Can Anyone Govern Gaza? The Perilous Path to the Day After

By Daniel Byman

When the devastating war in the Gaza Strip ends, someone will have to govern the territory. It’s a job that many have held. Israel occupied the strip between 1967, when it conquered Gaza, and 1994, when it transferred official control of most affairs to the newly created Palestinian Authority in the heady days of the Oslo peace negotiations—although Israel maintained 21 settlements there until 2005. In 2006, Hamas won the legislative elections in the Palestinian territories, and in 2007 it pushed its rivals out of Gaza by force. Hamas then governed Gaza, albeit with many Israeli restrictions, until Israel dislodged it in response to the October 7, 2023, attacks. Today, Gaza has no functioning government.

When the shooting stops, Gaza will remain a political and economic wasteland. As of mid-July, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, over 38,000 Gazans are dead. According to UNWRA, 1.9 million—about 80 percent of the territory’s population—are displaced. About 80 percent of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure—such as homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities—has been destroyed or damaged, according to the World Health Organization. Now that Hamas no longer polices the territory, crime is rife. Gaza’s economy was stagnant before October 7, but today, there is no economy to speak of. The population will be even more dependent on outside aid than before.

It would be hard to fix these problems even if Israel, Hamas, and the United States agreed on what Gaza’s future should look like. But each has a different vision. Hamas, of course, wants to survive, claw back its power in Gaza, and, over time, eclipse the PA to dominate the Palestinian national movement. Israel wants a government in Gaza that has no link to Hamas, but it is skeptical of other existing Palestinian organizations that could take over. Israel blames the PA, which controls much of the West Bank and has long cooperated with Israel to suppress Hamas, for sustaining a tolerant attitude toward extremism that tacitly encouraged terrorist attacks. The United States hopes the PA will rule Gaza and eventually become a more credible partner in negotiations for a long-sought two-state solution.

The Palestinians in Gaza don’t get a vote, but they seek an end to conflict, the resumption of essential services, and a path to prosperity and nationhood. Their wishes should not be conflated with those of Hamas. The group was not popular in Gaza before October 7, and although the war has raised Hamas’s standing considerably, some Palestinians in Gaza blame it for leaving ordinary people defenseless and without food or water in the face of Israel’s predictably destructive response to the October attack. “If the death and hunger of their people do not make any difference to them,” Motaz Azaiza, a Gazan photojournalist, wrote in an apparent reference to Hamas in March, “they do not need to make any difference to us.”

There are at least seven possible options for Gaza’s future, and none are good. Some leave Hamas too strong; others require a costly occupation of the territory by Israel or foreign powers. The best among this set of bad choices is for the PA to run Gaza, but given both Hamas’s and Israel’s opposition to any elevation of the PA’s standing, this option seems a long shot. The United States and its allies should increase the odds of a PA-run government by pushing Israel harder to accept that option, building up the PA’s security and administrative capacity, and demanding that the PA’s current leadership step down. By doing so, the United States may be able to avoid the worst scenario.

The most likely future for Gaza, alas, is that it becomes a failed state in which Hamas maintains some authority and the Israeli military regularly invades to quash the militant group. In such a scenario, ordinary Palestinians would continue to suffer but with less international outcry as people around the world become desensitized to the violence. Washington should prepare for a Gaza that is perpetually plagued by violence and starvation—while doing all that it can to prevent that grim outcome.

ISRAELI OCCUPATION, AGAIN

One potential future for Gaza is that Israel fully reoccupies the territory. Israel has a significant military presence there, but it does not really run the strip on a day-to-day basis—no one does. Various international organizations and charities, such as UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders, provide some services but are hamstrung by the ongoing fighting, Israeli restrictions on goods going into Gaza, and the devastation of the territory’s health infrastructure. If Israel did formally reoccupy Gaza, it would be responsible for providing law and order, running services such as sanitation and education, and otherwise functioning as the government there.

