The Palestinian Authority is working with US officials on a plan to run Gaza after the ongoing war is over, with one of its top leaders arguing that Israel’s aim to fully defeat Hamas is unrealistic and the militant group should instead join a new governing structure.
Speaking to Bloomberg in his Ramallah office on Thursday, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said his preferred outcome of the conflict would be for Hamas to become a junior partner under the Palestinian Liberation Organization, helping to build a new independent state that includes the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
“Hamas before October 7 is one thing and after it is another thing,” said Shtayyeh, a 65-year-old economist who’s been managing the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas since 2019. “If they are ready to come to an agreement and accept the political platform of the PLO, then there will be room for talk. Palestinians should not be divided.”
Yet that proposal contradicts what Israel says it sees as the future of the impoverished coastal strip of 2.2 million, where its military launched an air and ground campaign to destroy Hamas after the group’s attack on Oct. 7, when some 1,200 people were killed and 240 taken hostage.
Israel says it won’t stop its campaign until Hamas is eradicated. It says no group based in Gaza should be able to threaten it again — and that means patrolling the territory for the foreseeable future.
US officials visited Shtayyeh earlier this week to discuss a plan for the day after the war in Gaza, the Palestinian official said. Both sides agreed that Israel shouldn’t reoccupy Gaza, reduce its land for a buffer zone or drive Palestinians out. That suggests plenty of friction ahead.
“We’re not going to go there on an Israeli military plan,” Shtayyeh said. “Our people are there. We need to put together a mechanism, something we’re working on with the international community. There will be huge needs in terms of relief and reconstruction to remedy the wounds.”
Shtayyeh will fly to Qatar this weekend to ask Doha to switch its substantial financial support for Hamas of recent years over to the Palestinian Authority.
Gaza Destruction
Israel’s campaign to dismantle Hamas’s military and political structures both above ground and in a complex tunnel network has killed more than 16,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, and large areas have been reduced to rubble. It’s now Israel’s longest war since 1948.
Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel not only wants to destroy Hamas — considered a terrorist organization by the US and European Union — but doesn’t trust the Palestinian Authority to pursue peaceful coexistence. It opposes a two-state solution and is hoping to cultivate a new technocratic leadership within Gaza as an alternative to Shtayyeh and Abbas.
Shtayyeh’s idea that Hamas, which rejects the existence of Israel, might join together with the Authority, seems optimistic. Hamas pushed the party out of Gaza following a 2007 civil war, and four subsequent agreements between the sides haven’t been implemented.
Asked why Israel can’t eliminate Hamas, Shtayyeh said: “Hamas is in Lebanon, everybody knows Hamas leadership is in Qatar and they are here in the West Bank.”
Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have expressed anger that top Palestinians like Shtayyeh haven’t condemned the slaughter of Oct. 7. Asked to do so in the interview, Shtayyeh demurred, saying the conflict didn’t begin on that date and Israeli officials have refused to condemn things done by their citizens to Palestinians.
“What Israel is doing in Gaza is an act of revenge,” he said. “This is not going to take them anywhere.” At least half a million Gazans are likely to be homeless after the war, he added.
Shtayyeh, who’s worked in the Palestinian Authority for years after teaching economics and being a university administrator, said both Palestinian and Israeli youths are growing more militant and the chance for a peaceful agreement between the two sides is fading fast.
He said ministers in his government have repeatedly reached out to Israeli counterparts but have been rebuffed.
“Unfortunately, there is no partner on the other side,” he said, an echo of what Israelis say about Palestinians. “Look at what Netanyahu has been saying — no return to the Palestinian Authority, no two-state solution. What does this mean? Netanyahu wants a continuation of a military occupation of the Palestinian territory. This is not acceptable.”
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