Dissolving the Hamas Government: Beyond the Gaza File
Today, Hamas announced the dissolution of the governmental body that has administered the Gaza Strip, represented by the Government Emergency Committee headed by Mohammad al-Farra, in preparation for transferring administrative authority to the Palestinian National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, chaired by Eng. Ali Shaath. While this decision can be understood within the immediate context of Gaza or Palestinian politics, its significance extends well beyond these confines. It reflects broader regional realignments that are unfolding at an accelerating pace—developments in which Hamas, sooner or later, will inevitably have to define its place.
Gaza: The Crisis of Options and the Logic of Survival
At the domestic level, governing the Gaza Strip has become more politically costly for Hamas than at any previous stage. Given the unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe engulfing the territory, the movement’s options for administering Gaza have been reduced to virtually none. This is not only because Gaza’s physical infrastructure has been devastated, with approximately 70 percent of its territory remaining under Israeli military control and living conditions deteriorating to unprecedented levels of deprivation. It is equally because Hamas itself is confronting profound organizational challenges. The movement is struggling to preserve its political and military structures, maintain internal cohesion, and, perhaps most importantly, recover from the loss of a substantial portion of its civilian and social leadership during the war—individuals who had played indispensable roles in governing the Strip. Taken together, these pressures have transformed the administration of Gaza into a political liability whose costs now outweigh its strategic, political, popular, and even resistance-related returns.
From a tactical negotiating perspective, the decision can be interpreted as an attempt by Hamas to shift responsibility onto Israel by removing one of the principal justifications used to explain its failure to meet commitments regarding humanitarian relief and the entry of aid into Gaza. Yet the decision also represents a strategic choice concerning Hamas’s position during the transitional period and beyond. Through this step, the movement seeks not merely to participate in the transition itself but to secure a place within the political framework that will ultimately govern the Gaza Strip.
In practice, Hamas faced two principal strategic options.
The first was to insist on retaining administrative control over Gaza while arguing that Israel had failed to fulfill its obligations. Under this scenario, one possible outcome would have been preserving as much of the movement’s military and bureaucratic infrastructure as possible before the arrival of the Palestinian National Committee. However, this prospect appears increasingly remote after more than a year of negotiations, particularly given the absence of any international actor both willing and capable of supporting such an outcome. The alternative consequence of maintaining this position would be the continuation of Israeli military and humanitarian pressure until the remaining organizational capacity of Hamas is systematically dismantled, effectively excluding the movement from the post-war political order. Although this strategy has also imposed considerable costs on Israel and has failed to achieve its objectives after nearly three years of conflict, it nevertheless remains a plausible and potentially existential threat to Hamas’s political future.
The second option—which Hamas now appears to have adopted—was to pre-empt this trajectory by transferring administrative responsibility to the National Committee while simultaneously negotiating an indirect role within the emerging governance structure through its civilian networks and local elites inside Gaza. Such an approach would gradually transform Hamas from a movement possessing a clearly defined politico-military structure into an ideologically aligned administrative current operating within a broader national institutional framework.
Even this strategy carries significant uncertainties. Its success depends on the willingness of Hamas-affiliated elites to engage pragmatically with the new governing structure and gradually integrate into it, as well as on the capacity of the new administration itself to absorb these actors without provoking institutional paralysis or renewed political confrontation. Nevertheless, both possibilities appear considerably less risky for Hamas than insisting on retaining formal administrative authority and remaining the primary public face of governance in Gaza.
Equally important will be the approach adopted by the new administration in its engagement with international actors regarding Hamas’s weapons. This issue is likely to define the future relationship between the two sides. Should the administration pursue a coercive and humiliating disarmament process aimed at dismantling Hamas’s organizational infrastructure, the transition would almost certainly become contentious, undermining administrative continuity and complicating governance in Gaza. By contrast, a more gradual and less coercive approach would create greater opportunities for cooperation, facilitate Hamas’s political retreat from direct governance, and improve the prospects for a more orderly institutional transition.
The Emerging Regional Order and Alignment with the Nearest Regional Coalition
Viewed through a broader regional lens, Hamas’s decision appears to extend beyond calculations confined to Gaza itself. Rather, it can be understood as a response to an emerging regional trajectory being shaped by a number of Middle Eastern states. The recent war against Iran has prompted several regional powers to reconsider the architecture of regional order, increasingly favoring a model in which the region is managed by its own states rather than through external intervention. At the core of this emerging alignment lies what may be described as a doctrine of “minimum collective security,” founded on the shared perception that Israel, together with a number of its regional and international partners, now constitutes the principal challenge to that objective.
