A year later

The tragedy of Gaza’s destruction and the hope for a rebirth and renaissance

Today’s post is from Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who writes extensively on Gaza’s political and humanitarian affairs. 

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I was a ten-year-old child in Gaza when the Second Intifada began. Initially, the violence consisted of rock-throwing against Israeli positions, as well as some exchanges of small-arms fire between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. Over the next few months, however, the tempo and scale of the violence gradually increased, as did the extent of the death and destruction. 

I remember vividly the first time that an Israeli Apache helicopter struck targets in Gaza City, where my family lived. The thunderous sound of the gunships’ rotating blades dominated the skies and captivated the attention of the entire population, as did the sound of the heavy cannons and Hellfire missiles the helicopters rained down upon the Gaza Strip. Then came the naval gunboats, followed by weaponized, unmanned aerial drones, followed by tanks and ground incursions. The ultimate escalation took place when Israel began using F-15 and F-16 fighter jets to carry out heavily destructive airstrikes that killed and maimed dozens, wiping out entire buildings in a single run.

I experienced firsthand the consequences of this gradual escalation of violence, the trauma that planted seeds for long-lasting resentment and pain throughout the Gaza Strip. 

In the Fall of 2001, as I was walking home from the UNRWA middle school that my friends and I attended, Israeli fighter jets struck a Palestinian Authority building a few feet away from us, killing two of my friends and shaking me to my core. This particular incident caused me permanent asymmetric hearing loss from the concussive blast waves and remains one of my life’s defining moments.

Everyone in the Gaza Strip has stories like this. Everyone has grandparents, parents, children, or grandchildren who have experienced the trauma and hardships that have been a consistent thread from the 1948 Nakba¹ to today. 

Generations of Gazans — including my parents, who were born in a barebones refugee camp in Rafah to parents who had been displaced in 1948  — have never experienced stability, nationhood, prosperity, or a sense of control over their lives or the trajectory of their futures. Their traumas and difficult lived experiences inform the current generation’s actions, behavior, and thought processes, shaping the collective psyche and influencing Gazans’ perceptions of the complex and messy realities of today — just as the Jewish people’s history of persecution or the African American community's experience of slavery or the Native American peoples' tragedy inform these respective communities’ thinking and attitudes.

I have long been a proponent of agency, responsibility, and accountability, even within the imbalance of power that exists for the Palestinian people. However, a better future for Gaza and the Strip’s rejuvenation necessitates understanding past traumas and grievances, which need to be acknowledged for durable change and transformation to occur. Due to the meddling of multiple players over the decades, Gazans have been largely isolated and denied an opportunity to prosper, grow, and connect with the outside world.

Unprecedented violence, horror, and destruction

In the lead-up to the October 7 massacre, I had been tracking multiple developments that concerned me about the risk of Hamas embarking on a suicidal adventure to deal with its mounting problems in Gaza. 

First, there were large-scale protests in July and August of 2023 against the unemployment and horrid living conditions that have defined Hamas’s 17-year-long rule of the coastal enclave. Second, multiple sources in Gaza shared with me Qatar’s warning to Hamas that it would no longer receive monthly suitcases full of cash, a financial death sentence to Hamas’s fragile and heavily sanctioned government. Third, numerous reports indicated that Hamas viewed the Saudi-Israeli rapprochement as a potential existential threat to the Palestinian cause. In recent years, the Palestinian issue had plateaued and been increasingly sidelined by Arab focus on the threats from Iran and the need to work with Israel to contain Tehran’s nuclear program and menacing proxies.

Still, I never would have imagined that Hamas would be capable of an attack on the scale of October 7.

It was Friday night, October 6, in San Francisco, when I saw the attacks unfold; I was devastated and extremely concerned with what I knew was about to happen. I immediately realized the catastrophe that would be unleashed upon the people of Gaza, and that the Strip’s residents, including my immediate and extended family members, would suffer unprecedented consequences due to Hamas’s narrow and nefarious calculus. As the scale of the death of Israelis became apparent, and after hundreds of hostages were brought back to Gaza, it became clear that Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, and other hardliners in Gaza had effectively mounted a coup against the rest of Hamas’s political echelons — all of whom were outside of the Strip when the attack took place.

My worst fears were realized when three separate Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of my immediate and extended family members in the Gaza Strip, destroying my childhood homes and rendering my entire family homeless, along with over two million Gazans who were displaced throughout the narrow strip of land. My brother Mohammed and his wife stayed in northern Gaza, which was under an evacuation order, until they managed to leave in mid-November for southern Gaza, which was ostensibly designated as a safe zone but was not spared bombardment and attacks.

My brother’s four children, along with a few other families, moved multiple times in pursuit of safety, constantly surrounded by heart-stopping bombardment that nearly claimed their lives many times. This was exceptionally difficult for three-year-old Maria and two-year-old Ahmed, who were utterly confused as to why their normal daily life was fundamentally disrupted. They ran out of food and water, often having to resort to drinking salty, unsanitary water from polluted wells and boiling grass and eating bread, with no other substances to provide them nutrition. My brother kept in contact with me through an Israeli SIM card that bypassed the communications blackout imposed by Israel.

