Situation assessment...what is required from Hamas to restore the balance of the Palestinian people and reduce the burdens

Jihad war

Thabat Center for Research and Opinion Polls issued Situation Assessment No. 1 for the year 2025 on “What is required of Hamas to restore the balance of the Palestinian people and reduce the burdens” as part of the series of policy papers and situation assessments issued by the center for the year 2025. These papers address internal and external policy issues of interest to Palestinian society and decision-makers.

introduction

The statement of Musa Abu Marzouk, a member of the Hamas political bureau, to the New York Times on February 24, 2025, that “knowing these consequences would have made it impossible to support such an attack. If we had known what was happening would have happened, there would have been no October 7,” has once again sparked debate about the political assessment of the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” and the various aspects of what happened before and during the operation, its paths and outcomes, or the achievement of its goals from multiple aspects that are taken into account during its planning, and not limited to the military aspect.

The evaluation process is usually done in order to consider the successes and failures and the similarity of the operational aspects compared to the political aspects; especially in the case of national liberation, and the prices included, expected or paid in the context of an integrated process of extracting lessons, understanding the lessons and absorbing the beginning and the end.

This paper, “Situation Assessment,” aims to present proposals that contribute to reducing the burdens resulting from the war that accompanied October 7, 2023, and ensure the interests of Palestinian citizens and the future of the Palestinian cause. It also focuses on the necessity of an internal review of the Hamas movement regarding what is required of it after this long war that the Palestinian people waged following the movement’s decision to carry out the large-scale military operation represented by “Al-Aqsa Flood.”

The paper reviews the planning rules necessary for the success of the military operation and understanding the political risks, looks at the objectives of Operation “Noah’s Flood”, then presents the prejudices that Palestinians and Israelis have about each other, and then the gains and losses of “Noah’s Flood”, and finally a number of proposals are put forward that Hamas is required to review to help restore the balance of the Palestinian people and reduce the burdens.

(1) The military operation and the conditions for success

Civil and military planning and military and political decision-making require reliance on a number of rules necessary to ensure success and achieve objectives, namely: First: The rule of due diligence, i.e. taking precautions against anything that could spoil the mission, distort it, or weaken performance during its implementation, i.e., more precisely, working to ensure the success of the operation or mission. Second: The rule of taking care to achieve results, i.e. ensuring the achievement of the intended results. Third: The rule of due risk management in calculating potential or existing risks, in order to take precautions and prepare for the Israeli and international reactions to this operation.

Despite the unexpected great success of the military operation on the morning of October 7, in breaching the border and reaching the military bases and Israeli towns in the Gaza envelope area, Hamas’ documents related to the Al-Aqsa Flood, whether the statement of Muhammad Deif, Chief of Staff of the Qassam Brigades, launching the operation, or the 100-day document it issued under the title “This is our vision… Why the Al-Aqsa Flood,” indicate that the first rule, i.e. taking due care, was not taken seriously enough to ensure that the operation was carried out in a “clean operation” without errors that could threaten the success of the operation or affect its effectiveness in the future.

The document “This is our vision… Why the Al-Aqsa Flood” clearly indicated that due diligence was breached when precautions were not taken to prevent citizens from entering Israeli towns randomly (some glitches may have occurred during the implementation of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, due to the complete and rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and some chaos resulting from the extensive breaches in the fence and the buffer zone between the Gaza Strip and our areas of operations). Muhammad Deif’s statement also showed that the goal of the operation was broad, “Today, yes today, our people are reclaiming their revolution, correcting their path, and returning to the project of liberation, return, and establishing the state, with blood and martyrdom,” and that it exceeded the capabilities of the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip; especially since this operation was not coordinated with the national and Islamic forces or even with the allies or even its military wing in the West Bank; liberation requires gathering all forces in at least one crucible.

As for the management of risks that are important in understanding the expected or potential reactions and calculating the costs resulting from this process; especially since the expected victims are the citizens, their property, their lives and the lives of their families compared to what can be achieved, such as the release of prisoners, which is a fundamental issue for the Palestinians and the mission of all Palestinians to ensure their freedom and stop their suffering, in the event that the cost of preventing the danger is greater than the cost of the danger itself, decision-makers refrain from confronting the danger.

