This is the second part of the Middle East Program’s series on postwar governance in Gaza. For more, read part one on Israeli perspectives, part three on regional perspectives, or part four on international perspectives.
How Will Gazan Society Emerge From the War?
By Mkhaimar Abusada
Gazan society was already suffering from dire economic and social conditions before the outbreak of the current war. Poverty and unemployment had reached unprecedented levels as a result of seventeen years of Israeli siege that turned the Gaza Strip into the largest open-air prison in the world. According to a 2012 UN report, Gaza would be inhospitable by 2020 if the siege were not lifted completely. Since the start of the current war, Gazan society has gone from bad to worse on all levels.
The Israeli bombardment of Gaza since October has led to roughly 93,000 people being declared dead, injured, or missing—4 percent of the territory’s people, according to local authorities. In addition, Israel has destroyed significant parts of Gazan homes and infrastructure in the north, and military operations are underway in the central refugee camps and the southern city of Khan Yunis. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has compared the destruction in Gaza with that suffered by German cities during World War II.
Many international agencies have estimated that Gaza needs roughly $50 billion to be rebuilt, and it could take seven to ten years even if the money is available. But this reconstruction will not start until there is a permanent ceasefire and the horrors of this destructive war come to an end.
Some effects of the war will be beyond repair, with the lives of Gaza’s roughly 2 million people having been shattered. Their homes, families, friends, and memories are gone. Gazan society is filled with pain, deprivation, and agony. If that is not dealt with, a more desperate and radical society will emerge.
And the worst has not yet come. The ongoing state of war, chaos, and hunger has motivated local gangs and starving locals to break into and loot vacant homes and exchange any belongings they find for food. There is no active police force; law and order are absent; and local gangs are filling the vacuum in the north of Gaza, where the Israeli army has cleared the area of Hamas fighters. A suggested Israeli plan to place responsibility for people’s lives in the hands of clans and families is a recipe for ongoing internal strife.
Gazan society witnessed similar lawlessness between the start of the First Intifada in December 1987 and the 1993 signing of the Oslo I Accord, which led to the 1994 creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA), as well as during the Second Intifada that began in 2000. Thousands of Palestinian lives were lost during those chaotic years.
The current war is not only weakening Hamas and undermining its rule in Gaza, but also undermining the ability of the PA, political factions, or social forces to safeguard life and property. Israel is sowing chaos in Gaza, and redeploying the Israeli military at the end of the war to newly created buffer zones will lead to a vacuum that will be filled by local gangs and clans, which will primarily preserve and serve themselves.
Israel’s declared approach is to continue the war against Hamas until the group is destroyed—or at least structurally weakened and removed from power. Israel wants to prevent another catastrophe similar to that of October 7. But this approach does not take into consideration the well-being of Gazans. To prevent a state of all-out war, there must be a smooth transition with some contribution from the PA. The PA still has some human resources in Gaza and has been paying them since June 2007, when Hamas seized control of the territory.
Gaza’s needs are not simply those of long-term reconstruction. The lives of Gazans will have to be reassembled and reorganized quickly in the postwar era. It is not only law and order that need to be revived: schools must function again and smoothly, healthcare services must be provided to all, and cleaning and sanitation must resume quickly. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which has been serving the Palestinian community since 1949, must be empowered to deal with Gaza’s postwar situation. Instead, its own services have been undermined by the United States and many Western governments’ aid suspension.
Neither clans and families nor civil society organizations are capable of carrying out these duties. Therefore, a newly restructured, reformed, and democratic PA must take up its responsibilities; otherwise, not only will Gazan society suffer and pay the price for many years to come, but Gaza’s neighbors of Israel and Egypt will also be unable to escape the volatile political, social, and radical environment that is in the making.
Mkhaimar Abusada is an associate professor of political science at Al-Azhar University—Gaza. He is now based in Cairo.
Reforming the PA Requires a More Inclusive PLO
By Zaha Hassan
Asking the average Palestinian today about their thoughts on plans for PA reform—a topic that is preoccupying policymakers in Israel, the United States, and Europe—is like asking a starving person which flavor ice cream he’d like to have on Mars. Governance while under a military occupation is already extremely fraught. And reform during what many legal experts are warning is a “slow- motion genocide” in Gaza —indeed, more than fifty countries have expressed support for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice—is viewed as either magical thinking or a cynical ploy to divert attention away from an immediate ceasefire.
