A masked Hamas fighter stands guard next to children before handing over a second batch of Israeli hostages in central Gaza on Oct. 13. Hamas has been quickly reasserting its presence in Gaza.BASHAR TALEB/AFP/Getty Images
A hundred and fifty metres from the city centre of Khan Younis, an armed group says it has asserted control over a small area the group is calling a humanitarian area, a unique slice of embattled Gaza wrested from the grasp of the Hamas leaders who have ruled the area for decades.
Now, under a tenuous ceasefire, the enclave appears to offer a hint of a different future for the war-ravaged region.
Here's what you need to know about Gaza and the Israel-Hamas war, including the ceasefire deal, the toll of the war so far and what comes next.
“We are actually holding territory and fighting Hamas and winning – after 18 years in which Hamas refused and, through force, imposed a complete ban on there being any other entity in the territory,” said Hossam al-Astal, commander of the clan militia in Khan Younis, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
After two years of war, he said, “a new Gaza is reflected in the humanitarian city that we currently hold.”
It is a vision of optimism. Less clear is whether it’s a vision of the future, as Hamas quickly reasserts its violent presence in Gaza.
The group, which led the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, has staged a highly visible return to force in the days since Israel suspended the two-year war that followed. Hamas militants have been at checkpoints. Gunmen in its green headbands have carried out public executions of people they called “collaborators and outlaws,” amid violent confrontations with rival groups. Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem has returned to the airwaves, telling Sky News this week that the group “is committed to every detail” of the agreement that underpins a ceasefire.
In Gaza, “it’s back to Oct. 6, what we had before Oct. 7,” said Khaled Abu Toameh, an expert on Palestinian affairs who has closely followed Hamas for decades.
“As far as Palestinians are concerned, Hamas is still the governing body in Gaza,” he said. “Their ministries are back. They’re issuing statements, issuing instructions. They’re talking about deploying security forces.”
Hamas fighters on guard before a hostage handover on Oct. 13. Hamas militants have been at checkpoints, and gunmen in its green headbands have carried out public executions.BASHAR TALEB/AFP/Getty Images
The modest footprint that Mr. al-Astal claims to control only underscores the diminutive scale of any challenge to Hamas rule. “Scores of families currently reside in our territory,” he said – among a broader population of two million.
Still, Mr. al-Astal, who once served as a security official in Gaza for the Palestinian Authority, said that the tactics employed by Hamas this week suggest a debilitated group, one whose senior leaders have been killed, whose subterranean strongholds have been destroyed and whose hold on the economy has fractured.
“Hamas has lost its political and military power,” he said. “What remains for them is the logic of gangs, of sowing fears to project the appearance of still being powerful.”
Indeed, the ability of figures like Mr. al-Astal to openly challenge Hamas can be read as “a sign of weakness” for the group, said Magnus Ranstorp, a strategic adviser at the Center for Societal Security at the Swedish Defence University who has spoken with many of the group’s senior leaders.
But Hamas enjoys considerable reach. Before the war, it counted more than 30,000 fighters, in addition to roughly 50,000 civil servants and some 18,000 in policing. Those are considerable numbers of people from which Hamas can draw.
Even so, “some of those clans are making trouble,” Mr. Ranstorp said.
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Mr. al-Astal’s militia is one of several that have asserted control over territory in Gaza. Other areas are held by separate groups in Shuja’iyya, northern Gaza and Rafah, where Bedouin leader Yasser Abu Shabab has the largest presence.
Those groups have been openly backed by Israel, whose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this year: “On the advice of security officials, we activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas.”
“What’s wrong with that?” he added. “It’s only good. It only saves the lives of IDF soldiers.”
Mr. al-Astal acknowledged co-ordinating with Israel “to ensure that Israel does not attack our area.” He said Israel “accepts” the group’s acquisition of weapons.
Displaced Palestinians walk through destroyed buildings in Khan Younis last Saturday. Hamas has experience with rebuilding after conflict with Israel.Jehad Alshrafi/The Associated Press
Aid organizations said Israel’s protections of militias during the war had given them a free hand to grow their influence, in part by stealing aid, which could then be resold for profit.
This was true of the Abu Shabab group in Rafah, the southern city that was the entry point for supplies, said one United Nations official who served in Gaza.
“I was in a car and there they are, looting the truck ahead of us. This isn’t hearsay,” the official said. The Globe and Mail is not using the official’s name because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The presence of the militias nonetheless offers a possible alternative to Hamas, said Joseph Braude, the founder and president of the Center for Peace Communications, a non-profit.
Their success will depend on whether their “initial role of holding territory gives way to a new role as protectors of an experiment in non-Hamas Gazan self-rule,” he said.
Israel has a history of backing and arming alternative power structures, as it did with the Palestinian Village Leagues in the West Bank in the 1970s and 1980s. That experiment ended in failure, with Village League leaders condemned as collaborators with Israel.
Militias in Gaza today have been accused of the same.
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Hamas, meanwhile, has experience with rebuilding. After it initially seized control of Gaza in 2007, an Israeli military offensive killed Hamas commanders and destroyed significant numbers of tunnels. Hamas quickly reconstituted itself.
The group has also been consistent in its tactics for establishing power.
“If you look at how Hamas emerged, it emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, murdering collaborators,” said Seth Frantzman, author of The October 7 War and adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The executions in Gaza this week are a sign, he said, of Hamas “trying to return to power in the only way they know how. They’ve always done this.”
Without the forceful imposition of an alternative, he sees little reason those tactics, and the group behind them, will not once again succeed.
“If one guy is talking, and the other guy is willing to line up people and shoot them – unfortunately the people willing to line people up and shoot them tend to win.”