On 18 August Hamas accepted a new ceasefire proposal for the war in Gaza. The deal, which had just been presented by Egypt and Qatar and closely echoed earlier proposals shaped by the United States that Israel had backed without approving, called for the release of ten of the remaining twenty living Israeli captives in exchange for a sixty-day truce. Unlike previous such proposals, Hamas did not request any changes to the document and accepted it within hours. So far, Israel has not accepted the proposal.
Many observers have interpreted Hamas’s immediate endorsement as a sign of weakness, if not desperation. In this reading, after nearly two years of unremitting Israeli bombardment and siege of Gaza, the assassination of Hamas’s top leaders, and devastating attacks on the group’s allies around the region, including Iran and Hezbollah, Hamas has few options left.
But Hamas’s rapid acceptance of the deal may be as much a strategic ploy as a symptom of duress. After nearly two years of war, Hamas’s political organization has suffered severe blows and its remit over war-torn Gaza is tenuous. Yet despite the growing devastation of Gaza, Hamas’s fighters have shown continued strength. Since the spring of 2025, they have stepped up offensive attacks on Israeli forces across the strip, including a large-scale assault on an Israeli base on 20 August, and other operations in June and July in which multiple Israeli soldiers were killed.
At the same time, Hamas has increased coordination with other armed groups in Gaza and replenished its ranks, even amid the widespread starvation of the population. Behind its resilience is an evolution in its approach to the war that has further raised the stakes and that could make Israel’s controversial new campaign to seize Gaza City a military, as well as humanitarian, disaster.
To understand Hamas’s survival strategy, it is crucial to trace the way its aims have evolved. When it launched its 7 October attacks, Hamas’s Gaza leadership assumed that the operation would quickly draw in allies across the region, and cause Palestinians and even the Arab public to collectively rise up. In essence, it expected a replay of May 2021, when Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem provoked an unprecedented collective response: Palestinians rose up across the West Bank and in Israeli cities, Hezbollah and other allied groups fired rockets from Lebanon and Syria, and Hamas itself launched an intense barrage of rockets from Gaza. October 7 was intended to replicate this joining of the fronts but on a much larger scale.
After nearly 700 days of war, those aims have dramatically failed. Following Hamas’s unilateral attack from Gaza, Palestinians in Israel did not mobilise, while those in the West Bank found themselves surrounded by an intense Israeli crackdown. Most of Hamas’s regional allies remained on the sidelines. Despite its formidable arsenal in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah sought to contain rather than expand the conflict; then, in September 2024, it succumbed to Israel’s pager operation and decapitation of its leadership. In December, the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime closed off crucial military supply routes.
The collapse of these external fronts was compounded by the difficulties Hamas faced in Gaza. After breaking the ceasefire in March 2025, Israel initially focused on aerial bombardments, keeping ground incursions strictly limited. The lack of fighting in urban centres prevented Hamas from taking the initiative, often leaving it a passive bystander to the massacres of Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israeli forces reoccupied large parts of the strip. Combined with the Israeli cut-off of all aid in March, the new offensive greatly increased the ordeal in Gaza and Gazans began to publicly protest against Hamas.
Hamas’s forces in Gaza began to change their approach. On 20 April a small group of fighters staged an ambush from a tunnel in Beit Hanoun, an Israeli-held “buffer zone.” Using rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs, they overturned an Israeli military vehicle, killed an Israel soldier, and left several others wounded. Since then, groups of fighters have been ramping up similar actions across Gaza. On 24 June, fighters from the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, killed seven Israeli soldiers in Khan Younis. On 7 July, again in Beit Hanoun, a group of fighters assaulted a convoy of tanks just a few metres from the border, killing five soldiers and wounding fourteen others. On 15 July, in the northern enclave of Jabaliya, three more soldiers were killed in an ambush targeting an Israeli engineering team that had been sent to clear roads for Israeli forces. On 22 July, in Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the strip, a Hamas operation targeted an Israeli military convoy and a Merkava tank.