Of course, Palestinians have ideas about and crave good governance. The enthusiasm Palestinians showed for legislative elections, with more than 90 percent of the 2.3 million eligible voters having registered to vote in 2021 and their ensuing anger when the Palestinian president canceled those elections, prove that rejuvenating the PA institutions is very important to Palestinians in the occupied territories. The results of the 2022 West Bank municipal elections also indicate a desire to see new blood and move away from the binary choice between the factional politics of Hamas and Fatah, as 64.4 percent of voters chose independent candidate lists. But without a path toward ending the carnage in Gaza and the increasing killing and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank, Palestinians wonder: what is the point in posing the perennial PA reform question now?
Palestinians are suspicious because the questions of who governs them and how have always been a matter of great contestation. Various external actors with blunt tools for manipulating Palestinian outcomes have been seen to weigh in, even at the expense of purported democratic values. Before Palestinians organize elections, they feel forced to calculate which potential outcomes will be acceptable to both Israel and the United States. And indeed, the United States is required to cut aid and suspend bilateral relations if the wrong faction wins. This fear is not imaginary: it is what happened after the United States pushed for the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, which resulted in a Hamas victory.
And the Palestinians understand that Israel will withhold the Palestinian clearance tax revenue it collects on behalf of the PA —revenue that represents around 65 percent of the PA’s budget —if they check the wrong boxes on their ballots. Those earlier choices led to a crippling Israeli blockade and siege of parts of the Palestinians’ territories, as well as other draconian measures, including manipulation of their caloric intake to encourage them to overthrow their elected leaders.
If a direct line can be drawn from Palestinian governance choices to Israel’s siege and blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza, then another one can be drawn from that point to an Israeli policy bent on maintaining Hamas in power and preserving Palestinian political and geographic divisions to prevent the possibility of a two-state solution. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated he will oppose any effort to bring the PA back to govern in Gaza. And if the U.S. administration opposes Hamas being represented in any new PA, it makes sense that for Palestinians, talk of reform and democracy from the world’s most consequential political actor is less about fostering good governance or representing the popular will than about selecting leaders of whom the White House approves.
Based on Palestinians’ lived experience, this kind of reform cannot support the principal demand Palestinians have: freedom from the structural violence of more than half a century of military occupation. If Palestinians could express their demands through credible and accountable leadership, most of them would choose leaders who would resist the status quo. As a result, Israel and its allies will remain hands on when it comes to Palestinian choices.
To the extent that Palestinians outside Gaza have been thinking about reform of their national bodies today, the focus is on a process of national reconciliation or a unified national leadership that would bring all disaffected factions—including Hamas—under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The aim of such a focus is that the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinians may truly reflect the will of all its people everywhere—not just those living in the occupied territories. Around half the Palestinian people live as refugees or exiles outside their homeland. A single political address is required to make decisions about the future of the Palestinian national project and the day after the current war in Gaza, given that the PA has linked its return to Gaza to the two-state solution and a plan for an end to the occupation.
Yet the PA is not mandated to make the kinds of decisions that affect the national rights and claims of Palestinians everywhere. And it is with the PLO that the PA’s fate ultimately lies. Once the PLO is reformed, will it maintain its agent, the PA, as it was originally conceived under the discredited Oslo Accords? Or will the PLO reimagine the PA’s purpose and function so that the authority may become a vehicle for a just and durable political solution? That’s the reform question Palestinians are most concerned with. So far, it has not been a question their current leadership has been prepared to take up, precisely because of the forces lined up against it.
Zaha Hassan is a human rights lawyer and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Palestinian Reforms: International Expectations vs. Local Realities
By Sanaa Alsarghali
While the war in Gaza is challenging to endure, it also provokes a different kind of reflection from the traditionally more detached academic responses. Numerous voices now assert the right to speak on behalf of the Palestinians and seek to influence their future and direct the course of this new phase. But what about the Palestinians themselves? Aren’t they the rightful architects of their own political destiny?
As the war persists, statements like those by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the two-state solution and restructuring the PA to govern both Gaza and the West Bank require further discussion.
Since the Oslo Accords were signed in the mid-1990s, Palestinians have faced geographic division. Initially, the accords formalized the various Palestinian groups in the region and created a hierarchy between those living in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem and those officially residing in Israel, often referred to as the “1948 Arabs.” Furthermore, the agreements prompted the neoliberalization of the Palestinian economy, leading to significant income disparities in a region that was previously more egalitarian. Palestinian unity was fragmented, resulting in a divide between political elites and olive growers, and, crucially, between idealists and pragmatists in the face of Israel’s aggressive expansion.
