Within hours of the Gaza ceasefire starting on Sunday, dozens of masked fighters from Hamas’ armed Qassam Brigades emerged in their distinctive black balaclavas and green headbands to deliver three hostages to Red Cross vehicles taking them back to freedom in Israel.
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, had vowed to “destroy” the militant group in the wake of its October 7th, 2023 attack on Israel. Instead, after 15 months of fighting an underground guerrilla war, Hamas’ officials, fighters and policemen have in the days since the deal emerged from the rubble of the shattered enclave – seemingly ready to rule Gaza once again.
“We are working according to an emergency plan,” said Ismail al-Thawabta, a spokesperson for Gaza’s Hamas-controlled government. “We cannot leave our people in a vacuum to please Netanyahu.”
Thawabta said the Hamas-led authorities were planning meetings to restore education, reopen mosques for prayers and upgrade health services in hospitals that have been repeatedly bombed.
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“Hamas has not ended despite its military losses,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist from Gaza at Northwestern University in the US.
“The way the hostages were handed over was a display of force and an act of defiance towards Israel,” he said. “The ceasefire agreement has left vague arrangements for the ‘day after’ and for the governance of Gaza.”
In Israel, the images of Hamas fighters back above ground and asserting their authority shocked the public, and raised serious questions about the effectiveness of the ferocious campaign unleashed on the strip.
While some Israeli analysts cautioned that the procession of masked militants was a public relations stunt obscuring the group’s enormous losses, others saw it as proof of the lack of strategic planning by Netanyahu’s government.
Israel has refused to consider a postwar role in Gaza for Hamas’ rivals the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in parts of the occupied West Bank.
“Gaza is destroyed, but Hamas is still on its feet,” said Avi Issacharoff, an Israeli Middle East analyst and co-creator of the television show Fauda. “The reason for that is the lack of interest by the Israeli government to discuss any other option for an alternative regime in Gaza.”
Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed almost 47,000 people and reduced vast areas of the enclave to an uninhabitable, bombed-out wasteland.
Hamas too has suffered devastating losses and been left a weakened force. Many of its senior commanders, including its leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, were killed along with an estimated thousands of its fighters.
Yet international officials warn that the ferocity of Israel’s campaign and civilian suffering may have drawn new members to the group, with outgoing US secretary of state Antony Blinken saying last week that the United States believed Hamas had recruited roughly as many militants as it had lost.
Youssef Labad, who was displaced from the north to the Mawasi coastal strip in the south, said his joy at the ceasefire was increased “by the reappearance of Qassam Brigades and the police to reassure us about the resistance and to crush Israel and show its failure”.
Other Gazans, however, bitterly resent the group for the devastation they believe Hamas’s October 7th attack – which Israeli officials say killed 1,200 people, and triggered the war – helped bring upon them.
Maha, who was displaced from Gaza City to Nuseirat in the centre of the strip, said she found the reappearance of the Qassam Brigades fighters “provocative”.
But she added that the deployment of police was “positive and will at least deter thieves”. “We need Hamas during this phase to control security but we don’t want them to govern and we don’t want to hear the word resistance,” she said.
Since Sunday, Gaza’s Hamas-era authorities have sought to restore law and order and administrative control of the strip.
Police have been deployed on some roads and roundabouts, while local Hamas-appointed councils are trying to open up streets blocked by concrete debris and restore services.
They appear to have had some limited success. Hundreds of aid trucks have entered since the ceasefire, and aid officials say that the presence of police has helped deter looters who have in recent months frequently attacked deliveries.
But whoever tries to rule Gaza will face much bigger challenges. The decimated infrastructure and millions of tonnes of rubble will require massive investment to clear and start rebuilding.
For Yehia Sarraj, who heads the Gaza City council, the priority now is removing the rubble blocking streets. But he said that 80 per cent of the heavy equipment owned by the municipality, such as bulldozers, had been destroyed. “It is our biggest problem,” he said.
Even with the first, six-week phase of the ceasefire in effect, negotiators still have to finalise a second and potential third phase of the deal to end the war permanently before reconstruction begins.
Abusada and others say funding at the required scale is unlikely to be forthcoming if Hamas remained in power, given both Israeli and US opposition.
Despite Hamas’ attempt to project presence and efficiency, some Gazans said its efforts have so far had little impact given the enormity of the destruction.
Nevine Hamada, an unemployed mother of six whose husband was killed in the war, said: “I have not seen policemen or bulldozers clearing roads.” Standing in a breadline at a bakery in Gaza City, she added: “Everything is the same and we are still afraid.”
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
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