Opinion | The Board of Peace Road Map for Gaza Gives Hope

One sign Hamas might be serious about giving up its weapons is that, aside from an alleged incident of a sole projectile being fired and landing inside Gaza itself, it and other armed groups have apparently not fired a rocket at Israel since the original cease-fire took effect in October. They have shown this restraint despite the fact that Israel has killed over 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza in that time, including Hamas’s top military leaders.

This unusual holding back could very well indicate that Hamas has no better cards left to play. Armed resistance in Gaza has reached its limit and has exhausted the rationales that sustained it. Well before the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas’s deputy leader, Saleh al-Arouri, admitted as much in 2020, according to a leaked phone conversation. “Frankly, armed resistance failed to create change,” he said. “The resistance presented heroic examples and fought honorable wars, but the blockade wasn’t broken, the political reality didn’t change and none of the land was liberated.”

When Hamas fired hundreds of improvised projectiles on Israel in 2021, purportedly to deter Israel’s escalation in East Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah and the West Bank, a cease-fire was reached, only to result in a sharp escalation of Israel’s military raids and settler violence in the West Bank. The years 2022 and 2023 became two of the deadliest on record in the West Bank.

The Oct. 7 attack failed to ignite the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s dream of a multifront war in which Israel would be overwhelmed by ***aults from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Yemen along with popular uprisings in the West Bank, inside Israel and in neighboring countries. Instead, it led to an Israeli offensive that killed more than 70,000 people and destroyed most of the Gaza Strip. Some Hamas officials have suggested openly and privately that Oct. 7 was a strategic mistake and that they failed to take into consideration the severity of Israel’s reaction.

Palestinian factions such as Hamas, which defined themselves for decades by the ideology of armed resistance, have been looking for a face-saving way out, figures close to Hamas have told me. Hamas leaders like Khaled Meshaal have been sending the message that Gazans have done their part in contributing to the Palestinian cause and paid the heaviest price, and should now be allowed to recover and heal.