Thus, the complexity of Palestinian governance and sovereignty is evident. Initially, the PLO served as a comprehensive representative for the Palestinians, including those in the diaspora and those in the territories. The establishment of the PA, aimed at representing Palestinians in the territories, added a new layer to this framework. However, since its inception, the PA’s individual leadership has overshadowed its institutional development. This trend has failed to provide the necessary stability or clarity for effective Palestinian self-governance, a reality highlighted by the uncertainty surrounding Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s succession and the instability in legislative processes since the Palestinian Legislative Council was dissolved in 2018.
Therefore, the floating proposals to empower a new Palestinian prime minister as part of a restructuring of the PA raises questions about the authority’s efficacy, given its limited success in Palestine previously. Contemplating the day after the current war may seem premature because of the unpredictability of events, but if discussions turn toward restructuring the Palestinian institutions, a critical evaluation of their suitability and effectiveness in a complex context is essential.
The Prime Minister Position: Divide and Conquer
After the Second Intifada in 2000–2002, the road map for peace weakened Palestine’s unifying figurehead, Yasser Arafat. The agreement imposed a prime ministerial role on the parliamentary system that the transitional constitution had formalized a year earlier. This hastily adopted change resulted in ambiguities and tensions between Arafat, the president, and Abbas, the appointed prime minister, that undermined the government’s functioning. Designed specifically for Arafat as president and Abbas as prime minister, the system quickly outlived their tenure in office. (Abbas replaced Arafat as president in 2005, after the latter’s death.)
The instability intensified after the 2006 legislative election, which led to Hamas’s victory and the appointment of a prime minister—Ismail Haniyeh—from a different party from president’s Fatah party. The subsequent rejection of Hamas by the Israeli government, the international community, and Fatah led to an internal political schism, culminating in the territorial division of the West Bank and Gaza in 2007. This situation left Palestine in a prolonged state of political suspension, without an active legislative council and with Abbas resorting to presidential decrees for governance in the West Bank.
The imposition of a prime minister position through the road map was widely anticipated to lead to political deadlock. Such a system, which requires careful design and implementation in a mature political environment, carries an inherent risk of creating tension between the two heads of the executive. This tension was evident in the relationship between Arafat and Abbas and, subsequently, in the interactions between Abbas and each successive prime minister up to the current Palestinian government. Disputes often arose over jurisdiction in areas such as finance, security, and crisis management, including on issues with teachers’ unions and the social security law.
Two decades after the creation of the prime minister position, the United States seems to be desperate to repeat the experiment—even though the circumstances now are even less promising than in 2002. Notably, there are increasing doubts about the effectiveness of Abbas’s leadership, in contrast to Arafat’s previous significant popularity, while Palestinians have objected to the introduction of a new prime minister role. Furthermore, in 2003, Palestinians had not yet experienced a government led by a prime minister, whereas now they have encountered a range of governments under various prime ministers, each of whom has grappled with a unique set of challenges.
Moreover, the central question should not merely be who will assume a beefed-up prime minister role, but rather what they can realistically achieve. Before considering the empowerment of a new prime minister, it is crucial to contemplate a reformed PA structure or a Palestinian government that incorporates various parties, including Hamas.
What Next for Palestinians?
Scholars have described structures like the PA as embodying “nested sovereignty”—smaller, localized sovereignties functioning within larger ones, each exerting control in its respective areas. In this case, Israel retains broad control, while the PA administers the West Bank and Hamas controls Gaza (with Egypt controlling one of the borders). Reforming the PA within such a framework is likely to have very limited results, and inserting a new or empowered prime minister would only make that figure an extension of a deteriorating PA.
And the focus on the person of the prime minister—and on the person of any successor to the president—is part of a pattern of favoring individuals over institutions, which has hindered the flourishing of the latter. Therefore, it is essential to challenge this status quo and shift the focus from who leads the PA to how the institution can evolve and strengthen.
The PA’s decay serves Palestinians poorly, but it may be helpful for Israeli strategy: by maintaining the status quo ante and not endorsing elections, Israeli leaders seem to have used division as a strategy to make nested sovereignty akin to effective annexation. Indeed, the Israeli approach has been to ensure the divide between the West Bank and Gaza, favoring local governance in each area, with Palestinian leadership resembling a governor’s role rather than a unified post-Abbas PA. Now, with the war in Gaza, some Israeli officials speak openly of the intention to relocate the Palestinians to the Sinai Peninsula.