In recent weeks, these pressure attacks have become bolder. By mid-August, when the Israeli army resumed its incursions in into residential areas, Hamas’s offensive operations were multiplying in eastern Gaza City, especially in the neighbourhoods of Tuffah, Zaytoun and Shujaiyya. The al-Qassam Brigades have also been active in the south, as the unusual 20 August attack on an Israeli military encampment in Khan Younis attests: no fewer than eighteen fighters attacked the base with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at close range. Such a large-scale operation, which Israeli officials concluded may have been an attempt to capture new soldiers, would have required significant preparation, coordination, and intelligence.
In fact, these operations are part of a tactical reassessment by Hamas, which has sought to turn Israel’s expanded war aims to its own advantage. Despite Israel’s overwhelmingly stronger military resources, Hamas has drawn on the potential of asymmetrical warfare and the singular determination of its fighters. When Israeli soldiers began to limit ground incursions in urban areas, Hamas fighters began to seek out and target them in the “buffer zones.” As Israeli officials have acknowledged, Hamas was able to adapt and rebuild its forces in areas that Israeli forces had previously “cleared.”
Now, as the Israeli government has set out to seize and control large parts of Gaza City, Israeli forces must contend with urban guerrilla warfare in a terrain that Hamas knows by heart. These tactics could prove especially effective in the labyrinthine ruins of Gaza City, where Hamas is believed to still have a significant network and where Israeli forces have until now mostly avoided major incursions.
Even as Hamas has been cut off from external support and come under growing pressure in Gaza, its fighters have shown surprising strength. Hamas’s ability to renew its manpower has long been a defining feature of the group, which has for years managed to maintain a very strong foothold in Palestinian society even after severe setbacks. The current war is no exception. The loss of a significant number of top leaders — including Yahya Sinwar, the overall leader of Hamas in Gaza and mastermind of the 7 October attacks, Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, and Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing — has had little visible effect on its capacity to fight.
The overall manpower of Hamas’s brigades remains unclear. In the summer of 2024, Israeli sources claimed that some 17,000 Hamas militants had been killed since October 2023, including “half of the leadership” of Hamas’s military. But as of May 2025, Israeli intelligence officials assessed that just 8900 named fighters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad had been killed, according to a classified database newly revealed by the Guardian and the Israeli-Palestinian news organization +972 Magazine. US intelligence officials concluded in January that Hamas may have added as many as 15,000 additional fighters since the war began. Gazan officials and the United Nations do not distinguish between civilians and fighters in their total count of fatalities, but if the Israeli database is correct, it would mean that more than 80 per cent of the 53,000 believed to have been killed as of May 2025 were civilians.
Paradoxically, Israel’s relentless escalation may be fuelling Hamas’s resilience. To an extent, the growing desperation of Gaza’s civilians has fed public opposition to Hamas. After Israel’s total aid blockade began in March, Gazans began staging anti-Hamas protests in the northern part of the strip, calling for the immediate entry of aid and for Hamas to relinquish power. Hamas’s response fluctuated between allowing discontent and repressing the demonstrations. Although Hamas has always faced significant opposition to its rule in Gaza, public protests have previously been rare. Their appearance in March appears to be a direct response to the extremity of the situation in Gaza amid the Israeli cut-off of aid.
Opposition to Hamas has also been encouraged by Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and has tried to exploit Gazan anger and position itself to govern postwar Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has advanced its own strategy to fragment the social fabric, including by backing and arming an anti-Hamas militia in Rafah controlled by Yasser Abu Shabab, a strongman and drug trafficker who escaped from a Hamas prison in October 2023 and who also has ties to Fatah. According to UN officials and international aid workers, the Abu Shabab militia has been looting aid convoys.