Israel has experience doing these things. If Israel reoccupied the territory, Gazans’ sovereignty, already limited before the war, would disappear, but the population might be able to enjoy some peace and basic services. Eventually, perhaps, Israel might hand over some powers to local Palestinians, but this would be a gradual process under even the most optimistic scenario. Israel would routinely hunt down members of Hamas to prevent the organization from resurfacing, which would require frequent military operations. Even before Hamas came to power in 2006, the group had deep roots in the educational, social welfare, and religious institutions in the strip. Based on calculations from the RAND analyst James Quinlivan to determine the size of stability operations, Israel would have to indefinitely maintain around 100,000 troops and police in Gaza. Even more may be needed, given that Gaza is mostly urban, which makes military operations particularly hard.

That is a huge number of personnel for Israel, a small country whose military depends heavily on reserves, especially considering that it also faces a restive West Bank and a possible war with Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group backed by Iran. If Israel reoccupied Gaza with fewer troops, Hamas could return to parts of the strip. This has already happened: in January 2024, Hamas returned to Gaza City after Israel withdrew the bulk of its forces there, and since then Hamas’s forces have returned to other areas that Israeli officials thought were pacified. Inevitably, Hamas would wage a low-level insurgency against the Israeli army, carrying out a steady stream of kidnappings and causing more casualties.

The cost to Israel’s international reputation would be even higher. Its image is already tattered, including among young people in the United States, its most important ally. The violence of an occupation would likely not make the news as often as did the fighting in the months after October 7, but it would be constant, likely preventing Israel from repairing the damage to its reputation. Ordinary Palestinians, too, would loathe an Israeli reoccupation; their resentment toward Israel, already strong, has grown since October, and a renewed occupation would be a step backward from Palestinian statehood. Washington would also oppose this option. It would not want to be seen as abetting the long-term occupation of more Palestinian territory, and continued fighting would distract from other U.S. goals in the region, such as uniting allies against Iran.

HAMAS BACK IN CHARGE

At the other end of the spectrum of options is the possibility that Gaza will basically return to its status quo before October 7. Hamas would rule Gaza, as it did between 2007 and 2023, albeit with even more difficulty than before. Israel’s campaign has hit Hamas hard, destroying much of its military infrastructure and killing many of its members. Hamas, however, remains the strongest Palestinian actor in the strip and could regain control of it. Hamas could then use Gaza as a base to rebuild its armed forces, launch attacks on Israel, and restore its credentials as a governing entity. Israel would continue to regularly conduct strikes on Hamas, trying to kill its leaders and prevent it from regrouping. Israel and Egypt would severely restrict economic activity in the territory.

Hamas not only wants to survive as an organization. It also wishes to grow stronger in relation to both Israel and its Palestinian rival, the PA, although the Hamas leadership is divided when it comes to priorities. The more pragmatic members, many of whom live outside Gaza, seek influence among Palestinians in the West Bank and hope to emerge as the dominant force within the Palestinian national movement. Hard-liners, including Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza and the mastermind of the October 7 attacks, have dedicated themselves to Israel’s destruction and are willing to sacrifice their own people to achieve it. As was true before October 7, governing Gaza would leave Hamas open to criticism that it is failing to provide for ordinary Palestinians. It would also make members of Hamas especially vulnerable to Israeli attacks because governing Gaza would force Hamas leaders into the open, revealing deeper layers of its leadership apparatus.

For Israel, a return of Hamas rule is a nonstarter. Israelis understandably ask themselves how they can live with a neighbor that launched such a brutal surprise attack, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly affirmed that Israel seeks “total victory” against Hamas. The United States, too, would balk at the prospect of Hamas openly returning to power.

There are at least seven possible options for Gaza’s future, and none are good.