It is crucial for Palestinians themselves to contest these plans. The Palestinians should determine their future leadership based not on the events of October 2023 but on the experience of the past thirty years. Hence, it might be time to consider alternatives beyond the confines of political groups or factional tribes. As a constitutional scholar, I am cautious of a dual-executive system for the forthcoming phase because a semi-presidential system needs proper constitutional design before its implementation, and this has never been given to the Palestinians. However, it is vital that Palestinians make this decision autonomously, guided by the principle of unity. This approach opposes external impositions while striving to address domestic disparities. Thus, even if a prime minister position is part of the new stage, this person cannot be imposed like in 2003.
Although the focus should not be on an individual, certain criteria should be taken into consideration for this position. The ideal candidate should have a strong presence among Palestinians, particularly the youth, and maintain at least an acceptable relationship with the major Palestinian factions. The new incumbent’s key responsibilities will include combating corruption and improving the lives of ordinary people. The prime minister’s leadership must garner regional and international support, aligning with Palestinian aspirations. It is crucial that this individual brings fresh perspectives, rather than repeating past political patterns.
Recognizing that Palestinian support is based on a faction’s domestic and political effectiveness, the new prime minister’s appeal should extend beyond elite circles to the wider Palestinian community. However, this will work only if the reactivation of other institutions, such as the legislative council, is in play.
Sanaa Alsarghali is the co-founder and director of the Constitutional Studies Center at An-Najah National University, and a member of the Palestinian constitutional drafting committee appointed by the Palestinian National Council – PLO.
De- and Revitalizing the Palestinian Authority
By Nathan J. Brown
After four months of warfare in Gaza, the PA continues to operate in the West Bank and is likely to do so in the future—but without much vitality as a set of administrative rather than leadership structures. The PA is loved by none, is respected by few, and has disappointed all actors. It is likely to disappoint them still further—the Israeli leadership that wishes to avoid it, the U.S. leadership that wishes to revitalize it, and, most of all, the many in Palestinian society who view it as a complete failure. Yet the PA is unavoidable in parts of the West Bank; its remnants operated in Gaza until the current war and might reemerge as a headless set of social services struggling to provide for a traumatized and displaced population.
For Palestinians and the PA’s own leaders, it is clear what the PA was designed to be: the basis of a Palestinian state. Instead, the Authority is widely seen as having become complicit—whether by intent or not—in a reconfigured Israeli occupation. The PA was formed after the PLO signed the 1993–1995 Oslo Accords with Israel. For Palestinians, it was the PLO that gave birth to the PA by forming it out of the various administrative bodies that governed Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and supplementing the authority with statelike structures: a parliament, security services, and ministries. Thus, the PA was to be the kernel of a Palestinian state. The PA and PLO leaderships have always overlapped.
When the negotiation process with Israel failed to deliver a Palestinian state, the PLO leadership declared one unilaterally and received widespread diplomatic recognition—but not from Israel or the United States. So, while the PLO’s leaders very much like to present themselves as leaders of the state of Palestine today, they are accepted generally as PA leaders by their most important international interlocutors.
Domestically, those leaders are in even worse shape: having failed to deliver a state in anything other than a symbolic sense, failed to end the Israeli occupation, presided over the 2007 schism between Gaza and the West Bank, abandoned elections, been unable to offer Palestinians any strategic vision, and been inert in the Gaza war, they simply cannot be seen as leaders beyond a formal sense of occupying official positions.
But that does not mean the PA is dead. Far from it: Palestinians still study, engage in legal disputes, get medical treatment, and, in a few cases, get caught shoplifting. Schools, courts, health services, and even basic local policing carry on in those limited areas of the West Bank where they are allowed. And while Israeli leaders deride the PA leadership, they have shown only relief at not finding themselves responsible for such services.
The current Israeli government has placed a fiscal stranglehold on the PA: under the economic provisions of the Oslo Accords, Israel collects the taxes on goods destined for Palestinian markets and then delivers them to the PA. Revenue transfer is now an uncertain trickle, with Israeli officials withholding a shifting portion. Yet only the extreme voices in the Israeli leadership seem to wish the disappearance of the PA, the interlocutor accepted by most international actors and donors.