In this regard, assessing the situation requires a political reading that is higher than the task of preparing for the military operation, on the one hand, and requires expanding consultations from outside the single framework and listening attentively to critics and opponents for what it achieves in terms of reconsideration with broader eyes that are more capable of examining the risks, on the other hand.

The lack of due diligence and care to achieve results in line with available capabilities, the absence of consultations, and the failure to take into account risk management procedures led to crossing the lines acceptable to the international community, especially with regard to attacking Israeli towns and capturing a number of civilians, including the elderly and children, which at that moment caused the Palestinians to lose international solidarity, the essential element to ensure the legitimacy of the large-scale military operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” and support for the Palestinian struggle against the occupation.

(2) The objectives of Operation “Noah’s Flood”

The statement of the launch of Operation “Noah’s Flood” delivered by Mohammed Deif on the morning of October 7, 2023, raises controversy over the objectives of the operation itself; is it a war to liberate all the Palestinian territories occupied since 1948 “to implement the promise of the afterlife” or to liberate the territories occupied in 1967, or is it an operation to advance the Palestinian cause and change the balance of power? On the one hand, the statement describes in its introduction the establishment of the State of Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, but in the second paragraph it quickly moves to say that the Israeli occupation did not respect international law and international resolutions (some of these resolutions are what established the State of Israel in this region) “We previously warned the leaders of the occupation of the continuation of their crimes, and we called on the leaders of the world to take action to put an end to the crimes of the occupation against our holy sites, our people, our prisoners, and our land, and to force the occupation to abide by international law and international resolutions. The leaders of the occupation did not respond, and the leaders of the world did not take action, but rather the crimes of the occupation increased and exceeded all limits.”

The statement listed the reasons behind Operation “Noah’s Flood” as follows: (1) The dangers surrounding Al-Aqsa Mosque and the ongoing attacks by the occupation and settlers, and the fear of its demolition and the construction of the alleged temple. (2) The continued detention of Palestinian prisoners and their suffering in Israeli occupation prisons. (3) The occupation forces’ raids on Palestinian cities and villages in the West Bank. (4) The continued seizure of Palestinian lands in order to increase settlements and exacerbate settler attacks on citizens. (5) Imposing a criminal siege on the Gaza Strip.

All of these motives listed in the statement are related to the occupation’s practices in the territories occupied in 1967, and this belief is supported by what was stated in the call that the guest addressed in the statement to the Palestinians in the territories occupied in 1948: “Oh our people in the occupied interior, in the Negev, Galilee and the Triangle, in Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Lod and Ramla, set the land ablaze under the feet of the usurping occupiers, killing, burning, destroying and closing roads, and make this cowardly occupier understand that the flood of Al-Aqsa is greater than he thinks and believes,” compared to the call addressed to the citizens in the West Bank that called on them to sweep away the occupation: “Today is your day to sweep away this occupier and its settlements from all our land in the West Bank.” The statement then followed that the Al-Aqsa Flood operation came "in light of these ongoing crimes against our people, in light of the occupation's rampage and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and international silence, we have decided to put an end to all of that with God's help, so that the enemy understands that the time has come for it to rampage without being held accountable."

In contrast, Hamas’s document, which it published on the 100th day of the Al-Aqsa Flood, added, “This is our vision... Why the Al-Aqsa Flood and what it does to fulfill the hope of 7 million Palestinians to return to their homes after 75 years of exile and diaspora.” The document added, “The Al-Aqsa Flood operation on October 7, 2023, was a necessary step and a natural response to confront the Israeli plots that aim to liquidate the Palestinian cause, control and Judaize the land, establish sovereignty over Al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy sites, end the unjust siege on the Gaza Strip, and a natural step within the framework of getting rid of the occupation, restoring national rights, achieving independence and freedom like the rest of the peoples of the world, the right to self-determination, and establishing an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Adopting these goals and orientations and calling on the Palestinians in the various arenas and the allies in the various multilateral fronts requires two main issues; the first: preparation and readiness in the various arenas, which were not taken into account and perhaps the preparation cell "the limited military council" considered it a foregone conclusion or dealing with the parties always following the center regardless of the necessary preparation to activate the arenas. The second: coordination with the fronts "Iran, Hezbollah and their allies" to be ready for effective participation, but it seems that this was not completed and needed more time according to what was revealed in the leaked documents about the meetings of the limited military council that prepared the "big project."

