AI-Summary – News For Tomorrow
Hamas’s organization has crumbled, lacking coherent leadership both internally and abroad. Criticism was suppressed through patronage and fear of Israeli reprisal, but immense Gazan suffering, with devastating casualties and destruction, is breaking down this fear. Gazans feel Hamas bargains only for its survival, not their well-being, and resentment grows. “The day after” remains unclear. International plans propose external control, development, or reformed Hamas participation, but these lack legitimacy. Existing unity formulas are viewed as meaningless. Gazans are trapped between a timid political class and reckless Hamas, hoping for a new political future.
News summary provided by Gemini AI.
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 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.”
Some versions of the deal imagine Hamas continuing as a disarmed political party—its weapons placed under international custody while a “reformed” movement competes in future elections. Others assume Fatah will regain ground under a “revitalized” P.A., or that a unity government could be assembled between the two groups. Inside Gaza, few believe that these formulas can gain legitimacy again. “Unity has become meaningless,” Heba al-Maqadma, a pharmacist and a writer from Gaza now studying in Ireland, told me. “It’s a slogan that doesn’t have a foothold.” Rokba described two broken camps in the territory: a “trembling political class” waiting on international arrangements to rescue it, and a “reckless current,” embodied in Hamas, that gambled a nation’s survival for its own. “Between timidity and recklessness, neither offers a vision,” he said. The hope, if there is any, is that new political formations can take their place.