In a more plausible scenario, Hamas would exercise power behind the scenes, as Hezbollah does in Lebanon. Although Hezbollah is the most powerful force in Lebanon, the group usually holds only 12 to 15 of the 128 seats in the country’s parliament. Hezbollah limits the number of seats it contests to allow allied groups, including Christian ones, to win them instead, thereby maintaining a façade that it does not dominate Lebanon. This coalition has sometimes held a legislative majority, and Hezbollah has controlled various government ministries for almost two decades. Even when Hezbollah and its allies do not win enough seats to control parliament, as is the case today, its mixture of political influence, armed force, and street power—and its willingness to assassinate rivals—make it a player that cannot be ignored. Supporters of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri learned that in 2005, when Hezbollah killed him for supporting the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon. Many Lebanese groups and communities are anti-Hezbollah, but they respect its power. The group exercises a de facto veto over government formation and policy.

Yet despite its influence, Hezbollah has avoided becoming the public face of Lebanon. Its control is not complete, and Western countries work with the Lebanese government even though they know that doing so indirectly funds some of Hezbollah’s activities. Leading such an arrangement in Gaza would probably appeal to Hamas, which might prefer to be the power behind the throne. Even before October 7, governing Gaza under international isolation was a constant struggle. At several points over the past 16 years, Hamas even considered arrangements in which its rival, the PA, would take over some of its responsibilities while Hamas maintained its military forces and power base as part of a unity government. Although the PA and Hamas have at times signed agreements supporting this idea, no real unity ever emerged—a Chinese effort to bring the two together earlier this month is likely to suffer a similar fate. In any event, in a behind-the-scenes role, Hamas could fight Israel when it wanted to and leave the difficult task of rebuilding Gaza and providing services to someone else.

If Hamas became puppet master to a generic Palestinian administrative power in Gaza, the Israeli government could publicly claim that Hamas no longer governs Gaza, and foreign governments could send aid to the territory without openly assisting a terrorist government. Ordinary Gazans could thus gain some humanitarian relief and, if all sides accepted the charade, a degree of stability. But the risks for Israel—beyond accusations of hypocrisy—would be many. Hamas could take control of aid flowing into Gaza and rebuild itself militarily without interference from Gaza’s government. Israel would still likely regularly conduct attacks to suppress terrorism, which would put civilian lives at risk and leave Gaza’s putative government looking helpless and illegitimate. And because there are no other strong political organizations in the strip, any government in Gaza would be even more beholden to Hamas than Lebanese factions are to Hezbollah.

CALL IN THE PA

The Biden administration’s preferred approach is for the PA to take the helm. The PA ran Gaza before Hamas seized power in 2007; it controls parts of the West Bank and enjoys support from much of the world, which recognizes it as the voice of the Palestinians. For years, PA security forces have worked with Israel to fight Hamas in the West Bank and otherwise limit violence there. On paper, the PA already has a bureaucratic presence in Gaza—for years, it paid the salaries of some civil servants there, an arrangement that lingers from its previous stint in power—and it has a shadow cabinet that claims to manage education and security, although in reality it does nothing.

If the PA took charge, Arab countries would have an easier time working with Israel to rebuild Gaza. Many Arab governments loathe Hamas for its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran, both of which are political bogeymen for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in particular. At the same time, it is politically risky for Arab governments to work with Israel because it is exceedingly unpopular among their citizens, especially when it is killing Palestinians on a daily basis. If Israel makes concessions to the PA and promises progress toward a two-state solution, Arab leaders can justify working with Israel because they can show their people they are not abandoning the Palestinians. Uniting the leadership of Gaza and the West Bank would seem like a positive step toward the establishment of a Palestinian state—a goal also supported by the United States but unpopular among Israelis.

