Hamas or No Hamas: Gaza's Future Hinges on More Than One Armed Group's Fate

As the war enters its fourth year, leaving Gaza almost entirely destroyed, calls are mounting for Hamas to relinquish administrative control and withdraw from the Strip. The argument goes that for Gaza to have a viable future, the group's political and military wings must be dissolved.

While Hamas's fate is a pivotal question, charting a meaningful path to recovery is impossible without addressing the realities that gave rise to the group in the first place.

What is unfolding in Gaza today is directly linked to the origins of the Palestinian-Israeli question, which has little to do with any particular armed group.

Hamas did not exist in 1948, when hundreds of Palestinian villages, including Naj and Huj, were wiped out and their residents expelled during the Nakba — the Palestinian catastrophe that accompanied the birth of the State of Israel — to make way for the establishment of Sderot, Or HaNer and many other Israeli towns and villages built on their ruins.

The group had still not been founded in 1967, when the Arab-Israeli War broke out and Israel began its military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while unilaterally capturing and annexing East Jerusalem — actions that laid the groundwork for Israel's broader settlement enterprise.

In the decades that followed, the occupation profoundly shaped Palestinian society. That, combined with growing religious influence — the number of local mosques tripled from 200 to 600 between 1967 and 1987 — and the vacuum left by a fading secular nationalist leadership, set the stage for the rise of faith-based nationalist factions. The outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987 was the immediate political turning point that led to Hamas's founding.

The group was established by several Palestinians, among them three prominent figures. Ibrahim al-Yazouri was born in Bait Daras, near what is now Ashdod, and was only eight years old when Haganah soldiers killed members of his family and expelled the survivors to Khan Younis, south of Gaza City.

Another founder, Abdulaziz al-Rantisi, was born in Yibna — a village near Jaffa whose ruins now lie beneath the Israeli city of Yavne. He was only one year old when Israeli forces expelled his family to Khan Younis.

Finally, Ahmed Yassin was born in al-Jura, a village near Ashkelon that was razed by the Israeli army. He was 12 when he and his family left their home and settled in the al-Shati refugee camp on the Gaza coast.

Highlighting this history should not be misconstrued as an attempt to minimize Hamas's responsibility. However, the group's actions cannot be separated from the historical context and the role of the State of Israel throughout this process.

Unlike the self-styled ISIL (ISIS) and other groups that emerged in recent years — groups lacking deep roots in local society and relying on anachronistic ideologies — Palestinian factions are deeply embedded in local society and national identity.

While Hamas's trajectory has been marked by several disastrous decisions — most notably its decision to attack Israel on October 7, 2023 — the group remains, above all, a symptom of a century of suffering, oppression and an unrelenting struggle for self-determination.

Any solution — with or without Hamas — to the war in Gaza that fails to address these fundamental realities is bound to fail. It must be stressed that the prevailing Western tendency to treat Palestinian self-determination as a “reward for Hamas” is entirely mistaken. It stems from a systemic bias that should not be normalized.

This right has been enshrined in international law and supported by the vast majority of states long before Hamas's attack.

It is equally wrong to equate Hamas's actions with the will of the Palestinian people. Today, nearly 50 percent of the Gaza Strip's population is under 18; when Hamas won elections in 2006, more than half of Gaza's current residents had not even been born.

Moreover, in an Arab Barometer survey conducted in the West Bank and Gaza between late September and early October 2023, only 29 percent of respondents in Gaza said they trusted the Hamas-led government. A majority blamed poverty on internal factors; 31 percent held the Hamas government directly responsible for the situation.

Notably, a majority (54 percent) supported a two-state solution to the conflict; 73 percent backed a peaceful solution. Only 20 percent supported military action.

Hamas's presence in Gaza cannot justify the destruction of the entire Gaza Strip and crimes against civilians that have left Israeli officials facing accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Hamas was not present at al-Nasr Hospital in November 2023, when the Israeli military let babies die in incubators after forcing caregivers to evacuate and preventing them from returning. Hamas was not in the car with Hind Rajab, the young Palestinian girl, when Israeli forces fired 335 bullets into the vehicle in January 2024.

Ironically, and unsurprisingly, Hamas has long been viewed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as useful for sustaining the argument that there is no moderate Palestinian partner to negotiate with.

This strategy is tightly bound to the 2017 Plan of Submission — officially known as the “Israel Decisive Plan” — a political and ideological framework presented in 2017 by Israeli far-right politician Bezalel Smotrich, which explicitly advocates disregarding Palestinian national aspirations.

Refusing to address this structural root has frozen the contemporary diplomatic landscape. Israel's unwillingness to engage with Palestinian partners stands in stark contrast to the pragmatic realism once articulated by Israeli General Moshe Dayan: peace requires negotiating with enemies, not friends.

Today's diplomatic landscape is shaped by a profound imbalance in expectations. For years, Palestinian factions have faced strict, non-negotiable preconditions to gain international political legitimacy — such as explicitly recognizing Israel, renouncing violence and honoring previous agreements.

Conversely, no reciprocal demands have been placed on the Israeli authorities, who face no requirement to recognize a sovereign Palestinian state, respect prior treaties or renounce violence.

In practice, Israel's own political development has been bound up with factions that used political violence. Paramilitary organizations such as Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, and Lehi, led by Yitzhak Shamir, carried out operations targeting civilians, yet both leaders eventually moved into mainstream politics and became prime ministers.

This power imbalance is reflected directly as diplomatic asymmetry in recent ceasefire negotiations, which remain deadlocked over Israel's demand for Hamas's complete disarmament. By making the elimination of the group's military capacity a precondition for a permanent ceasefire, Israel's leadership has set a political threshold that effectively closes off the possibility of a negotiated settlement.

This allows the Israeli government to maintain a status quo that delivers significant strategic, territorial and political benefits.

Ultimately, eliminating Hamas will not eliminate the Palestinian need for freedom, nor will it satisfy the legitimate security rights of both Israelis and Palestinians. The conflict did not begin with the rise of an armed faction and will never end until all parties involved recognize that, as Peruvian indigenous jurist Dionisio Inca Yupanqui warned two centuries ago: “a nation that oppresses another nation ultimately forges chains for itself.”

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.