Hamas Has Lost Control of 80% of Gaza

Repeated batterings by the IDF have reduced Hamas’ power in Gaza. More than 25,000 Hamas combatants — half of the terror group’s prewar strength — have been killed, and thousands of others have been wounded, including some too severely to ever return to fighting. The IDF has managed to kill 95% of the Hamas commanders, including all of its most senior leaders. Lacking funds, Hamas has had to decrease salaries to its members, or not pay them altogether, and the result is that it is hard to recruit new members or to hold onto those who are already in Hamas, and suffering from its economic collapse. The people of Gaza, looking around at the rubble, and contemplating the human cost of a war that Hamas brought down upon the Strip, are ever more willing to speak out against the group. They are now keenly aware of how Hamas has been stealing large amounts of humanitarian aid, distributing it to its own members and their extended families, and selling some as well at exorbitant prices to the very people for whom that aid was intended to be distributed for free.

Now the leaders of the large families, or clans, have been seizing control of their local turf, defying Hamas’ attempts to rein them in. More on this failure of Hamas to maintain its control of the security situation in Gaza can be found here: “‘Security situation has completely collapsed’: Hamas has lost 80% of its control over Gaza- report,” Jerusalem Post, July 7, 2025:

Hamas has reportedly lost about 80% of its control over Gaza, a senior official from the terrorist organization told the BBC.

The official explained that Hamas’s command and control infrastructure had collapsed after months of Israeli airstrikes, which wiped out its political, military, and security leadership.

“Let’s be realistic here – there’s barely anything left of the security structure. Most of the leadership, about 95%, are now dead… The active figures have all been killed,” he said in the interview published Sunday.

“Logically, it has to continue until the end,” the Hamas official said. “All the conditions are aligned: Israel has the upper hand, the world is silent, the Arab regimes are silent, criminal gangs are everywhere, and society is collapsing.

“Let me be clear: the security situation has completely collapsed. There is no control anywhere.
“So, the security situation is zero. Hamas’s control is zero. There’s no leadership, no command, no communication. Salaries are delayed, and when they arrive, they are barely usable. Some die just trying to collect them. It’s total collapse.”

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he and US President Donald Trump are determined to eliminate Hamas’s military capabilities, in addition to bringing the hostages home.

“We are still focused on the Gaza arena. We have also achieved great successes there, but there are still tasks to complete,” Netanyahu stated prior to his visit to Washington.

“We are also determined to ensure that Gaza will no longer pose a threat to Israel. This means we will not allow a situation where there are more kidnappings, more killings, more beheadings, or more invasions. This means one thing: the destruction of Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities. Hamas will not be there.”…

With Hamas having lost control of four-fifths of Gaza, according to distraught Hamas members themselves, it should be easier for Netanyahu to obtain his stated goal of a Gaza where Hamas does not exist either as a military or a political force, but is expelled from the Strip altogether. That means out of a total population of 2.2 million in Gaza, some 20,000-30,000 will be pushed out — a perfectly manageable number — perhaps to be taken in by Iran or Qatar, Hamas’ two remaining friends in the region.

After the collapse of the Assad regime, Hamas could no longer readily receive weapons and money from Iran. As a result, it more and more needed to rely on the amounts it made from stealing humanitarian aid and selling it at exorbitant prices to the people for whom it was meant to be distributed for free. But when Israel and the United States set up the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to distribute aid, and to provide security to make sure Hamas was no longer able to seize any of it, Hamas’ revenues plummeted, and as a result, so did the amounts it could pay its members. The GHF system to distribute, under armed guard, humanitarian aid, has harmed Hamas as much as it has helped the people of Gaza.

Hamas has lost 95% of its commanders in Gaza. Its command-and-control centers and its weapons warehouses have been devastated. More than half of its fighters have been killed. It has lost control of the humanitarian aid that, before the GHF entered the picture, it had managed to pillage at will, selling some of the aid, and using the money derived from those sales to pay its combatants. It is no longer be able to do so.

So weak has Hamas become that the large families, such as the Abu Shabab Bedouin clan based in Rafah, have declared their opposition to Hamas, and seized control of local areas, defying the terror group’s threats to dislodge them, and demanding that they surrender to Hamas’ authority. Hamas has not only been militarily destroyed by the IDF, but it has lost almost all its authority in the Strip, its once fearsome ability to scare the Gazans into submission. Instead, the clans have stepped forward to replace Hamas, in their own territories, so that a patchwork of powerful families now rule four-fifths of Gaza. And to judge by their pronouncements, they despise Hamas, that has brought the Gazans to such grief, and are ready to make a permanent peace with Israel.

AUTHOR

Hugh Fitzgerald

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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