What Does Hamas Want? Islamist Olive Branch Could Be Thorn in the Side for Mahmoud Abbas
Ever since it seized the Gaza Strip from rivals Fatah in 2007, Palestinian militant group Hamas has been anything but predictable.
In April 2014, it had looked as if Hamas was finally ready to come in from the cold in a short-lived unity deal with Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah. But only a few weeks later Hamas picked a fight with Israel that descended into a third bloody conflict with the Israelis since 2008, leaving 2,100 Palestinians and 73 Israelis dead—and effectively torpedoing any deal with Fatah.
Then in May 2017, Hamas again surprised with a pledge to alter its charter and accept in principle a deal with Israel based on 1967 borders, effectively abandoning its commitment to Israel’s destruction and paving the way for peace talks. But less than a month later, it appointed Yahya Sinwar as its new leader—an individual so extreme that he had opposed his own release from Israeli jail in a prisoner swa
Members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas attend the funeral of Hamas official Mazen Faqha in Gaza city on March 25, 2017. Hamas blames Israel for his murder. Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty
Read More: Mahmoud Abbas's Legacy is More Elusive Than EverOn Sunday, Hamas threw another curveball, announcing that it was dissolving its administration in Gaza and would agree to a general election that would end its decade-long feud with Abbas and Fatah. Fatah officials have cautiously welcomed the announcement, coming as it does just two days before Abbas is due to head to New York for what could well be the 82-year-old president’s final United Nations visit.
Whether Abbas takes the bait—and the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) re-enters the strip from which it has been absent since 2007—remains to be seen. Abbas is 13 years into what was supposed to be a four-year term, and last time he called parliamentary elections in the Palestinian Territories (in 2006), Hamas not only took Gaza but won significant majorities in Nablus, Hebron and even Ramallah, a Fatah stronghold.
The reason for that defeat was not only Hamas’s popularity (although that was a significant factor). As Amir Tibon and Grant Rumley explain in their 2017 book The Last Palestinian: The Rise and Reign of Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah botched the election campaign, managing to anger its base to the extent that many of its members ran as independents, splitting the vote and handing an easy majority to Hamas
Abbas, who had won presidential elections a year earlier, initially tried to work with a Hamas-dominated parliament, but within a year Fatah had been violently ousted from the strip and Hamas all but banned in the West Bank.
Since then, Gaza has been sealed on three sides by Israel and on its southern border by Egypt. Hamas has had various suitors—including Egypt under Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar—but three wars and an ongoing blockade has made life all but impossible. Since early 2017, the P.A. has refused to pay Gaza’s electricity bills, making life even more difficult for 1.4 million Palestinians in the strip.