Differences in leadership
Hamas Politburo calls for an end to the war
December 20, 2023, 11:29 a.m
A conflict is brewing within Hamas. While the Islamist militants continue to engage in fierce battles with Israel, their political arm is talking about an end to the war and with Palestinian rivals about the aftermath.
After more than two months of war in the Gaza Strip, according to a media report, there are increasing differences within the leadership of the Islamist Hamas about the future course. While the military wing of Hamas, led by Jihia Sinwar, continues to fight with Israel’s army, representatives of Hamas’ political wing spoke about an end to the war and with Palestinian rivals about the aftermath, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
“We want the war to end,” Husam Badran, a member of Hamas’ political bureau, told the newspaper in Doha. “We don’t fight just because we want to fight. We are not supporters of a zero-sum game,” Badran told the newspaper on the outskirts of the Qatari capital. While the Hamas political leadership there is now in talks with its Palestinian rivals about how the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank should be governed after the end of the war, the militant wing under Sinwar continues to wage war in Gaza. Such negotiations threatened to spiral into conflict with Sinwar’s militant wing, it said. “We want to establish a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem,” Badran told the newspaper.
The Hamas leader’s comments marked a significant turnaround from Oct. 7, when the militant wing led a massacre in Israel. On the Israeli side, more than 1,200 people were killed. Israel responded with massive air strikes and a ground offensive. According to the Hamas-controlled health authority, the number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip has risen to almost 20,000 since the start of the war. The USA is relying on a revitalized and transformed Palestinian Authority (PA) under Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for the period after the Gaza war. The USA wants the PA, which rules in the West Bank, to take back control in the Gaza Strip.
Israel rejects this and accuses it of supporting terror. Hamas violently drove the autonomous authority out of the coastal strip in 2007. Abbas heads the PA as well as the secular Fatah faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization. Fatah and Hamas are the two largest Palestinian organizations – and bitter rivals. Some representatives of the Fatah party expressed understanding for Hamas’ terrorist attack in Israel. There have been reconciliation talks between the two groups for several years. Recent talks between Hamas’ political leadership and Fatah have led to tensions with Sinwar, it said. Sinwar does not want Hamas to continue to rule Gaza, but believes that the war is not yet lost. It is too early for a compromise.