What next for Hamas?

Ten days after the ceasefire Raji Sourani's rage still boils. He brushes aside my questions about Hamas rule, the execution of collaborators, and Palestinian prisoners in Israel. "Don't you understand the enormity of what has just happened?" Sourani says. "More than 2,000 people have just been killed." Israel "are butchering us, year after year".

Sourani is a lawyer who founded the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in 1995. He has won several international awards, including the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award and, most recently, the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “alternative Nobel”.

“They are destroying our lives,” he says. “Israel has to say what it wants. Twenty years ago they said, ‘We want peace and a two-state solution.’ We were supposed to have our state by May 4th, 1999. Instead the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem continues. There’s apartheid on the West Bank, and Gaza is under siege. They are strangling us, dehumanising us. We’ve had three wars in five years. We’re not allowed to treat our own water. We’re not allowed to treat our own sewage. We’re not allowed to move in and out. And Israel is supposed to be our victim? Israel needs protection from us? It’s Kafka. It’s absurd.”

Hatem Hassouna, a civil engineer and the owner of several destroyed factories, laments the sheer waste. "According to news reports, this war will cost Gaza $4 billion and Israel $3 billion," Hassouna says. In the 1990s Yasser Arafat predicted that Gaza would be the Singapore of the Middle East. "With $7 billion you could turn Gaza into Singapore. If Gazans had a decent life nobody would attack Israel."

An opinion poll in the immediate aftermath of the war showed that 54 per cent of Israelis opposed the August 26th ceasefire. They want their prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to “finish off” Hamas. In every war it’s the same illusion.

Racist rhetoric During this seven-week conflict, racist rhetoric reached new heights in Israel. Ayelet Shaked, a member of the Knesset from the party of the economics minister, Naftali Bennett, called for the mothers of Palestinian “terrorists” to be killed so they cannot give birth to more “little snakes”.

Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer on Arabic literature at Bar-Ilan University, wrote that the sisters and mothers of Palestinian “terrorists” should be raped. Moshe Feiglin, a deputy speaker of the Knesset and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, said the Israeli army should force Palestinians in Gaza to leave or kill them indiscriminately.

Netanyahu has tried to convince his people that “Hamas received nothing” in exchange for the ceasefire. Hamas claims Israel breached the ceasefire three times this week. Gazans fear the war could resume at any moment.

“I am very pessimistic,” says Dr Medhat Abbas, director general of the health ministry in Gaza. “The borders are not open. The siege is not lifted. Our salaries are not being paid. We hear that Netanyahu is refusing to resume negotiations [on a long-term truce]. And the drones are still flying over our heads.”

Support for Hamas never dips below 35 per cent, says Mkhaimar Abusada, professor of political science at Al-Azhar University. “Whenever there’s a war or a prisoner exchange their popularity shoots up, because people translate their anger towards Israel into support for the resistance.” But, he adds, Hamas’s popularity will fall if conditions don’t improve soon.

Paradoxically, Abusada adds, Hamas is more popular in the West Bank, where Palestinians are disillusioned with the corruption of Fatah and its failure to stand up to Israel, while many Gazans are nostalgic for the relative peace they knew under Fatah rule.

Unanimous support In dozens of interviews in Gaza this week support for “the resistance” was almost unanimous, even among those whose homes were destroyed or who lost close relatives.

Shehda Najjar, a 44-year-old labourer from the village of Khuza’a who was shot in the chin and shoulder by invading Israeli ground troops, is a rare exception. Like many older Palestinians, Najjar expressed affection for the Fatah leaders Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. “I don’t trust Hamas,” Najjar says. “They are protecting their own interests. The war was the fault of both sides: Israel and Hamas.”

How can Hamas proclaim victory when it obtained none of its goals? “That’s not the way we look at it,” says Ihab al-Ghussein of the government media office. “When you face one of the world’s most powerful militaries the best you can do is keep standing. You are small and weak, but you keep defending yourself and you win.”

Israel's long practice of hasbara, or propaganda, met its match in the images broadcast live around the world. The world watched Gaza as never before. Al-Ghussein notes that even the US administration now advocates the lifting of the siege, although he doesn't mention that Washington's conditions are the same as Israel's: the disarmament of Hamas and the return of the Gaza Strip to rule by Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. Both conditions are unacceptable to Hamas.

“We saw some new positions during the war, especially from Britain,” al-Ghussein says. “London threatened to stop weapons sales to Israel, and a cabinet minister resigned. Demonstrations and rallies showed us that people are putting pressure on their governments to stop supporting Israel. Israel is more isolated in the world.”

But if Israel's isolation is growing, Hamas's isolation is greater still. Its only two remaining friends, Qatar and Turkey, refuse to provide direct financial assistance, for fear of being accused of funding terrorists.

Are Hamas terrorists? Terrorism is defined as the indiscriminate killing of civilians. More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the July 8th-August 26th war between Israel and Hamas. Three-quarters of the Palestinian dead were civilians, more than 500 of them children. Sixty-five of the 72 Israelis who died were military. Yet Israel and the US continue to portray Hamas as the terrorist organisation. As pointed out by the United Nations Human Rights Council, under international law the disproportionate use of force is a war crime.

The Islamist group Hamas was founded in 1988 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated by Israel in 2004. It is part of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it prospered when that organisation was in the ascendant in Egypt. "When the Brotherhood were in power in Cairo everything was perfect for Hamas," says Abusada. Thousands of Gazans crossed every day at the border post with Egypt at Rafah. Hamas transported everything from missiles to milk, cattle and cars through tunnels under the border.

