Hooded men with their insignias are “gazing” with bursts of automatic weapons three men who are slaughtering in the street, tied up. The video was posted by the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian network Gaza Now on its Telegram account (gazaalan.net) on Thursday, with the caption “It is time for punishment for the agents of the Zionist occupation responsible for the killings of thousands of Palestinians in ‘.
No exact place or time is mentioned. Even if this is a horror document from an earlier execution of traitors, the message is clear: Hamas is here to enforce its law. The recipients of the message are enemies, friends as well as those who would dare question the choices and strategy of the organization that sparked the war with the October 7, 2023 invasion of southern Israel.
After 470 days of war and , the Islamist group remains dominant in Gaza. It sent the same message from the first moment the guns fell silent, when its fighters came “out of nowhere” into the streets, celebrating the “victory of the resistance” amid the rubble of Israeli bombardment. Soon after, Hamas made a show of force as it handed over to the Red Cross the first three women of the approximately 100 Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza. The armed men who accompanied them were wearing “out of the box” military uniforms and their cars were spotlessly clean, the exact opposite of what one would expect from “dug in and exhausted terrorists”.
Since then, where tens of thousands of displaced people are returning. Armed operatives of the organization pray in public at the ruins of mosques, supervise the transfer of humanitarian aid, the neutralization of unexploded bombs, as well as searches in the ruins from which an average of 100 dead are recovered a day, as a result of which the total number of victims is constantly rising. . Now the Palestinians count more than 47,000 dead and more than 111,000 wounded. Israel disputes these numbers while its officials put the number of dead Hamas operatives at over 17,000.
“They tried to uproot us but they didn’t succeed”
Hamas is making up for losses with a new batch of fighters emerging from the ashes of war, Palestinian sources and Western agencies estimate. “It is clear that those who are protecting the citizens and guarding the home front are the forces of the Ministry of Interior,” General Abu Watfa, who was wearing civilian clothes but was surrounded by armed members of the organization, told Al Jazeera.
“Hamas is much weaker than it was before October 7, but it is clear that it can impose its authority everywhere in Gaza,” Israeli military analyst Michael Milstein told the New York Times. “They tried to uproot us but they failed,” Musa Abu Marzouk, the first chairman of Hamas’ Politburo (1992-1996), who remains in the Qatar-based leadership group, told the same newspaper.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government insists Hamas should have no role in governing Gaza the next day. One of the scenarios circulating in the Arab press predicts that Hamas would accept a Palestinian government of national unity, but under no circumstances would it agree to disband its own military wing (Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades). But the war is not over, big steps remain to be taken to stabilize the situation while there are not a few people in Israel who want the attack on Gaza to be repeated after the release of the hostages.
