By October 7th, decision-making had migrated to the armed cadre. Reporting indicates that the assault’s green light came from only a handful of Hamas leaders and commanders, including Yahya Sinwar, Marwan Issa, and Mohammed Deif (all of whom were later assassinated by Israel). After the catastrophe, even senior figures signalled misgivings. Mousa Abu Marzouk, the head of Hamas’s foreign-relations office, said that he would not have backed the operation had he foreseen the scale of Gaza’s devastation. (Hamas later claimed his words were taken out of context.)
The organization itself has since crumbled. Today, Hamas operates without a coherent leadership, a reality its remaining figures seem unwilling to confront. Most of those who shaped or even marginally influenced the events of October 7th are gone, leaving Gaza’s authority withered to the point that even managing the hostages has become paralyzingly difficult. Abroad, the leadership was fragile long before a recent assassination attempt on its leaders in Doha, in September. It has only weakened since.
Inside Gaza, criticizing Hamas has long been treated by the organization as a form of betrayal. In a time of constant siege and bombardment, people feared that public dissent would be weaponized by Israel. Patronage networks ran through Hamas, and speaking out could carry real costs for civilians. Families learned to keep quiet because the price of a wrong word could be a lost permit, a withheld salary, or worse. In wartime, the instinct to hold the line is understandable. But that instinct is breaking down. Nearly seventy thousand Palestinians have been killed, and more than a hundred and seventy thousand have been injured. At least two million have been internally displaced. As many as a hundred thousand have been forced out of the Gaza Strip. Civilian infrastructure—roads, sewage, electricity, and municipal services—has been destroyed. More than ninety per cent of residential buildings have been reduced to rubble. Some ninety-five per cent of people face severe shortages of food, clean water, and medicine. Disease and malnutrition have spread as the medical infrastructure has collapsed. The education system is in ruins.
Many Gazans now point out that Hamas has been negotiating primarily for things that the territory already had before October 7th—aid trucks, limited freedom of mobility within the Strip, and I.D.F. pullbacks to prior lines. The bargaining looks, to many, like a fight for organizational survival rather than for the protection of the people. The appetite for Hamas’s return to power now feels thin among Gazans. Ahed Ferwana, the secretary of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate in Gaza, described a mood of rising resentment at a leadership that dragged Gaza into a war no one could survive. “There is distance, even anger,” he told me. “People were left disappointed.”
The P.A. offers little alternative. The P.A.’s remit in the West Bank is narrow: running municipal services, payrolls, and security coördination with Israel, all inside a map that Israel still controls. The P.A. depends on foreign donors and on taxes that Israel can withhold at will. Elections were postponed in 2021, and dissent is heavily policed. In recent polling by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, satisfaction with Abbas hovers at fifteen per cent, and demand for his resignation is overwhelming. For most Palestinians, a P.A. return to Gaza under an Israeli-American umbrella would read as a return to occupation by proxy.
The rest of the political field has also collapsed. Once-influential leftist factions—the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine—have been ground down by decades of arrests, exile, funding collapse, and irrelevance. This war obliterated their remaining infrastructure. Little political order is left. For the first time in decades, Gaza has no actor with a meaningful mandate to define its interests or negotiate its future. “Gaza needs leadership called in by the people themselves, not appointed from the outside,” Sundos Fayyad, a journalist in Gaza, told me. “Rebuilding what’s been destroyed may be impossible, but any future worth living begins with that right for representation.”
The phrase “the day after” is much used in Gaza, but it remains an abstraction. “Everyone has a plan,” Fayyad told me. “But none of them speak to our needs.” The most visible plans are those devised by the same international custodians who have engineered postwar order elsewhere in the Middle East. Last month, a leaked “Gaza Riviera” postwar plan circulated within the Trump Administration. It proposes placing Gaza under U.S. control, recasting displacement as development, and suggesting a temporary relocation for much of its population. The Strip’s coastline and interior would be remade into “modern and AI-powered smart planned cities.”
The peace plan, the most recent proposed trusteeship structure under Trump and Blair, follows the same logic—Palestinian statehood deferred, Israel’s security rights preserved in a Gaza turned into an international project. The Palestinians being floated to join efforts to administer Gaza seem selected primarily for their palatability to foreign governments. “None has a mandate,” Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer and a former legal adviser to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, said. “Their qualification is access to foreign capital.” Governance, she added, “is being rebuilt around external interests, not public legitimacy.” Talal Abo Rokba, a professor of political sociology in Gaza, told me, “These leaders are administrators for someone else’s agenda.”