Hamas, Israel, and unspoken alliance

The October 7 attack was the climactic chapter of Hamas’s rise, the result of 37 years of growth and evolution with founding roots in the Gaza Strip. 

The offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood started as a religious and proselytizing organization that eventually pursued a more rigid Islamization agenda. Interestingly, the group operated under the watchful eyes of Gaza’s military governor before the emergence of a Palestinian Authority in the 1990s, a fact that points to potential early Israeli interest in the emergence of an Islamic rival to Yasser Arafat’s secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Israel’s calculus, however, would repeatedly backfire as Hamas carried out deadly suicide bombings in the 1990s, sabotaging the fragile yet viable Oslo Peace process and undermining the emergence of a Palestinian state led by the moderate Palestinian Authority, which had renounced violence and recognized Israel as a legitimate state. Years later, the desire to see a counterweight to the secular PLO backfired again when Hamas gradually took over the Strip after the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli settlements in 2005, turning Gaza into a “resistance” citadel from which attacks and activities against Israel were launched.

After Hamas forcibly and fully took over on June 14, 2007 (the very day of my political asylum interview in the United States), and after the first major war against the coastal enclave in 2008 failed to remove the group from power, the Israeli government showed a renewed interest in leveraging Hamas against the weak and isolated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. This became the unofficial policy of Benjamin Netanyahu, who would go on to become Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister. A well-intentioned (or perhaps nefarious) enabler of this policy was the state of Qatar. Doha has emerged as a consistent ideological backer of Islamist groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and has sought to bolster the organization’s grip on the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu loved Qatar’s role, through which he believed Hamas could be bought off with suitcases of cash. Hamas appreciated the lifeline from Doha, which enabled the terror group to keep its government alive.

Unfortunately, the informal alliance between Hamas and Netanyahu benefited both while harming Israelis and Palestinians alike. Hamas’s warlords were able to gain power and accumulate massive wealth while serving the agendas of Qatar, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the far-right in Israel. Meanwhile, the Netanyahu regime claimed that there were no viable partners to negotiate peace with, preventing the emergence of an independent Palestinian state, and used Hamas’s terrorism and control of Gaza to promote settlement expansions and the entrenchment of the occupation of the West Bank. The people of Gaza became largely aid-dependent, with 70 percent of the Strip’s population, before the current war, relying on some sort of international aid to stay afloat. Unemployment was regularly above 30 percent, with youth unemployment regularly surpassing 70 percent.

Nevertheless, Netanyahu thought that he could contain and manage the Israel and Palestine conflict, especially in Gaza, without having to make any concessions or work towards any meaningful resolution, while turning his attention toward normalizing relations with Sunni Arab countries to build an alliance against Iran.

A war of revenge and retribution

The unanticipated efficacy of the October 7 attack enraged Israeli military commanders, who felt humiliated that Hamas’s preparations were missed before their watchful eyes. They resented what they deemed a betrayal by Palestinians who failed to appreciate efforts by the Israeli military to improve the quality of life for people in Gaza with work permits and some commercial exchange. Additionally, Netanyahu went from claiming to be a security-centric leader to owning the worst security failure in Israel’s history, which led to the deadliest single-day attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

The Israeli military and Netanyahu were furious and felt they had to inflict maximum pain and damage on the people of the Gaza Strip. 

It didn’t help that there were hard-to-watch and shameful scenes of hostages being paraded around Gaza and abused by some civilians. This footage was used time and again to proclaim that all of Gaza is Hamas, that no innocent civilians exist in the Strip. The dehumanization of the Palestinian people in Gaza before the military campaign commenced was clearly meant to prime Israeli and global audiences for a war unlike any other that came before it, with two seemingly contradictory goals: destroying Hamas and returning the hostages.

Despite the initial humiliation, October 7 was a gift to Israeli far-right and extremist parties, including those in Netanyahu’s government, led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. The horrendous massacre was their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to push through the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank and the expansion of settlements, permanently preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state.

Israel’s entire military strategy seemed to be based on the hope that the people of Gaza could be expelled en masse through the north-to-south strategy, with over a million people in northern Gaza told to move south for safety. Extremist ministers, media personalities, and other leaders in Israeli society called for the “transfer” of Palestinians and a “new Nakba,” explicitly saying that the goal was to push Palestinians into northern Sinai and make them Egypt’s problem. Ecstatic fascist groups within Israel began fantasizing about resettling the Gaza Strip and started organizing massively attended conferences (endorsed by government ministers and officials) to plan for the settling of the Strip after the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. 

This is not hyperbole; these were their explicit, overt, and out-in-the-open sentiments that were broadcast for the entire world to see.

