By launching the war against Israel from the small Gaza Strip it controls, Hamas imposed itself on the entire occupied Palestinian territory and marginalized a Palestinian Authority that is now viewed by the majority as a “burden,” experts say. .
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With its “Al-Aqsa Flood,” a coordinated land, sea and air attack – a first for the Palestinian armed factions – the Islamist movement positioned itself “as a Palestinian reference partner capable of advancing the political and military agenda dictate.” “Xavier Guignard, specialist in the occupied territories, told AFP.
For this Noria Center researcher, the situation changed radically on Saturday with the attack that has so far claimed 1,200 lives on the Israeli side – the reprisals in Gaza have claimed more than 1,000 lives.
Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union, “carried out an unprecedented operation and managed to completely conceal its preparations for several months,” he reports.
A tactic that is disproportionate to “everything we have seen in the occupied West Bank for a year and a half: the outbreak of limited clashes, small armed groups whose ideological scope and scope of action are difficult to understand,” he assures.
“Potemkin authority”
The Palestinian Authority, which emerged from the 1993 Oslo Accords and was supposed to disappear to make way for a Palestinian state pending in return for recognition of Israel, has lost its footing.
In Gaza, where Hamas forcibly expelled them in 2007, and even in the occupied West Bank, where its President Mahmoud Abbas sits, whose mandate officially expired in 2009.
In September, a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that the Palestinian Authority had become a “burden” for 62% of Palestinians, while 58% of them said they were in favor of “a return to clashes and an armed movement “. Intifada.
For Mr. Guignard, “the agency can continue to exist as a “Potemkin agency” without playing the slightest role, but this is fundamentally the political project it embodies – security cooperation with Israel and control of the population. Palestinian conflict for the good of Israel, which has suffered a lasting blow.
And although this choice of cooperation has been criticized, “Hamas now appears to have fully committed itself to the voice of unlimited confrontation, renouncing its role as ruler in Gaza and the modus vivendi with Israel,” adds Hugh Lovatt, researcher at European Council, Added for Foreign Relations (ECFR).
On Tuesday evening, Hamas’ green flags could even fly in the heart of Ramallah, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. During a demonstration in support of the Gaza Strip, dozens of Palestinians proclaimed their support for Hamas.
“All of Ramallah is Hamas,” they shouted, before launching slogans in praise of Yahya Sinouar and Mohammed Deif, leaders of Hamas’s armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades.
“The only role is to ask for help”
But the confrontation is not limited to the borders of the Gaza Strip or the Hamas camp.
In the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967 and now dotted with settlements and checkpoints, clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers have left at least 28 Palestinians dead and 130 injured since Saturday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
President Mahmoud Abbas – who has been the voice of peaceful resistance for the establishment of a state of Palestine for decades and continues to denounce violence – has hardly been heard since the war began.
In a statement, he recalled “the right of Palestinians to defend themselves against settler and occupying terrorism.”
The secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which brings together all Palestinian movements except Hamas and Islamic Jihad, said that “the Palestinian leadership is in contact with leaders around the world to end the war” and ” to allow food to enter the country.” and medicine to Gaza.”
But, recalls Palestinian political scientist Jihad Harb, “the Palestinian Authority does not control Gaza, nor the Hamas militants, and does not even have influence over Israel, so the only role it can play at this stage is to ask for aid to Gaza to ask.” “