What Hamas Wants in Postwar Gaza

[Richard D]

My summary: A fundamentalist Shiite Islamist state, from the river to the sea.
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On May 6, in an effort to forestall an all-but-certain Israeli operation in Rafah, Hamas leaders said that they might be prepared to accept a hostage-for-prisoners agreement with Israel. Coming after weeks of stonewalling by Hamas, the announcement raised hopes in Washington that some kind of deal might still be reached that could free dozens of hostages and bring about a pause in Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip. But even now, it remained unclear how committed Hamas was to carrying out this deal, or whether it was simply seeking a means to preserve its Rafah stronghold, where Israel believes its remaining brigades and Gaza-based leadership are holed up.

After seven months of war in Gaza, the Israel-Hamas conflict has caused untold devastation to the more than two million Gazans that Hamas claims to represent and has all but destroyed Hamas’s governance project in the strip. It is worth asking two basic questions: What are Hamas’s goals? And what is its strategy for achieving them?

With its heinous October 7 assault on Israel, Hamas sought to put itself and the Palestinian issue back at the center of the international agenda, even if that meant destroying much of Gaza itself. The attack was also meant to thwart a possible normalization pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would promote Palestinian moderates and sideline Hamas.

But Hamas’s leaders also have political aims that may at first seem counterintuitive. They are trying to relieve themselves of the sole burden of governing the Gaza Strip, which had become an impediment to achieving the group’s goal of destroying Israel. And as talks hosted by China in early May between Hamas and Fatah officials have underscored, the Hamas leadership is also trying to jump-start a process of reconciliation with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA), which Fatah controls, despite years of fierce hostility between the two groups.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/what-hamas-wants-postwar-gaza