Installing the PA, however, would not be a silver bullet. The PA’s track record in the West Bank is poor. The organization is corrupt and fails to deliver many essential services. It has not held real elections since 2006 because its leaders and foreign backers fear, with good reason, that it would lose. Nearly 90 percent of Palestinians want Mahmoud Abbas, the 88-year-old head of the PA, to resign. Most important, many Palestinians see the PA as Israel’s stooge because it cooperates with Israeli security services. The PA’s image worsens every time Jewish extremists build a new settlement or attack Palestinians. The PA used to be credited with maintaining some semblance of order. Now, as violence grows in the West Bank, it can’t even claim that: between October 7, 2023, and July 15, 2024, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians over 1,100 times, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Despite the PA’s cooperation with Israel, many Israeli politicians oppose the idea of having the PA take control of Gaza. They claim that the PA radicalizes Palestinians, pointing to PA-approved textbooks that praise violence against Israel, public buildings named after militants who have killed Israelis, and payments the PA sends to the families of Palestinians in jail for terrorism or of those killed fighting Israel. Many Israelis chafe at the idea that Palestinians in general might benefit from October 7 and its aftermath. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank, most Israeli Jews now oppose a two-state solution and believe the PA will not reform. Forty-four percent think terrorism would increase if there were a Palestinian state. The far right, a core component of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, is particularly hostile to the PA. Since October 7, Israel has refused to send some tax revenues it collects from Palestinians to the PA. Israeli leaders, including the far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have threatened to withhold a waiver that allows Israeli banks to send payments to Palestinian ones. Without it, the PA’s financial system could collapse. Netanyahu has made his opposition to PA control clear, saying that a Palestinian state would become a “terror haven” and that he is “not ready to hand [Gaza] over to the PA.”

FOREIGNERS AND RANDOS

Israeli leaders have offered few details as to how they believe Gaza should be governed. But some have raised the idea of local, unaffiliated Palestinian leaders or technocrats taking charge instead of Hamas or the PA. Such a government might be decentralized, with a clan leader in charge in one part of Gaza and a local politician in another. Israel might control certain zones itself and help local Gazan leaders administer the rest of the strip, overseeing reconstruction with international support and lending a hand in the government’s day-to-day functions. Eventually, the United States or other foreign countries could take over Israel’s role. In the short term, some Palestinians would probably welcome a government that could provide basic services and that poses a smaller risk of inciting more war with Israel.

This approach, however, is largely a pipe dream. Hamas is so deeply enmeshed in Gaza that it would be hard to find respected officials there who are independent of the group and strong enough to resist its influence. According to Netanyahu, Hamas has already killed Palestinians in Gaza who worked with Israel to distribute aid after October 7, and any Palestinian associated with Israel risks being seen as a pawn of the occupation. A Palestinian government cannot cooperate with Israel and maintain legitimacy for long, especially if it can’t guarantee Palestinians more political rights, and Palestinians would not want a fragmented state dominated by Israel. The few alternatives to Hamas already have ties to the PA.

Given the weaknesses of various Palestinian alternatives, another option is for outsiders to control Gaza in the form of de facto trusteeship, as happened in Kosovo and East Timor. The UN Transitional Administration in East Timor, established in 1999, appointed judges, regulated the economy, and trained civil servants, among other duties. If set up in Gaza, this arrangement could be an outcome in and of itself or be used to transition to another scenario. The trustee, perhaps made up of officials and forces from Arab and European countries acting under UN auspices, could provide security and administer services. Even if the trustee did not fight Hamas directly, its presence would deprive the group of tax revenue and any legitimacy that comes from governing territory. Third-party control might even facilitate eventual Israeli-Palestinian peace talks if the trustee nurtured a corps of Palestinian political leaders who enjoyed domestic and international legitimacy.

In practice, however, a trusteeship is likely to fail, and no one is volunteering for the job. Third-party forces usually come with narrow mandates, limited numbers of troops, and restrictive rules of engagement, all of which Hamas would exploit. In Kosovo, the de facto UN trusteeship succeeded because U.S.-led forces had already defeated Serbia. In East Timor, Indonesia agreed to give up control. In both cases, the trustee did not have to fight a powerful indigenous insurgency. Whoever governs Gaza, by contrast, will face the threat of a Hamas resurgence and the risks, both military and political, posed by regular Israeli operations to keep the group down. If the trustee let Israel routinely go after Hamas, it would be seen as an extension of the Israeli occupation. If it didn’t, it would be seen as pro-Hamas. A trustee government would struggle to find a middle ground. Although Arab countries probably have the most legitimacy to rule in the eyes of Palestinians, they tend to have ineffective armies and would fear that suppressing Palestinian insurgents or associating with Israel would cause them domestic political headaches. To get around that, their participation would need to be connected to a real plan to create a two-state solution—and since that is unlikely to materialize, so is any interest on their part in governing.