That changed when the Egyptian defence minister Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrew President Mohamed Morsi in July last year. “Hamas sided with Morsi and were inciting against el-Sisi,” Abusada says. “Egyptian authorities claim Hamas gives logistical support to radicals who are making almost daily attacks on the army and police in the Sinai peninsula.”

Egypt’s new president closed the tunnels and allows Palestinians to cross the border only under very specific conditions.

Hamas's former alliance with Iran, Syria and the Lebanese Hezbollah has also ended, as a result of the armed uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Some of the rebels are, like Hamas, part of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Hamas leader Khaled Mashal, who lived in exile in Damascus, left for Qatar, which supports the Syrian rebels, in 2012. Because Iran and Hezbollah are defending Assad, their close relations with Hamas collapsed.

“This is the first war we fought without Iran,” says the Hamas member Islam Shahwan, of the interior ministry. “Hamas is fine without Iran.”

Islamic State, the Sunni fundamentalist extremists who have taken over large portions of Syria and Iraq, and who decapitated a second American hostage this week, have labelled Hamas "infidels".

Hamas condemns Islamic State. “They claim to defend Muslims, but they are killing Muslims,” says al-Ghussein.

Pretext The emergence of Islamic State has provided Netanyahu with yet another pretext for refusing to grant Palestinians statehood. He equates Hamas with Islamic State – a statement that even the US administration finds laughable. With Islamic State entrenched in Syria and Iraq, there's a danger that it could spread to Jordan, Netanyahu reasons. So Israel cannot take the risk of creating a Palestinian state alongside Jordan.

Netanyahu rejects the suggestion by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, that UN, US or Nato troops should control the border between the West Bank and Jordan. In July Netanyahu said, “There can’t be a situation, under any agreement, in which we would relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan” – which is to say the West Bank. Israelis interpreted the statement to mean that Netanyahu will never consent to a Palestinian state.

In the meantime Gaza waits. Egypt and Norway have called for a donors’ conference in October, but potential participants want to see a proper truce agreement first. The six-month “unity government” that Fatah and Hamas established on June 2nd will expire in December.

Tense as relations are between Fatah (which runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank) and Hamas, they are in total agreement on Abbas’s plan to ask the United Nations Security Council on September 15th to impose a timeline for the end of Israeli occupation. If that fails, Abbas says, he will take Israel to the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza.

Most of Gaza’s 1.8m residents are “’48 Palestinians”, the 700,000 people who were driven out of their homes in Israel in 1948, after the Arab-Israeli War, and their descendants. It is they who have given Gaza its unique blend of rebelliousness and resilience.

Gazans believe that Israel wants to drive them into the sea. “I will not make the mistake my grandfather made in ’48,” says Hassouna, the businessman. “We may lose our sons, our money, our houses, but we will not leave.”

Two-state solution For decades, hopes for a two-state solution – an independent state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel – have been based on the assumption that Israel would relinquish control of the territories it occupied in 1967, as required by UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. With Israel continuing to steal land in the West Bank – it expropriated 400 hectares, the biggest land seizure in 30 years, last Monday – that looks increasingly unlikely.

The author and Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit says the problem is not 1967 – that is, the Six-Day War, which led to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Israel – but 1948, when the Palestinians were dispossessed by the creation of Israel. In other words, Palestinians will not give up their claim to all of British Mandate Palestine, so it is impossible to give them a state.

In the dusty streets and refugee camps of Gaza, many of the ’48 Palestinians have kept the deeds and keys to the houses their parents or grandparents fled 66 years ago.

The Abu Jiyaab brothers, 51-year-old Mohamed and 46-year-old Hussein, show me the black-painted key to their grandfather’s two-storey wooden home overlooking the Yassour Valley, between Ashdod and Ashkelon.

“He was a farmer with 100 dunams of land. He grew grapes and tomatoes and raised livestock,” says Mohamed. Three generations of the Abu Jiyaab family have known the bitter life of refugees, moving often, eking out a living from a grocery shop, or as employees of Fatah. The house their father, Abdel-Fattah, fled as a 12-year-old boy was torn down in the 1980s. The farm is now an Israeli military airport.

The key passes from eldest son to eldest son. “We tell our children, ‘This is your home in Yassour,’ ” Hussein says. “When I hold this key I hold my land.”

Right of return The Palestinians’ right of return, established by UN General Assembly resolution 194, is one of the most difficult issues blocking a peace agreement, for the return of hundreds of thousands of ’48 Palestinians and their progeny would end Israel’s aspiration to be the homeland of Jewish people.

Still, Palestinians cling to the dream. Mohamed and Hussein Abu Jiyaab and their siblings have 65 children. “They all want to go to Yassour,” says Hussein.

Yet a succession of Palestinian leaders – Arafat and Abbas for Fatah, Sheikh Yassin and Khaled Meshal for Hamas – have made it clear they would accept the West Bank and Gaza. "Khaled Meshal reconfirmed it to Mahmoud Abbas last week," says al-Ghussein. "We are ready to make a ceasefire for 1,000 years."

Israel never ceases to point out that Hamas’s charter calls for Israel’s destruction. But Hamas says it is capable of compromise.

“There are a lot of things in our charter that aren’t implemented,” says al-Ghussein. “You should look at what we say now. Our leaders have said for decades that if Israel gives us the ’67 lands there will be peace.”

“Operation Protective Edge” was by far the most devastating of three Israeli assaults on Gaza that were intended to uproot Hamas. The Islamist group’s mere survival is a victory for it. Hamas’s “street cred” with Palestinians and other Arabs has rarely been higher. There is growing international pressure to lift the seven-year-old siege of Gaza, which the UN has labelled collective punishment. But lifting the siege would strengthen Hamas, and Israel is determined not to give them that present.