The strategy appears to be aimed at making Gazans believe that Hamas is stealing their food — as Israeli officials have long claimed, without furnishing evidence — and to sow chaos. For Israel, it also may be a way to impose the idea that it can place its own men in a position of control and power in the enclave, in preparation for the “day after” in Gaza. After Israel’s arming of the militia was revealed in early June, Netanyahu publicly defended the practice. (“What’s wrong with this? It saves IDF soldiers’ lives,” he said.)
Yet this divide-and-conquer approach, combined with the relentless attacks on civilians, has also entrenched resistance among ordinary Gazans, who now perceive Israel as undertaking a war of extermination. In southern Gaza, the Abu Shabab militia is widely reviled, and Abu Shabab’s own family has disassociated itself from him and called for his death. Meanwhile, there are indications, including on social media, that growing numbers of young Palestinians with no prior training have been joining the al-Qassam Brigades and carrying out guerrilla actions. Although the intensive bombardments and the territorial division of almost the entire Gaza Strip has weakened the coordination between the groups of fighters, who are acting increasingly autonomously, it has not buried their capacity for action.
Another crucial factor in Hamas’s staying power is its tunnel network. Even now, after months of intense bombardment and the use of advanced technologies, Israeli forces have been unable to destroy significant parts of this underground city, allowing Hamas to continue to hide the remaining hostages and prisoners, protect its fighters, and provide bases for watching and attacking Israeli forces.
Israel’s inability to control the depths of the earth highlights the asymmetrical nature of the conflict, which increasingly pits sophisticated and highly expensive weapons systems, many of them acquired from Western countries, against ersatz, locally made rockets, explosives, and tunnels.
The recent Hamas ambushes have also raised growing concerns among Israeli military officials that more soldiers could be captured. In July, the army implemented the so-called Hannibal directive, which requires the military to use all means necessary to prevent soldiers from being taken by the enemy, even if such use of force leads to soldiers’ death. Indeed, out of the 205 hostages and prisoners that have been released since the war began, only eight have been freed as a result of Israeli–American rescue operations — and these six were in buildings above ground and not in underground tunnels. On 8 June, an Israeli military operation to rescue four hostages from a building in the Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza led to the massacre of 274 civilians, among them sixty children.
Israel’s inability to destroy Hamas’s tunnels has led increasingly to efforts to obliterate everything above ground in Gaza. As early as October 2023, Israel began targeting displacement camps, schools and hospitals with the aim of turning the population against Hamas and forcing surrender. Although that objective failed, the Israeli government has doubled down on this strategy since resuming the war in March, enforcing a total cut-off of aid for eleven weeks, and then, starting in late May, taking effective control of aid delivery through the establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has led to hundreds of Gazans being killed by Israeli forces at humanitarian distribution points, one of which an IDF soldier described to Israeli newspaper Haaretz in June as a “killing field.”
Hamas has long emphasised the sacrificial dimension of its liberation project, which has helped it push Gaza back to the centre of the Palestinian cause. Unlike their counterparts in other Palestinian regions, Gazans are primarily attached to their land not because of their historical presence there but because of its status as a place of refuge. Almost all Gazans are descendants of refugees from 1948, when some 250,000 Palestinians were expelled to Gaza from their towns and villages during Israel’s founding, and they have passed down stories of past massacres and dispossessions. Hamas sees the current war as part of that tradition.
In light of the extraordinary privations and mass killing of Gaza’s civilian population in the current war, Hamas’s external leader, Khaled Meshaal, has likened Gaza to Algeria, where independence was achieved only after the death of more than a million civilians.
Although Hamas’s leaders counted on regional allies joining with them in the war after 7 October, from the outset they viewed Hamas’s Gaza organisation as autonomous. It did not share the specific planning and details of the 7 October attacks with other members of the axis and it was the sole instigator. In compensation, Hamas’s brigades have relied on — and increased — ties to other militant groups within Gaza, some of which were already established before 7 October.
