Diplomacy Is All Hamas Has Left in the Arsenal

Hamas and Israel each abandoned long-standing demands in order to secure the cease-fire that takes effect today. Both parties were responding to internal and external pressures when Israel agreed to pull its forces back from almost all of Gaza, and Hamas accepted a temporary cessation of hostilities, but not the end to war it had sought.

In Israel’s case, one source of external pressure was President-Elect Donald Trump, who pushed Benjamin Netanyahu to accept conditions he’d long rejected. The Israeli prime minister was also swayed by intense public demands to retrieve the hostages. Netanyahu’s priorities and incentives are relatively visible and easy to apprehend. Hamas’s strategy is, in this instance, more opaque.

A major concession for Hamas was to accept that many of its key cadres will now stay indefinitely in Israeli prisons. In any case, the militant Islamist group is no longer the same organization that launched the October 7, 2023, massacre. Its battalions have been smashed; all that is left is a ragtag insurgency capable only of hit-and-run tactics. The group’s arsenal is greatly depleted; its fighters have fallen back on improvised explosive devices assembled from unexploded Israeli ordinance. The top tier of Hamas’s military leadership has been eliminated, leaving two relatively inexperienced and junior commanders—Ezz al-Din Hadad in the north and Mohamed Sinwar, younger brother of the October 7 attack’s mastermind, Yahya Sinwar, in the south.

As they planned the original 2023 assault, Sinwar and his lieutenants no doubt anticipated a devastating military response from Israel. They accepted the bargain of sacrificing all of the infrastructure and quasi-state apparatus that Hamas had built in Gaza since seizing power in 2007, in return for a “permanent” guerrilla war against Israel. According to the military wing’s theory of insurgency, after drawing the Israel Defense Forces into Gaza, Hamas fighters would inflict grinding attritional losses on Israeli troops. In a marginal way, that scenario seemed slightly plausible when Israel recently lost 15 soldiers in the northern town of Beit Hanoun within a week. After 15 months of fighting, the IDF’s losses are incommensurable with Hamas’s. But Israel’s generals need clarity from its civilian government about the political goals of the war and what they can call victory.

[Read: Israel never defined its goals]

Hamas, too, may finally have had a moment of clarity. Sinwar used to mock the Hamas politburo as “the hotel guys” because few of the political leaders ensconced in comfortable digs abroad had personal experience of armed struggle. For more than a decade, the Gaza gunmen became ascendant, while these formerly commanding, civilian Hamas figures in foreign capitals were reduced to soft-power roles as diplomats and TV talking heads. They had their uses as conduits for money and arms, but as Sinwar saw it, they had no hard-power value to the movement.

All of that has changed. Sinwar is dead; in Lebanon, the great ally Hezbollah has collapsed; in Syria, Israel’s longtime adversary Bashar al-Assad is gone; a humbled Iran has been kept at bay. So Hamas has had to change course. With the reemergence of Turkey and Qatar as regional power brokers, the deal-making diplomacy of the hotel guys is now the only game in town. If Hamas is to have any way of rebuilding power inside Gaza, the politburo must get its way.

Plenty of evidence suggests that the Sinwar-directed version of Hamas has not fared well in public opinion in Gaza, where 2.2 million Palestinians suffered serial displacement, hellish misery, and mass death. The military wing calculated that its adoption of a frontal position in the so-called Axis of Resistance of Iran-backed regional militias would shift Palestinian public opinion in its favor. But the backlash potential among Gaza’s civilian population, in what was surely imagined as a years-long insurgency, must have been obvious. Even the most implacable and belligerent Hamas leaders must operate within a Palestinian political context that demands significant support for a “people’s war.”

But the decisive factor in shifting Hamas at the negotiating table is the dramatic change in the wider geopolitical landscape. The Sinwar strategy of October 7 was to provoke a multifront war against Israel, in hopes of dragging into a regional conflict the ultimate adversaries, the United States and Iran. That call went unanswered. When Hezbollah made clear that it would intensify its long-standing border conflict with Israel but essentially sit out the war in Gaza, Hamas leaders complained at first, but eventually had to accept that the Lebanese cavalry was not on its way.

Even so, Hamas assumed broader backing from its regional sponsors. Yet the devastation that Israel inflicted on Hezbollah last year, the general degradation of Iran’s militia network, and the failure of Tehran’s strategy of using Arab fighters as a forward defense against Israel and the U.S. were decisive. The collapse of the resistance proved central to Hamas’s change of course.

With the end of the Assad regime in Syria, Iran now has no overland route to resupply Hezbollah in Lebanon, let alone Hamas in Gaza. The fall of Assad has helped shift power inside Hamas away from the Qassam Brigades, which advocated “permanent war” against Israel, and toward the civilian politicians who recently relocated from Qatar to Turkey. Many of those operatives were never really on board with the strategy of ditching governance in Gaza and turning to guerrilla combat. Hamas was careful to avoid open dissension, but signs of unease among politburo members were evident.

The victory in Syria of the Turkish-backed rebels fundamentally altered Hamas’s calculations. Turkey and its close ally Qatar are now emerging as key players in the Levant. For Hamas, whatever political links to Ankara and Doha it can leverage suddenly matter far more than any ties to Tehran. Unlike Iran’s leaders, the rulers of Turkey and Qatar have no interest in prolonging an open-ended conflict in Gaza. Both countries are largely aligned with the U.S. They have an overriding interest in regional stability, not in support for an endless insurgency on Israel’s doorstep.

If Hamas is to have any hope of getting back in the business of governing Gaza, and restoring a social contract with its more than 2 million Palestinian residents, Turkey and Qatar are most likely to supply the means. That would involve, first, political and diplomatic cover, and then financing for the territory’s reconstruction, especially its shattered health and education systems.

Trump’s threats of “hell to pay” if a hostage deal did not materialize before his inauguration probably meant little to Hamas. But even if the president-elect’s principal influence was on Netanyahu, Ankara and Doha certainly felt the Trump factor enough to lean on the politburo. The Qassam Brigade fighters surviving in Gaza’s tunnels still have their guns, and at some point they may decide they’ve had enough of the cease-fire; equally, Israel will show no hesitation in playing militant whack-a-mole, and Netanyahu might judge that resuming the conflict would advance his interests. But for the moment, the politburo members who want to pull back from endless warfare and try to rebuild political power in Gaza have the momentum and the leverage. That’s why there’s a cease-fire—and why it might just last.