This is the structure that U.S. leaders say they wish to revitalize. The problem is that to do so without addressing the sources of its devitalization is likely to backfire. Revitalization would entail elections, a clearly defined and short-term path to statehood, a willingness to engage with Palestinians diplomatically and directly as the heads of a national entity, and effective advocacy for Palestinian national and human rights. Merely finding younger figures to occupy the same feckless offices would only visit a new generation of impotent figures onto Palestinians. And if PA leaders in Ramallah were somehow coaxed into reintegrating Gazan administrative and social-service structures under their oversight—without a clear political horizon and perhaps even with a continuing Israeli presence—then the prevailing contempt for them in Palestinian society would likely turn to outrage.
And what would the reappearance of the PA mean in Gaza? That is the question that is often posed internationally, but it is oddly phrased. In an administrative sense, the structures of the PA never disappeared from Gaza. In 2006, Hamas formed the PA cabinet after winning a parliamentary election and failing to find coalition partners. A brief attempt at a national unity government with Fatah in 2007 collapsed in a civil war that left Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah in charge of the West Bank.
The common phrasing that “Hamas took control of Gaza from the PA in 2007” is simply false in constitutional terms: it was Abbas who clearly acted unconstitutionally in seizing power, dismissing the parliament, and asserting authority denied him. The point is not merely legalistic; it is administrative. PA structures continued to operate in Gaza; they just stopped answering to the group identified internationally as the PA leadership. The two halves of the Palestinian polity both began to operate extraconstitutionally.
After 2007, then, Gaza’s administration answered to Hamas’s leadership, and that leadership continued even after Hamas ministers formally handed over authority to senior civil servants in Gaza’s ministries. A few Gazan structures, most notably those in charge of education, coordinated with Ramallah; a few, such as the Palestinian Monetary Authority, answered solely to Ramallah; and many salaries continued to be paid from Ramallah. But the relationship between the administrative structures in Gaza and those in the West Bank—such as courts, policing, and even legislation—was tenuous and bitter.
To return Gaza’s structures to Ramallah’s leadership would not only tar the latter as collaborating with the Israeli reoccupation of Gaza, but it would also mean either incorporating a large number of civil servants hired under Hamas’s leadership, purging them, or allowing Israel to vet them. None of these options seems politically palatable. And the governance task is likely to be enormous. Schools, housing, hospitals, and infrastructure have been decimated. The population is not only bereft of basic services and amenities, including beds and roofs, but has also been forcibly relocated.
The position of the PA institutions may make Gaza’s governance seem to be an insoluble problem. And indeed, that may be precisely the impact of the current war.
Nathan J. Brown is a nonresident senior fellow in Carnegie’s Middle East Program and a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.
Gazan Perspectives on Hamas and the Day After
By Imad Alsoos
Gazan society has never been synonymous with Hamas—so will the current war make it possible to remove Hamas from the equation? My many conversations with Gazans—displaced family members, friends, and former university colleagues living with severe trauma and emotional injuries—before and during the current war suggest the precise opposite.
Gazans tend to understand the war as an attack on their lives, and one that is dire but not unprecedented. Comments like those of Netanyahu—who cited the Israelites’ enemy nation of Amalek from the Old Testament and called for the elimination not only of Hamas fighters but also of the whole nation, including men, women, children, and animals—are widely publicized among Gazans.
The Palestinians currently feel they are being forced to renegotiate the trauma of the 1948 Nakba, in which most of today’s Gazans were made refugees, mainly from the areas where Hamas’s attacks took place on October 7. “America and Israel are not only fighting Hamas, but they are also deliberately killing [civilians] in order to force us to leave,” one Gazan engineer told me.
Palestinians in Gaza are convinced that if they leave their homes, they will never be able to return. This view shapes their reactions to the current fighting. My interviewees highlighted that the 1948 Nakba took place after the Palestinian defeat, when Palestinian fighters withdrew from cities, towns, and villages and trusted the Arab armies that were basically under Western colonialism. “Fighters [had] migrated and left their weapons so Jewish militias [in the 1940s] could expel Palestinians,” one interlocutor said.
Many Palestinians in Gaza, regardless of their political stance, believe that the defeat of armed resistance in Gaza will lead to a new expulsion—a “2024 Nakba,” as one citizen put it. One man I spoke to, a strong opponent of Hamas, said, “The defeat of the resistance will mean the end of us.” Another resident, from a neighborhood of Gaza City who is now displaced in central Gaza, told me that “our existence in Gaza is linked to the presence of Yassin 105s”—a reference to Hamas’s antitank weapons and the resilience of the group’s resistance—and that otherwise, “we will end up dying in Gaza or in Sinai.”