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan constitute the principal pillars of this emerging regional grouping. Despite differences in their broader strategic agendas, these states increasingly converge in viewing Israel’s regional posture—and its perceived attempts to draw the Middle East into prolonged instability—as representing one of the most serious strategic challenges since the establishment of the Israeli state. They also increasingly perceive themselves, either today or in the foreseeable future, as potential targets of Israeli pressure or of the regional instability that could enable Israel to consolidate additional political and territorial gains.
This emerging bloc has sought to expand its regional reach by drawing additional states into its framework. Syria is expected to become part of this arrangement through a gradual process of political rehabilitation, while Egypt and Jordan remain important prospective partners. Nevertheless, ideological differences and regional strategic calculations continue to shape the degree to which Cairo and Amman may ultimately integrate into such an alignment, despite sharing many of its broader assessments of regional dynamics. Iran, although positioned outside this emerging coalition, remains the closest external actor to it in terms of certain overlapping strategic interests, albeit on a limited basis.
The principal objective of these states is to preserve the highest possible degree of regional stability. Their efforts to contain the recent confrontation with Iran reflected this broader strategic approach. Within this framework, stability is understood not merely as the absence of armed conflict but as the essential political infrastructure required to reconstruct a new regional order. The defining characteristic of this envisioned order is the consolidation of political authority within stable, centralized, and sovereign states.
Achieving such an order requires one of the defining characteristics of statehood: the monopoly over the legitimate use of force. Consequently, this regional vision increasingly seeks to neutralize non-state actors, quasi-state organizations, armed factions, and militias by integrating or transforming them within formal state institutions. Similar approaches are already evident in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and Palestine now appears increasingly likely to become part of this broader regional trajectory.
These states may not fully endorse every mechanism currently being discussed to weaken armed movements through understandings involving Israel, including those emerging in Lebanon or those being promoted for Gaza. Nevertheless, they broadly support the underlying objective of restricting the independent military capabilities of such actors and redefining their role within formal state institutions. Whereas Israel seeks the outright destruction of these movements and the dismantling of their social foundations, this emerging regional coalition appears to favor a different approach: weakening these organizations sufficiently to facilitate their gradual reintegration into state structures, thereby reducing political polarization and minimizing the risk of future instability.
Against this backdrop, Hamas’s decision should not be interpreted solely as a response to Gaza’s immediate internal realities. It also reflects adaptation to an emerging regional order and to the strategic preferences of several of the states with which the movement maintains its closest relationships. The regional model currently taking shape is one centered exclusively on sovereign national institutions. Whether Hamas will ultimately integrate into the existing Palestinian Authority remains uncertain. The Authority itself suffers from profound structural and political weaknesses, while the governance model it has represented has lost much of its credibility among Palestinians. By contrast, the institutional framework now being proposed for Gaza may eventually serve as the nucleus of a broader Palestinian national structure into which Hamas could gradually be incorporated under expanded regional sponsorship.
Conclusion
Hamas’s decision to dissolve its governing authority in Gaza is closely linked to the severe narrowing of its domestic options, the unprecedented conditions facing the Gaza Strip, and the movement’s own political and military circumstances. At the same time, however, it represents a broader strategic calculation aimed at preserving Hamas’s relevance within a region that is actively redefining its political and security architecture, while positioning the movement within a potential new Palestinian institutional framework.
Whether this strategy ultimately succeeds will depend on the ability of both regional and Palestinian actors to overcome competing agendas and counter the alternative political arrangements that Israel and its allies are seeking to promote, whether within individual states or across the wider region. It will also depend on their capacity to reconcile competing priorities in pursuit of a broader regional vision capable of restructuring political authority while preserving a minimum level of regional stability. In this sense, the dissolution of Hamas’s governing apparatus should not be viewed simply as an administrative adjustment or a tactical concession. Rather, it reflects the movement’s attempt to adapt to an emerging regional order in which the future of non-state actors is increasingly defined by their ability to transform themselves into participants within formal state institutions rather than remain autonomous centers of political and military authority.