(3) Misrepresentations of Palestinians and Israelis about each other

The representations of Palestinians and Israelis have been shown to be wrong, misguided, or inaccurate, and are part of the fantasies that have existed about each other in recent years. Palestinians believed that Israeli society cannot sustain a long war, that it relies on quick wars and prefers them to not be on its soil, based on the wars that Israel has fought over the past years, and that Israelis/Israeli governments are very sensitive to the lives of Israelis in preventing their capture or prolonged captivity.

In reality, the matter is different, as Shalit stayed for about five years, and the prisoners or bodies of his soldiers in the 2014 war were nine years old before the war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023. The Palestinians also think that the Israelis are running to leave Israel abroad in large numbers if war breaks out, and that the Israeli economy cannot bear the damage of war or that the Israelis cannot bear the losses.

It seems that those who successfully planned the military operation on October 7th had forgotten the profound transformations in Israeli society. On the one hand, there was a shift towards the right and the fascist right, the influence of religious Zionism in its various forms, and the settlers’ control over the reins of government in Israel. On the other hand, most Israelis today were born in Israel or in the settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and are not immigrants, meaning they have no connection to this land. On the third hand, the idea of a Jewish state is rooted in all Israelis, regardless of their origins, backgrounds, and intellectual and political currents, regardless of the conflict in Israeli society over the form and nature of the ruling institution, not over the state itself. The opposition is at odds with the government from within the political system, in order to achieve the policies and aspirations of specific social groups and their interests, with the existence of institutions that guarantee respect for the public interest, such as the threshold guards, the courts, and others.

In contrast, the Israelis believed that the Palestinians were subject to the horror of Israeli brutality or to more pressure based on destroying their lives; such as destroying the infrastructure that the Palestinians had built over more than thirty years, and the hardship of their lives building their families, homes, businesses and properties, and to the hardship of living and continuous displacement. The Israelis also believed that the continuous abuse of the Palestinians could make them surrender to the occupation based on the idea of the iron wall, of the Revisionist Zionism to which most members of the cabinet belong, which is based on military force to impose Israel’s control. The Israeli Prime Minister believes that prolonging the war enables him to overcome the moral losses he suffered on October 7 and guarantees him more time to increase the suffering of the Palestinians and strike the popular incubator of the resistance factions.

The great success of the military operation on the morning of October 7, by penetrating the border and reaching the military bases and Israeli towns in the Gaza Envelope area, and the continuation of the resistance for more than fifteen months, has refuted the preconceptions and assumptions of the Israeli occupation based on colonial thought and that it was unable to understand the nature of Palestinian society or imagine its ability to withstand and confront, and its ability to analyze the liberation to understand the nature of the conflict and the main contradiction represented by the occupation and its priorities and the secondary contradiction based on the conflicting interests of the forces of the people and the Palestinian factions and their priorities. At the same time, it seems that the one responsible for Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa did not realize the significance of the transformations in the cultural and social structures of Israeli society in the past twenty years at least.

(4) Profits and losses of “Al-Aqsa Flood”

On the Israeli side, October 7, 2023, caused a massive earthquake in the theory of deterrence or the aura of Israeli deterrence in the region as a whole, and the military superiority based on boasting of technical capabilities or the high-tech military industry, and shook the status of the Israeli army, the "sacred cow" in Israeli society, which seemed unable to protect the state's borders or its citizens, and exposed the shortcomings of the intelligence capabilities of the Israeli security services. Not to mention the inability of the Israeli government and its institutions to predict or estimate the extent of threats or the behavior of "hostile" parties, as situation assessment reports indicated that Hamas is deterred and unwilling to confront and wants to maintain its rule in the Gaza Strip.

On the other hand, the "Al-Aqsa Flood" on that day (i.e. the military operation) was a dazzling success for the Palestinians, something they had never seen before in terms of size, capability, numbers of fighters participating in the operation, tools, capabilities and means. It restored the Palestinians' confidence in themselves and their ability to confront the occupation forces and "outperform" their military and technical capabilities. This operation put the Palestinian issue back on the agenda of the international community, which had been absent for years, or rather was no longer a necessity in order to achieve security and peace in the Middle East.

In contrast, the Israeli government considered revenge or war an opportunity to return to the biblical dreams and ideological ideas adopted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restore colonial ambitions to establish the Kingdom of Israel from the sea to the river, according to what Netanyahu recorded in his book “A Place Among the Nations,” using the brute force that Israel possesses and the international support it received at the beginning of the war, and relying on the “Iron Wall” theory, which requires the use of excessive force to force the Palestinians to surrender or displace them from their lands.