Supporting the armed resistance does not necessarily mean supporting the Hamas government. It means renegotiating the past to explain the present and protect the future. All of my interviewees rejected Hamas as the sole administrator of Gaza and instead spoke of the need for a collective approach that involves all political parties and civil society representatives for the day after the war ends. This stance aligns with my previous findings from interviews with Gazans in 2021–2022 as part of research on Hamas.
Palestinians’ position on Hamas as a governing authority is unlikely to change even in the unlikely event if the group succeeds in having all Palestinian prisoners released in exchange for the rest of the hostages and soldiers captured on October 7. Hamas sees itself as a national liberation movement. Indeed, Hamas’s seven founders were all refugees from the 1948 Palestine war. Before the foundation of Hamas in 1987, they were involved with public order in a stateless context in forms of conflict resolution and provision of services. While Hamas does not represent all or even most Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinian society still shares a powerful collective memory of trauma and displacement.
Gazans also show profound mistrust of any political process sponsored by the United States. Many of the Gazans I spoke to maintain that any U.S.-led process will weaken the Palestinian position in favor of Israel. Gazans believe there will be no political settlement as long as the United States acts as a broker, because, they argue, U.S. officials are as radical against the Palestinian cause as many Israeli leaders are. A Gazan pharmacist said that he believed that “American senators and presidential candidates call for a genocide of us on public TV.”
So where does this leave Hamas and its popular standing? Hamas’s position on the day after is not limited to military outcomes in Gaza; it is also linked to potential damage to the images of the U.S., Israeli, and Arab regimes. Gazans understand that Hamas’s resistance is currently more popular than ever among Arabs. Thus, even those who do not strongly support the movement respect it for highlighting the Palestinian cause, resisting what they see as unjust U.S. actions in the region, and overcoming the weaknesses of existing Arab regimes.
Most Gazans, in their conversations with me, expressed a view of the United States as a pernicious force in the region that is responsible for large-scale destruction and death in Iraq and other Muslim countries and now supports what they see as genocide in Gaza. Arabs and Muslims around the world have showcased their anger through protests. Meanwhile, some are disappointed at their leaders for not doing more. For example, one Egyptian activist told me that “the West sends foreign fighters and weapons to slaughter Gazans, and we cannot get bottles of water or bread to our brothers in Gaza.”
This feeling that most regimes are ineffective stands in contrast to the current resistance to Israel’s military operations. Gazans see Israel as a country that cannot wage a war against a tiny strip of land without massive Western political and military support. Israel’s inability to prevent the incidents of October 7 is viewed not merely as an isolated occurrence but as a component of a wider pattern. Clearly, Israel’s goal to continue normalization deals with Arab nations without ending its occupation of the Palestinian territories was significantly disrupted by the October 7 operation. Even Gazans I spoke with who have never supported Hamas’s rule see Israel’s image as irreparably damaged: a country that cannot defend itself alone against a small resistance group instead directs its destructive machinery toward civilians. Whatever losses Hamas ultimately suffers, its place in Palestinian society seems more secure than ever.
Imad Alsoos is a research fellow at the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb.
The Uncertain Return to Palestinian Elections
By Vladimir Pran
There have been wide swings in international actors’ attitudes toward Palestinian elections, from requiring them as the condition for the peace process to vetoing them outright. In the period immediately before the current war, international actors seemed to have pivoted in their stance toward elections and were quietly amenable to the idea that a legislative election might be risky but was perhaps a necessary measure for managing the looming crisis surrounding Abbas’s succession. The Hamas attacks on October 7 changed that attitude. The United States, Israel, and the Europeans are now blunt that there should be no future for Hamas in Palestine and would veto any election akin the one held in 2006. So are Palestinian elections possible, and if so, what kind?
Professionally and procedurally, Palestinians could hold credible elections were it not for the political minefield that has been laid. Ironically, the Palestinian Central Elections Commission remains the most reliable electoral authority in the Middle East. Under the leadership of Chairman Hannah Nassir, the commission has resisted attempts to be subjugated to Fatah and remains independent and neutral and committed to running credible elections. The caveat is that since 2006, elections under the commission’s remit have been limited to those held in the West Bank without the participation of candidates on Hamas-branded lists.
Along with the commission’s credibility, its operational capacity also remains high, considering the circumstances. The commission’s staff are mostly veterans of previous national elections and have organized three cycles of local elections in the West Bank, which are procedurally more complex than national votes. The commission also maintained a regional office in Gaza that periodically updated voter lists. But there would still be significant administrative challenges to holding fresh elections. Six obstacles stand out.