Particularly important has been Hamas’s longstanding entente with Islamic Jihad. In 2022, Israel sought to divide the two groups by launching a heavy campaign exclusively against Islamic Jihad. At the time, the strategy appeared to work, with Hamas lying low and many Israeli officials concluding that it was weak. In retrospect, Hamas’s decision to stay out of the 2022 confrontation appears to have been a division of labour agreed upon with Islamic Jihad — one that allowed Hamas more freedom to prepare for the 7 October attacks.
Since the war began, Hamas has remained closely allied with Islamic Jihad, which as of this summer continued to hold one of the remaining Israeli captives, Rom Braslavski. Coordination between the groups’ armed wings has also grown, including in a number of recent joint attacks in Khan Yunis. These attacks have in part been orchestrated by the joint operations room, an organization created by Hamas and Islamic Jihad back in 2006, but which officially emerged years later, during the 2018 Great March of Return, a series of popular protests by Gazans on the Gazan–Israeli border. Today, the joint operations room brings together twelve Palestinian armed factions — including, alongside Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Saraya al-Quds, al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, Mujahideen Brigades, and Omar al-Qasim Brigades — and has become the place where many decisions about the war and negotiations are made.
In recent weeks, there are signs that this broader front may be crumbling. Members of the joint operations room have called on Hamas to end the war. During a meeting with the head of Egyptian intelligence, some of these factions also criticised Hamas’s procrastination on reaching a ceasefire — which may account for Hamas’s immediate approval of the 18 August proposal without amendments. Still, these cracks in the coalition have not caused a shift in the brigades’ determination to fight. There is actually a consensus among the factions that surrender or capitulation is unthinkable.
As the core members of the Qassam Brigades see it, only continued attacks on Israeli troops will force Netanyahu to agree to another ceasefire and end the siege. In their view, it was military pressure by Hamas — including significant setbacks for Israel in Rafah and in Jabaliyya in November and December of 2024, as well as knife attacks in both Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun that caused the deaths of several soldiers in January 2025 — that finally led Netanyahu to sign the US-backed ceasefire in mid-January. By continuing to launch major operations, the Qassam Brigades hope to increase the pressure on Netanyahu, including from his own military. One such case was the 7 July killing of the five Israeli soldiers in Beit Hanoun, which caused some Israeli military and political figures, both on the right and in the opposition, to press the government to allow soldiers to return to their camps and to accelerate efforts to reach a ceasefire.
After nearly two years of war, the strengths and weaknesses of Hamas are almost the inverse of Israel’s. Where Israel has extraordinary military resources but has struggled to find the tens of thousands of additional troops it needs for its massive Gaza City invasion, Hamas, despite huge losses of forces, continues to recruit new fighters. Meanwhile, as Hamas expands operations, Israel is also losing more soldiers on the ground. It also faces increasing difficulty in getting reservists to show up for duty.
The 18 August ceasefire proposal is not new. Based on a previous proposal put forward by US president Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, it calls for the total withdrawal of Israeli troops, and, like the January ceasefire, allows Israel to resume its war against Gaza at the end of the sixty-day period. Hamas had accepted earlier versions of this proposal even before its response to the new one on 18 August. Netanyahu has approached the ceasefire proposals not as negotiations, but as a way to achieve what Israel has been unable to through force. In late August, he and other Israeli government officials called instead for an all-or-nothing deal that negotiators have said is unreachable.
Netanyahu is now trying to push Israeli forces into the tunnels of Gaza City, despite strong opposition from the Israeli military. The army has said a takeover could take more than a year to complete and would be highly dangerous, and that it prefers to use every possibility to negotiate before undertaking such an assault. In 2024, Netanyahu and the military establishment sought to vanquish Hamas’s regional allies, particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon. But now, with the military’s continued failure to achieve its stated objectives against Hamas itself, it has stepped up attacks in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. By promoting its actions on these other fronts, including against Iran in June, the government can downplay the actual situation in Gaza. Increasingly, an enormous gap has emerged between the image of the conflict the Israeli government is trying to convey and the reality on the ground. •
This article first appeared in Foreign Affairs. © 2025 Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency
