Over the last few weeks, a lot of ink has been spilled on the Trump administration’s “day after” plans for Gaza. Less attention, though, has been focused on evaluating what might happen to Gaza if Israel and Hamas were to agree to a deal to end the current war after a final hostages-for-prisoners exchange.
The short answer is that it’s not good. On its present course, Hamas would likely rebuild, Gaza would remain in ruins, and a durable peace settlement would be all but impossible.
First, Hamas likely would regain its strength in time. On the eve of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Hamas looked more like a paramilitary force than a typical terrorist organization. It boasted 25,000 to 30,000 operatives divided into five regional brigades, 24 battalions, and a host of specialized units—including air, maritime, and special operations. It was armed with an array of weapons that included up to 30,000 rockets, making Hamas larger than some European countries’ militaries. And indeed, the Oct. 7 attack was carried out more like a conventional military assault—complete with company and battalion objectives—than how one typically imagines a terrorist attack.
After almost 16 months of fighting, Hamas has been degraded to an insurgency. The Israeli military estimates that it has eliminated 17,000 to 20,000 foot soldiers in the war thus far. Much of the senior leadership is dead, including political chief Ismail Haniyeh; military chief Mohammed Deif; his deputy, Marwan Issa; and above all, Gaza head and Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar. Less known but arguably as important, Israeli military operations also decimated Hamas’s mid-level leadership: Eight brigade commanders, 30 battalion commanders, and 165 company or platoon commanders have been killed. Without these operational and tactical leaders, Hamas would be hard-pressed to conduct another large-scale coordinated assault like Oct. 7.
Israel, however, has yet to shatter Hamas as an organization. The fact that Hamas’s negotiators in Qatar could negotiate a deal, identify which hostages they still hold, and then deliver them in an orderly manner suggests that Hamas’s command and control may be battered but remains intact. With the ceasefire and renewed freedom of movement around the territory, whatever broken links there were in the command chain will almost certainly be patched by now.
With the ceasefire and renewed freedom of movement around the territory, whatever broken links there were in Hamas’s command chain will almost certainly be patched by now.
Consequently, absent a way for Israel to consolidate its military gains, Hamas will be able to reconstitute its ranks. U.S. estimates suggest that Hamas recruited some 15,000 new fighters during the conflict. While these fighters are unlikely to be as seasoned as their predecessors, some of this experience deficit likely will be filled by the Palestinian prisoners that Israel released as part of its deal to free 33 hostages from Hamas’s clutches. During the initial phase of the ceasefire, Israel agreed to release more than 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, including security prisoners who are serving life sentences for murder and other serious offenses. Presumably, freeing the remaining 59 hostages would involve releasing a similar number of prisoners. According to a 2021 Israel comptroller report, “security prisoners” have an 18 percent recidivism rate. If that rate continues, Hamas’s ranks will be bolstered by hundreds of hardened fighters, at minimum.
If Israel cannot stop Hamas from refilling its ranks, then it likely will turn to ever-tighter security restrictions on Gaza. That’s a problem, because Gaza today is in ruins. The United Nations suggests that more than 1.8 million people in Gaza need shelter and that 170,000 buildings—almost seven out of every 10 prewar structures—have been damaged or flattened. The United Nations estimates that rebuilding Gaza could take at least 15 years, whereas United States has estimated this to require at least 10 to 15 years.
Those estimates, though, are predicated on Israel allowing the import of building materials, which isn’t guaranteed. A lot of building material is fundamentally dual-use; the same concrete and rebar needed to rebuild homes and hospitals can go to rebuilding Hamas’s tunnel network. Similarly, with 50 million tons of rubble needing to be removed, Gaza needs digging equipment. But that same equipment also can be used for tunneling. Hamas has previously repurposed items as seemingly innocuous as water pipes into rockets.
Stringent restrictions on what enters Gaza still might not prevent Hamas from rearming. The United States estimates, for instance, that there are 30,000 unexploded ordnances in Gaza that need to be disarmed. That not only puts civilians at risk of accidental detonations, but it also means that Hamas presumably has access to tons of explosive material to repurpose for weaponry.