First, although the voter registry is not in bad shape, having been updated in 2021, it would have to be reopened to include new voters. Registration would entail setting up registration centers in Gaza for several weeks. A different method of registration could be considered, but that would require amending the law.
Second, the status of the roughly 300 registration and polling centers in Gaza is not clear, and the commission cannot yet assess the feasibility of using them. Of these locations, 30 percent were schools belonging to UNRWA, making the assessment of those sites easier via UNRWA.
Third, the capacity of short-term elections staff in Gaza is unclear. While in the West Bank the commission operates efficient rosters of experienced staff, Gaza has not seen any polling since January 2006.
Fourth, the degree of Israeli cooperation in allowing access into and out of Gaza will affect whether sensitive election materials, such as ballots with security features, can be imported from the West Bank and whether senior commission staff can travel to Gaza. Alternative arrangements, such as printing ballots without security features in Gaza, have been considered previously, but whether this would be possible considering the devastation is unclear.
Fifth, policing polling places was always a key sticking point in Fatah–Hamas negotiations. Some level of command and control would have to be reestablished.
Finally, the polling system in Gaza would have to consider how to deal with the massive number of internally displaced people, since many citizens would be unable to vote where they are registered. Fortunately, the system of proportional representation based on a single nationwide constituency adopted after the 2006 election makes it easier to organize voting for internally displaced people than a multiple-constituency system would.
With regard to these administrative challenges alone, and under the optimistic assumption that Israeli and international actors would be on board, the commission would likely be able to hold elections within six months. However, the question of the framework for political competition in Palestine might be a bigger challenge.
It appears that Israel and the West would effectively veto any election if Hamas were included, despite a desire to revitalize the PA. Israel’s stated plans for postwar Gaza already render elections impossible, except for some form of local elections reminiscent of those held in the West Bank before the 1993–1995 Oslo Accords. In the current circumstances, advocating for Palestinian elections—either for the Palestinian Legislative Council or for the presidency—without a change in Israeli attitude is a waste of time. Yet as much as elections are impossible with Hamas, they are impossible without Hamas. If the option of bringing Israel on board is viable at all, then one could envision two scenarios.
In the first one, Hamas could adopt the tactic it has used in West Bank local elections of discreetly endorsing nonmembers as candidates and avoiding registering the Hamas brand. Yet Hamas’s ultimate political prize is inclusion in the PLO, as per the 2005 Palestinian Cairo Declaration, which set out that Hamas would be represented in the PLO proportionally to its representation in the legislative council. How non-Hamas candidates would be part of that calculus is not clear.
The second scenario could be a substantial reform of the framework for political competition. In practice, this would mean new legislation to regulate political organizing—perhaps in the form of a political party law, which Palestinians have so far avoided adopting. Additionally, the election law that regulates the conditions for candidates would have to be reviewed—again. In 2007, Abbas issued an election law that introduced the so-called PLO principles, under which candidates effectively had to recognize the PLO agreements, including the two-state setup and recognition of Israel. However, before the canceled 2021 elections, these principles were moved from the candidacy requirements into a preamble of the law as a compromise that emerged from reconciliation negotiations between Fatah and Hamas.
Yet Hamas’s participation is not the only conundrum. The situation inside Fatah remains a potential pitfall. Any future elections will be a function of Fatah’s internal competition for the top position in the PLO and the PA—and, therefore, a succession issue. The perhaps misplaced hopes in Fatah’s 2023 party congress to produce much needed consolidation evaporated when the conference was canceled. It will never be known if the conference could have consolidated Fatah enough so that Abbas could have felt confident that legislative elections would not have led to intra-party fractures. But for now, Fatah does not seem close to getting its internal house in order, and the movement shows no appetite for elections. In the end, addressing the PA’s ever-growing crisis of legitimacy and overcoming Fatah’s succession anxiety will likely have to wait for a comprehensive peace package or a presidential vacancy.
Vladimir Pran has been an adviser on Palestinian electoral and political processes for the National Democratic Institute, International Foundation for Electoral Systems, the European Union and the United Nations.
Reconstructing Gaza: The Need for a Comprehensive, Accountable Approach
By Nur Arafeh
The current war on Gaza is Israel’s fifth major aggression against the strip since it imposed a land, air, and sea blockade on the enclave in 2007. Each war was followed by damage-and-needs assessments, conducted by international organizations such as the World Bank and the UN, that informed reconstruction efforts. However, past reconstruction plans have greatly failed to put Gaza back on its feet, leading to a mounting backlog of unmet needs after every war. This is largely because previous plans have focused on the technical aspect of reconstruction while paying lip service to the political context. Now, the needs will be much greater and the political context even more difficult.
