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“A team is dedicated to his security because he is the enemy’s number one target,” the official said.

A senior Hamas official acknowledged that “several thousand fighters from the movement and other resistance groups died in combat”. Despite its huge losses, the source in the group’s armed wing still gloated over the intelligence and security failure that the Oct 7 attack was for the Zionist entity. “It claims to know everything but on October 7 the enemy saw nothing,” he said.

The Zionist entity has its own reading of where Hamas now stands. In September, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Hamas “as a military formation no longer exists”. Bruce Hoffman, a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the Zionist offensive has dealt a “grievous but not a crushing blow” to Hamas.

Hamas has controlled Gaza and run its institutions single-handedly since 2007, after winning a legislative election a year earlier and crushing its Palestinian rivals Fatah in street battles. Now, most of Gaza’s institutions have either been damaged or destroyed. The war has left no part of Gaza safe from bombardment: Schools turned into shelters for the displaced have been hit, as have healthcare facilities.

Hundreds of thousands of children have not gone to school in nearly a year, while universities, power plants, water pumping stations and police stations are no longer operational. By mid-2024, Gaza’s economy had been reduced to a “less than one-sixth of its 2022 level,” according to a UN report that said would take “decades to bring Gaza back” to its pre-Oct 7 state. — AFP

The collapse has fueled widespread discontent among Gaza’s 2.4 million people, two-thirds of whom were already poor before the war, according to Mukhaimer Abu Saada, a political researcher at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. “The criticism is harsh,” he told AFP. His colleague Jamal Al-Fadi branded the Oct 7 attack as “political suicide for Hamas”, which has now “found itself isolated”.

Hamas political bureau member Bassem Naim dismissed the assessment. “While some may not agree with Hamas’ political views, the resistance and its project continue to enjoy widespread support,” said Naim, who like several other self-exiled Hamas leaders lives in Qatar. A poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in June showed that 67 percent of those surveyed in the Zionist-occupied West Bank believe that Hamas will eventually defeat the Zionist entity. In Gaza, that figure is lower at 48 percent. – AFP