The Israeli government has pursued a systematic policy of total and comprehensive destruction in the Gaza Strip to prevent the possibility of living there, to target Palestinian citizens on a broad scale, and to destroy the infrastructure, including the health care system with all its components, as well as education and the existing environmental systems in the Strip. These are strategic losses for all Palestinians that will affect and will affect the nature of their lives and the cultural and social structures for decades to come.

In contrast, the Palestinians succeeded in restoring their cause to the international community's agenda, increasing international solidarity at the level of peoples in general, granting the State of Palestine exceptional privileges in the United Nations that are very similar to the privileges of member states, and changing the positions of some countries, the most obvious of which was the recognition of the Palestinian state by European countries, for example, and the emergence of signs of a boycott of Israel by some European countries in specific cases, and activating the prosecution of Israel before international courts; such as the International Court of Justice in the case filed by South Africa regarding its violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, or the International Criminal Court, which issued arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister and his Minister of Defense as war criminals. Not to mention the decision of the United Nations General Assembly that ratified the advisory opinion of the Court of Justice regarding the illegality of the Israeli occupation and the continued prevention of the Palestinian people from exercising the right to self-determination as one of the most important purposes of the Charter of the United Nations and the purposes of its establishment. These successes at the level of international institutions in particular were not the result of the "Al-Aqsa Flood military operation" as much as they were solidarity with the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip following the disaster that befell them and the result of continuous political efforts for several years.

(5) What is required to reduce the burdens, alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people and restore their balance.

There is no doubt that the Palestinian people, especially in the Gaza Strip, have been exposed to a humanitarian catastrophe through the most heinous ethnic cleansing over the course of more than fifteen months at the hands of the Israeli occupation, which has systematically destroyed the components of life in the Gaza Strip and the dignity of its citizens.

This critical stage in the life of the Palestinian people requires a national approach with the aim of rebuilding the national ruins; this is done by restoring Palestinian unity in a way that strengthens national immunity on the one hand, achieves national and societal integration on the other hand, mitigates the consequences and effects of this war on the third hand, and ensures the ability to deal with the international community to begin restoring life in the Gaza Strip and to take international action without Israeli prosecution and its supporters, and to transform the international solidarity that the Palestinian people have enjoyed; because of the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, into creating tools for organized pressure on Western governments towards isolating Israel on the fourth hand.

Achieving this requires the active Palestinian parties to make courageous decisions based on their awareness of the public interest of Palestinian citizens, to preserve the dignity of citizens, and to ensure national partnership in a way that allows the opportunity to reduce “losses,” to preserve what remains of the Palestinian people’s capabilities, and to strengthen the internal front. This means that every Palestinian faction, especially Fatah and Hamas, must make and adopt responsible decisions on its own initiative to uphold the public interest of the Palestinian people regardless of factional interests. This can be done by implementing the following proposals:

- Adopting the discourse of the victim; the victim of the crime of genocide committed by the Israeli government, by all factions and Palestinians around the world and consecrating it, and moving away from the discourse of victories under the pretext of maintaining the morale of the Palestinian people, as the most important thing is to gain the solidarity of the international community and condemn the occupation government and punish it for this crime.

- Hamas forming a new political party to overcome the crisis of being labeled as a terrorist by influential countries in the international community, such as the European Union and the United States, and being pursued in these countries, with guarantees for positive dealing with this transformation by them.

- Announcing that the Hamas resistance movement is not limited to armed action in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and that other methods of resistance are to be identified in accordance with the United Nations Charter.

- Handing over power in the Gaza Strip to a national salvation government agreed upon through national dialogue, with guarantees that weapons will not be used in internal disputes, government work will not be disrupted, or the rule of law will not be violated.

- Agreement on the entry of the Palestine Liberation Organization and political governing institutions after holding general elections, provided that an agreement is reached on the date of holding the elections within a maximum period of two years from the cessation of war.

- The Fatah movement and the factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization provide guarantees to the Hamas movement to hold the general elections (legislative and presidential) on the agreed date, and to strive from the moment of signing the ceasefire agreement to overcome the obstacles and challenges facing the holding of the general elections through consultation and national agreement.