The main reconstruction process that has been used is the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM), an agreement between the PA and the Israeli government brokered by the UN after the 2014 war. Under the GRM, the UN monitors the movement of construction materials into Gaza, in cooperation with the PA. The UN tracks and records the movement in a database, which Israel then examines to agree on which materials are allowed into Gaza.
Although initially presented as a temporary measure that would streamline the process of importing goods into Gaza and lead to the lifting of the blockade, the GRM failed to achieve either of these objectives. It also turned out not to be a temporary arrangement. Rather, it only served to legitimize and entrench the blockade, allowing Israel to maintain absolute control over the reconstruction process.
The Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies has thus described the GRM as “an obstacle to effective rebuilding”: the mechanism has heavily restricted imports of construction materials into Gaza and amounted to a very bureaucratic and cumbersome system that has made the pace of reconstruction very slow. For instance, three years after the 2014 war, only 57 percent of the 17,800 homes that had been destroyed or significantly damaged were rebuilt.
Worse, the GRM and the limited reconstruction permitted have financially benefited the Israeli private sector, since almost two-thirds of the material bought through this mechanism was purchased from Israeli companies. Reconstruction efforts were also constrained because the amount of money pledged by donors was much less than that provided. For example, three years after the 2014 war, donors had paid only one-third of the total amount pledged for the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Thus, a new reconstruction mechanism is gravely needed. Although envisioning a reconstruction plan is challenging, given the uncertain nature of the ongoing war, any prospective effort for real recovery must be built on three pillars.
First, any effective reconstruction plan needs to be tied to a larger political framework and a process that aims to end Israel’s illegal siege of the Gaza Strip, terminate the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime, and secure Palestinian rights, including their longing for freedom, justice, and dignity. Reconstruction goes beyond rebuilding what was destroyed and should not be seen as a merely humanitarian or technical process, because it is in fact political. For example, for real recovery to materialize, Gaza’s economy has to be rebuilt and revived, and this is impossible if the strip remains under siege and if Palestinians have no sovereignty over their natural resources or borders.
Failing to link reconstruction to an end to Israel’s siege and occupation would further entrench Israel’s system of domination over Palestinians and enforce the violation of Palestinian rights. It would also risk perpetuating flawed and failed reconstruction efforts that would essentially be providing Band-Aids for a deeply rooted political problem—as in previous wars. Without addressing the root causes of that problem, real sustainable recovery and future development will be unattainable. The donor community has a legal and moral obligation to exert pressure on Israel to end its blockade and its larger system of injustice and oppression and open Gaza’s borders, especially if donors want to break the recurring cycle of destruction and reconstruction in Gaza.
The second pillar of any reconstruction plan must consist of ensuring local ownership and participation. For future processes to be effective, they should adopt a bottom-up approach and be determined and led by Palestinians. It is important for Gaza-based representatives to play a central role in any thinking about reconstruction and recovery, unlike in previous mechanisms, such as the GRM, that excluded Gazans.
Ending Palestinian fragmentation is equally crucial, to form a united and inclusive Palestinian body that represents Palestinian interests in the reconstruction process. The focus should be on including local businesses, institutions, and Gazan young entrepreneurs as much as possible to ensure that the reconstruction effort is a national endeavor and that most of the funds are channeled to Palestinian society, rather than to international, or even Israeli, companies.
Third, Israel should be held accountable for the current crisis in Gaza and pay reparations for the damage it has inflicted on the Gaza Strip. As the occupying power involved in military action that is damaging civilian infrastructure in violation of the laws of war, Israel should be the first country to bear the expenses of reconstruction, together with the United States, which has been complicit in this war and has so far refused to call for a ceasefire.
While achieving real recovery remains a daunting task that may take several years, it is important to acknowledge that many losses are irreparable: the cherished memories in the confines of destroyed houses, the shattered dreams of the tens of thousands killed, and the damaged heritage sites and cultural landmarks. Additionally, the invaluable contributors to Gaza’s intellectual elite who were killed—including scholars, writers, scientists, and journalists—cannot be replaced. Loss also extends beyond the physical realm and encompasses the profound psychological trauma that several generations of Gazans will be experiencing for a long time.
Nur Arafeh is a fellow at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.
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