Hamas can smuggle in weaponry, too. Israel likely will insist on inspecting convoys or boats heading into Gaza, but historically, smugglers have usually found a way. And then there is Hamas’s vast network of 350 to 450 miles of tunnels that crisscross the strip. Israel stated that it has destroyed some 80 percent of tunnels in Rafah and 85 percent of those in Khan Younis, but other accounts suggest that large swaths still remain intact. And even if the 80 percent claim is true, it still means that Hamas has scores of tunnels for smuggling and storing weapons.
All of this means that, more likely than not, in a post-deal Gaza, Hamas will have the personnel, infrastructure, and weaponry to remain a significant military organization in Gaza.
That would produce a host of negative second-order effects. Most directly, it will be a challenge for anyone to exclude Hamas entirely from having a say in governing Gaza, as Israel, the United States, and others have insisted. Few countries have the military muscle to take on a hardened military organization like Hamas, and even fewer have the will to do so. Whether the Palestinian National Security Forces could take on Hamas now, especially given that Hamas evicted it from the territory once before in 2007, is an open question.
Outside guarantors look less than promising. Even under the Trump administration’s proposals, the United States has no interest in putting troops in Gaza. Europe has limited military capacity to begin with, and it has a massive security commitment to Ukraine potentially looming. That leaves a coalition of Arab states. But recall how another Arab-led coalition struggled to combat another Iranian proxy—the Houthis—just a few years ago. It’s fair to ask whether many of those same coalition partners would be up to the task in Gaza.
Without a security guarantor, who is going to want to finance the reconstruction of Gaza? That’s going to take a lot of money—some $53.2 billion over the next decade, according to a joint estimate by the European Union, United Nations, and World Bank. Neither Israel nor the United States is likely to foot the bill, especially if Hamas remains present in the territory. Europe has expressed some interest in assisting, but with an even more mammoth reconstruction task in the offing in Ukraine, not to mention the scramble to shift resources to defense, there are real limits to European generosity. And then there are Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states. They certainly have the funds, but it’s questionable whether they’d agree to make such a sizable investment if it could be destroyed in another Israel-Hamas war.
Finally, if Hamas regains power in Gaza, even slowly, then the chance of a durable political settlement with Israel is slim to nonexistent. After all, until recently, Hamas’s central ideology was rooted in the destruction of Israel and death of its Jewish inhabitants. Even if Hamas softens its stances, that’s unlikely to assuage Israel’s security concerns. Hamas tried that before—most notably with a new policy platform in 2017—and it did not forestall the Oct. 7 massacre.
On the Israeli side, a large majority of Israelis say they prefer a second phase of the hostage deal with Hamas instead of resuming the war. But similar percentages also oppose any sort of two-state solution or believe that permanent peace can be achieved. If anything, the Israeli electorate is shifting right. With the wounds of Oct. 7 still fresh—and a degraded but undestroyed Hamas still on the other side of the border—the prospect of Israelis granting concessions on the scale required to permanently forestall another conflict is highly unlikely.
On the present trajectory, therefore, the question is not if but when another Gaza war would occur. And if that projection isn’t gloomy enough, wars in Gaza have been turning longer and deadlier, which means that the next war in Gaza may be even grimmer than the current one. Indeed, Israeli strategists have labeled the dynamic “mowing the grass”: Hamas attacks, Israel cuts the group down to size, and then the threat grows back. Absent any massive exogenous shock to the contrary, that’s the path for the current war as well.
Trump’s plan to remove and resettle 2 million Palestinians from Gaza may not be moral, prudent, or practical policy. But it points to a fundamental fact: Only an outside-the-box solution that changes the structural dynamics of the conflict can avert the current trajectory, which looks pretty ugly, too.
– Raphael S. Cohen is director of the Strategy and Doctrine Program at RAND Project AIR FORCE. This commentary was originally published by Foreign Policy on March 4, 2025.