PREPARE FOR THE WORST

Today, chaos rules Gaza. If no new government is imposed or emerges, chaos will likely dominate even after the fighting stops. Indeed, Gaza may end up like Somalia, where civil war, crime, and humanitarian crises are the norm outside a few pockets of relative calm. Gaza’s economy is in ruins. The territory will need tens of billions of dollars in reconstruction aid, and no one is lining up to offer it. Israelis will no longer allow Gazans to work in Israel and will be wary of permitting any goods that might have a military application to enter the strip. To some Israelis, Gaza without a government might seem preferable to rule by Hamas, but anarchy brings tremendous risk. Gazans might try to flee into Egypt, which already suffers from a floundering economy, a low-level conflict in the Sinai Peninsula, and a government with little legitimacy. And an atmosphere of squalor and violence will make it easy for Hamas or any other violent group to recruit fighters.

Some version of a failed state is the likeliest scenario for postwar Gaza. The alternatives would be hard to implement, and U.S. efforts to forge a cease-fire have mostly skirted the question of who will govern Gaza so as not to derail already thorny negotiations. Each failed state fails in its own way. Gaza may not look exactly like Somalia or Yemen. It will be nearly impossible, however, for any new Gazan government to gel amid Hamas’s opposition, Israeli strikes, and a collapsed economy, so the United States must prepare for such a dismal scenario. The territory is likely to remain in or near a humanitarian crisis for the foreseeable future.

All options for Gaza’s future are bad, but to prevent outright chaos, it is worth focusing sharply on the least bad scenario—the return of the PA to Gaza. It is a more plausible solution than imposing a government controlled by an international trustee or by unaffiliated Palestinians and a less disastrous option than a failed state or the return to Hamas rule, whether outright or covert. Although the PA is unpopular among Palestinians, they prefer a PA-run Gaza to a direct occupation by Israel. In the long term, it might also be preferable to Israelis—after all, there is a reason Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

The United States can do much more to ensure the PA beats the odds and governs Gaza. To help the PA, Washington must provide more training and aid. The Department of Defense and intelligence agencies should also step up efforts to train and equip the PA’s security forces to fight insurgencies. Yet technical training is only the first step. The bigger problem, as the United States learned the hard way in Afghanistan, is that security forces must have a government that inspires confidence. Right now, the PA is not worth fighting for. The PA will need to help itself by changing its leadership. Abbas is too old, inept, and unpopular to run Gaza, or even to continue running the West Bank. The United States should coordinate with international and Arab donors to the PA to identify younger, more qualified Palestinians to play leadership roles. Donors should restrict some aid if Abbas resists change and increase it if new leadership is brought in.

But shoring up the PA will mean little if Washington cannot convince Israelis to respect its authority and accept that a strong PA is in their best interest. Although Netanyahu says he is opposed to a PA-run government in Gaza, Israeli security officials increasingly recognize that destroying Hamas completely will not solve the country’s long-term problem and that they must find an alternative government for Gaza if Israel is to defeat Hamas. Leading opposition figures, including former war cabinet members Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, also seem more open to a PA role in Gaza. In June, Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, said, “If we do not bring something else to Gaza, at the end of the day, we will get Hamas.” He is right, and the best “something else” is the Palestinian Authority. As the Middle East analyst Ehud Yaari noted that same month, “Hamas is already working on their own day-after plan.” The only way to defeat the group, then, is for the United States, Israel, and the PA to collectively make a better plan.