With no clear leader coming to the fore, questions remain about how the devastated territory will be managed
After six months of wAr between Israel and Hamas, a question hangs not only over the fate of the devastated Gaza Strip, but also over the leadership of the millions of Palestinians and their aspirations for statehood.
Hamas, which is committed to destroying Israel and which triggered the conflict with its unprecedented October 7 attack, holds a lead in opinion polls. But the Israeli leadership has said it will not relent until it has broken the Islamist faction, which the U.S. also sees as a terrorist group.
Hamas’ main rival is largely secular Fatah, which leads the Palestinian National Authority that runs fragments of the Israeli-occupied West Bank under 30-year-old accords and has U.S. support to run Gaza after the war. But the conflict has only deepened Fatah’s legitimacy crisis after hemorrhaging support for decades.
No individual has a mass following. Closest comes Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader serving five life sentences for murder in an Israeli jail. Behind him comes Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political leader based in Qatar.
Mahmoud Abbas, the 88-year-old PA president elected 18 years ago, has support in the single digits. More than 80 percent of Palestinians want him to resign.
“ The current war has only sharpened the PA’s legitimacy deficit,” Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs, told Newsweek.
“After October 7—even if one is to adjust for the customary spike in Hamas’ popularity during the war— the PA’s credibility among Palestinians has plummeted as it is seen as passive and ineffectual, with no ability to impact the course of the war or bring about its conclusion,” he said.
Photograph by MAHMUD HAMS
The Palestinian Authority’s Fall
A critical question will be who rules Gaza when the fighting stops? The U.S. wants that to be the PA. Israel is considering imposing military rule.
Neither of those options would provide political representation for Palestinians, said Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor who advised on Arab-Israeli negotiations during the Oslo peace process of the early 1990s. At that time, an agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization produced rare hope that two states could co-exist.
“Only a revived, democratic PLO can lead the Palestinians effectively on obtaining their rights,” Khal-idi told Newsweek.
The PLO breakthrough came under iconic Palestinian guerrilla commando-turned-statesman Yasser Arafat, who also led Fatah and became the first PA president. But talks on statehood stagnated and a new Palestinian uprising erupted. By the time Arafat died in 2004, the PA faced accusations of misrule
