them expand back into the West Bank or marginalize Fatah and eventually take over the PLO. Yet these were the prime directives of their organization when it was founded: The first purpose of Hamas is to turn the Palestinian cause from a secular project to an Islamist one and, in doing so, to take over leadership of the Palestinian nationalist movement.
Hamas was hoping to lure Israel into Gaza, where it would get stuck in the quicksand of reoccupation while fighting a long-term, albeit low-intensity, insurgency. Hamas would then wave its bloody shirt to Palestinians and the world, announcing itself as the legitimate national leadership, because it would be the one fighting Israeli occupation forces for control of Palestinian land on a daily basis in Gaza. Against its blood sacrifice, Hamas would cast the Palestinian Authority as the Vichy gendarmerie of the occupation in the West Bank, and the PLO as a humiliated dupe, waiting pointlessly at an empty negotiating table for peace and independence that never come.
The insurgency that Hamas hoped for has already begun. That’s why the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, reportedly sent a message in February reassuring anxious Hamas leaders in Qatar and Lebanon that “we have the Israelis right where we want them.” Everything appears to be going according to plan. Why, then, would Hamas possibly be interested in Biden’s peace plan? It has even less motivation than Netanyahu.
The grim reality is that the only people left in the world who seem to want the war to continue into the indefinite future are also the only ones who could stop it: the Hamas leaders and Netanyahu. Biden deserves credit for trying, but he has almost no chance of success.