Egypt was horrified its supposed ally, Israel, openly calling for the relocation of two million Palestinians to its deeply troubled northern Sinai region, which had experienced a deadly insurgency by Al-Qaeda and ISIS-affiliated militants a few years prior. And when Egypt built multiple barriers along its border to prevent Palestinians from entering Egypt, the Netanyahu regime’s master plan failed. Israel had to carry out a highly destructive war of revenge with over 2.3 million people still largely within the territory. Some, myself included, put out proposals and pleas to Israeli officials to build small camps on the Israeli side of the border, right next to Gaza, that could house some Palestinians until the war was over and minimize civilian casualties, to no avail. Gazans were subjected to a series of evacuation orders, which would alternate based on geographically numbered blocks that were arbitrarily determined and selected by the IDF. This meant that hundreds of thousands of Gazans had to repeatedly flee, pushed from one area to another, making any sense of safety exceptionally elusive.

Hamas has become exceptionally vile, criminal, and nihilistic during this war, instructing its soldiers to fight in civilian clothes. Worse, its fighters have been explicitly engaging in firefights and attacks from civilian areas so as to maximize civilian casualties from Israeli retaliation, which Hamas hoped would delegitimize Israel and stop the war.

The Israeli army would often strike targets that had no military significance but caused numerous casualties among non-involved combatants, especially children who have paid the heaviest price throughout this war. After a year of being stuck between Hamas’s vile terrorism and Israel’s ruthless and relentless war of annihilation, the people of Gaza are utterly battered and exhausted. They are experiencing the worst chapter in Palestinian history, rivaling the 1948 Nakba. During this war, over two million people have been displaced from their homes, with 70 percent of Gaza largely destroyed.

The inevitability of Gaza’s rebirth and renaissance

Despite the cataclysmic death and destruction throughout the Gaza Strip, there are rays of hope, which have given me immense optimism that a different future awaits Gaza and its people, even if the trauma from the current war takes generations to overcome. Gaza’s small size and location overlooking the Mediterranean Sea afford it unique opportunities and distinct advantages that can be leveraged to rebuild the Strip into something truly promising, even auspicious.

What was exceptionally damaging about Hamas is that it sabotaged an opportunity to allow the Gaza Strip to become an effective model for Palestinian self-governance and an example of what an occupation-free West Bank could look like. Gaza should have been spared the destructive wars that distracted from its development so that it could reach its true potential as the crown jewel of a future Palestinian state. This is what “Islamic resistance” movements do: They waste Arab people’s potential, steal their resources, and use anti-Israel sentiments as Trojan horses to gain power, wealth, and control. The people of Gaza are aware of this and have been for years, even if they could not effectuate change to rid themselves of Hamas’s dictatorial military rule over them.

Accordingly, Hamas will never again be able to return to a situation like it did on October 6 and justify the failures with “resistance” slogans and empty promises of liberation and freedom. After this war, the extent of the destruction and damage that Gazans have experienced means that they will never again, under any circumstances, allow a rogue terror organization to hold them hostage in the name of fighting Israel. This is precisely why I am optimistic that Gaza’s battered population will rise and pursue nation-building, realizing the fraud that is the armed resistance against Israel narrative.

The next battle is not one with guns and explosives; it is a new endeavor of building, construction, and a true renaissance to shape the next chapter of the Palestinian people’s history in a world that is interconnected and interdependent. The future of the Palestinian people must be shaped by self-sufficiency and sustainability, without reliance on perpetual aid or handouts.

Gaza’s location could allow it to be a critical commercial link between Arab countries and Israel, while leveraging its airspace and maritime access to become an open part of Palestine, not a North Korea-like entity governed by an Islamist terrorist organization.

There are numerous mid-level technocrats, academics, business leaders, humanitarians, administrators, and patriots who are more than capable of effective governance and administration of Gaza’s affairs, who can play a vital role in transforming the coastal enclave into the pride and joy of the Palestinian people. Gaza’s borders are static and will not be changed by any amount of “resistance.” The Strip must instead become an anchor of stability for the Palestinian national project and the pursuit of freedom and liberation as the focus shifts to the West Bank, which is filled with illegal Jewish-only settlements and a choking military occupation.

This transformation is entirely attainable, but it requires an awakening among many Palestinians and their global allies that starts with a recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland in safety and security. This recognition does not negate the Palestinian people's equal right to safety and security. It requires that Palestinians are no longer used as pawns for ideologues and regional players, as they have been for the past 76 years. Most importantly, it requires the renunciation of armed resistance, which has harmed the Palestinians and provided excuses for their continued occupation and destruction, especially with the current Netanyahu regime of far-right extremists who depend on Palestinian violence for their very survival.

Indeed, the people of Gaza are done with Hamas and want nothing to do with Islamism, terrorism, or future suicidal adventurism, all of which have set their just and urgent aspirations back by decades. It’s time for Gaza to become the beating heart of a future Palestinian state and prove to Israel, and the entire world, that if given a fair opportunity, our people love life and want to prosper and thrive.

1. Or “catastrophe,” in reference to the displacement of 800,000 Palestinians when the State of Israel was established.