Unlike the Gaza Strip, the West Bank has been a far more obvious arena of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis over the past few years. Since the West Bank has also attracted international media attention, for Hamas and other militant groups, it has been a more suitable arena for nationalist Palestinian armed resistance.
Indeed, Israel seemed to recognize this: on the eve of October 7th, Israeli forces were busy surveilling Palestinians in the West Bank, assuming that Gaza posed little threat other than occasional rocket fire.
But the surprise attack by Hamas militants on October 7th was in radical contrast to this. To launch its deadly dawn attack, Hamas’ Gaza-based military wing blew up the Erez border crossing with Israel and breached Gaza’s security barrier at numerous points.
What changes did Sinwar introduce?
This also leads to raising important questions about the leadership of Hamas. Namely, previously it had been assumed that Hamas leaders were outside that territory, that is, that the leaders are located in Amman, Damascus, and Doha, but this understanding has long been outdated. Since 2017 when Yahya Sinwar took over the leadership of Hamas in Gaza, Hamas has gone through an organizational change in relation to Gaza itself.
He made the territory more autonomous from Hamas’s external leaders and also presided over the strategic renewal of Hamas as a fighting force in Gaza. He specifically aimed at taking offensive actions against Israel and connecting Gaza to the larger Palestinian struggle.
The other side of the story
Since this latest war with Israel, Hamas has also developed a concerted media strategy to emphasize the centrality of Gaza in the Palestinian struggle. Most important was the group’s ability to communicate with the outside world during combat. Despite the Internet blackout of Gaza, intense Israeli bombing, and the destruction of telecommunications infrastructure across the territory, Hamas continued to broadcast information from the battlefield, providing a continual counternarrative to official Israeli accounts of the war.
Even if it has come at a high price, Hamas’s attack has made the liberation project concrete for Palestinians; and by provoking Israel to launch its devastating invasion and mass killing of civilians, it also brought extraordinary worldwide attention to the brutality of the Israeli occupation and Israeli control over the Palestinian territories. These outcomes are likely to have profound consequences for the future of the conflict.
Goals and consequences
By forcing Israel to launch a major war in Gaza, the October 7th operation has overturned the prevailing understanding of Gaza as a territory that had been liberated from Israeli occupation and whose status quo as an isolated enclave could be sustained indefinitely.
Despite the heavy civilian casualties, for Hamas, the war has already achieved the goals of positioning Gaza as a key part of the Palestinian liberation struggle and bringing that struggle to the center of international attention.
And while Gaza is under constant shelling, Israel and the United States (U.S.) are discussing different scenarios for the “day after”. Although the two countries disagree on many issues, including the possibility of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas ruling, which Israel rejects, both countries are determined to eradicate Hamas completely.
However, this goal has shown little success so far, even though one of the strongest armies in the world – Israel’s – is not faltering. So despite all these efforts, there are no signs that Hamas has been eradicated.
For now, as its forces have failed to meet their objectives in Gaza, Israel has stepped up military operations in the West Bank through daily raids, mass arrests, and widespread repression. Not only does this raise the prospect of a two-front war, but it also suggests that the Israeli military itself could help achieve Hamas’s own goal of reconnecting Gaza with the wider struggle for Palestinian liberation, N1 writes.
