CAIRO: The Zionist entity’s military campaign to eradicate Hamas in retaliation for the Oct 7 attack has weakened it by killing several of its leaders and thousands of fighters, and by reducing swaths of the territory it rules to rubble. But the Palestinian militant group has not been crushed outright, and a year on from its unprecedented attack on the Zionist entity, an end to its hold over Gaza remains elusive.

According to data provided by the Gaza health ministry, the Zionist offensive has killed more than 41,000 people, the majority civilians. In one of the biggest blows to the militant movement since it was founded in 1987 during the Palestinian intifada uprising, Hamas’s leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran on July 31.

Both Hamas and its backer Iran accused the Zionist entity of killing Haniyeh, though the Zionist entity has not commented. After Haniyeh’s death, Hamas named Yahya Sinwar, whom the Zionist entity accuses of masterminding the Oct7 attack, as its new leader. On the Gaza battlefield, Zionist forces have aggressively pursued both Sinwar and Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, whom the Zionist entity says it killed in an air strike. Hamas says Deif is still alive.

“Commander Mohammed Deif is still giving orders,” a source in Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, told AFP on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to media on the matter. A senior Hamas official who also asked not to be named described Sinwar, who has not been seen in public since the start of the war, as a “supreme commander” who leads “both the military and political wings” of Hamas.

“A team is dedicated to his security because he is the enemy’s number one target,” the official said.

A senior Hamas official acknowledged that “several thousand fighters from the movement and other resistance groups died in combat”. Despite its huge losses, the source in the group’s armed wing still gloated over the intelligence and security failure that the Oct 7 attack was for the Zionist entity. “It claims to know everything but on October 7 the enemy saw nothing,” he said.

The Zionist entity has its own reading of where Hamas now stands. In September, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Hamas “as a military formation no longer exists”. Bruce Hoffman, a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the Zionist offensive has dealt a “grievous but not a crushing blow” to Hamas.

Hamas has controlled Gaza and run its institutions single-handedly since 2007, after winning a legislative election a year earlier and crushing its Palestinian rivals Fatah in street battles. Now, most of Gaza’s institutions have either been damaged or destroyed. The war has left no part of Gaza safe from bombardment: Schools turned into shelters for the displaced have been hit, as have healthcare facilities.

Hundreds of thousands of children have not gone to school in nearly a year, while universities, power plants, water pumping stations and police stations are no longer operational. By mid-2024, Gaza’s economy had been reduced to a “less than one-sixth of its 2022 level,” according to a UN report that said would take “decades to bring Gaza back” to its pre-Oct 7 state.

The collapse has fueled widespread discontent among Gaza’s 2.4 million people, two-thirds of whom were already poor before the war, according to Mukhaimer Abu Saada, a political researcher at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. “The criticism is harsh,” he told AFP. His colleague Jamal Al-Fadi branded the Oct 7 attack as “political suicide for Hamas”, which has now “found itself isolated”.

Hamas political bureau member Bassem Naim dismissed the assessment. “While some may not agree with Hamas’ political views, the resistance and its project continue to enjoy widespread support,” said Naim, who like several other self-exiled Hamas leaders lives in Qatar. A poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in June showed that 67 percent of those surveyed in the Zionist-occupied West Bank believe that Hamas will eventually defeat the Zionist entity. In Gaza, that figure is lower at 48 percent. – AFP