Hamas looks close to defeat

THERE ARE few matters on which Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, agrees with Al Jazeera, the Qatari satellite TV channel. Yet both consider Hamas, the Islamic movement that controls the Gaza Strip, exceptionally resilient. After 21 months of fighting there, Mr Netanyahu insists the group has yet to be defeated. Meanwhile Al Jazeera still runs back-to-back bulletins lauding Hamas’s heroics in the fight against Israel.

Yet according to multiple testimonies from Gaza, Hamas is on its last legs. Its military and political leadership has been almost entirely eliminated. Its government no longer governs. Gangs and looters are filling the vacuum. Its popular base has collapsed, with just 6% of Gazans still said to support it. Foreign backers are retreating. Nearly four decades after its founding, the group is nearing its lowest ebb.

Little remains of the leadership, whose exile Israel demands as a condition for a permanent ceasefire. All but one of its military council have been killed. In May Ezz al-Din al-Haddad, the head of Hamas’s Gaza City brigade, declared himself leader. He is said to survive by using the 20 or so remaining Israeli hostages as human shields. Israel has destroyed his communications network and chain of command. Though isolated cells still regularly kill Israeli soldiers in ambushes, Israel’s campaign to push Gazans into an ever-smaller area is proceeding largely unopposed.

Hamas’s political leadership is in similarly dire straits. Of the 15-strong politburo in Gaza, once the movement’s driving force, most are dead. The three known survivors have fled abroad. Their government in the strip is collapsing. The education and health ministers are said to be alive, but incommunicado. The 36 hospitals, 12 universities and hundreds of schools they used to oversee mostly lie in ruins. Israel’s army has killed law-and-order personnel, from the interior and justice ministers down to traffic police. The clan-based gangs that Hamas crushed back in 2007 have filled the vacuum, looting much of what little food Israel has allowed independent aid agencies to distribute in the strip in recent weeks.

After the ceasefire in January, Hamas quickly re-established control in Gaza, despite the losses it had suffered. But it is now both weaker and facing more competition. According to Mr Netanyahu, Israel has armed the clans, at least six of which claim to have carved out their own enclaves and are engaged in near-daily skirmishes with what remains of Hamas. Israel seems keen to give them more control.

At the peak of its power, in 2009, Hamas demanded a majority of the seats on the Palestinian National Council, the Palestinians’ parliament. That was its price for reconciling with Fatah, the Palestinian president’s movement in the West Bank, and for reuniting the would-be state’s two separate territories. Now, if Israel let them, President Mahmoud Abbas’s men could probably take over Gaza.

The world around Hamas has shifted, too. Gone are the monthly stipends of $30m and $15m the group used to get from Qatar and Iran respectively (in Qatar’s case via Israel). Israel’s pummelling of Iran and its Lebanese satellite, Hizbullah, has also hit Hamas’s arms supply and logistics support (though it is rumoured to be buying some weapons from the clans Israel is arming). The movement still has supporters in the diaspora, but they are embattled, too. Britain recently classified a pro-Palestinian civil-disobedience group as a terrorist outfit. If Palestinians in the diaspora had a vote, Hamas might still win an election. But they don’t.

For now, Hamas’s decision-makers limp on in Doha, Qatar’s capital, and Istanbul, the two cities where they can still operate. Without proper control of Gaza, the movement can no longer pack a punch. Its prime remaining leverage is control over the surviving Israeli hostages, which they may soon have to give up as part of a second ceasefire. If anyone cared to ask them, the desperate people of Gaza would probably say that whatever remains of the group should just surrender and go. ■