A U.S.-brokered pause in the war between Hamas and Israel has, in recent days, reportedly produced a grim and worrying sequel: internecine fighting inside Gaza as Hamas moves to reassert its authority over rival armed groups and prominent families across the enclave.
As Israeli troops pulled back to facilitate a deal that freed living hostages, Hamas “surged security forces in behind them — a public assertion of authority intended to make clear the group remains the enclave’s governing power,” the report said.
Those deployments were followed almost immediately by crackdowns on rival militias, firefights around population centers and scenes of public executions, all of which have spread fear and raised the prospect that internecine violence could deepen the suffering of ordinary Gazans.
Video verified by Storyful showed Hamas fighters dragging men from a family into a public square, forcing them to kneel and executing them in broad daylight — a stark illustration of the bloodletting now unfolding inside the strip. Clashes around a hospital in Gaza City left “dozens dead,” according to the Hamas unit that conducted the raid and members of the family it fought.
The violence complicates the more ambitious diplomatic work now under way: talks around President Trump’s peace plan that move beyond the hostage deal to the far more difficult tasks of disarming Hamas and replacing its administrative and security functions. The article makes clear the tension: “The U.S.-designated terrorist group’s assertion of authority, if it persists, will be at odds with the requirements of Trump’s plan.”
Observers warn that Hamas intends to demonstrate its staying power. “Hamas is re-establishing control,” said Hasan Abu Hanieh, an independent analyst based in Amman. “Hamas will be even more aggressive now to prove to the outside world that no one can remove them, that no force can challenge them.” Israel, which “has provided arms to some anti-Hamas groups,” is watching the fighting closely, an Israeli official said.
President Trump, asked aboard Air Force One about the moves, acknowledged Hamas sought to secure the devastated enclave: “They’ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,” he said. On Tuesday, he warned plainly: “They’re going to disarm…and if they don’t disarm, we will disarm them.”
The report traces how Hamas’s control had been eroded by the devastation after Oct. 7, 2023, and by Israeli pressure on revenue and cohesion.
Prominent families and local militias — some “armed by Israel in an effort to further weaken Hamas’s grip” — took advantage of that weakness to stake out their own power.
Now, with a pause in the broader conflict, Hamas “is fighting back,” redeploying Interior Ministry forces to “restore order, crack down on criminals and looters, and punish people it believes have collaborated with Israel,” said Khaled Qaddoumi, Hamas’s envoy in Tehran.
The fighting that erupted around Gaza City’s Jordanian hospital involved the Doghmosh family, long rivals of Hamas. According to family members, Hamas demanded the handover of relatives it alleged had cooperated with Israel.
When the family refused, exchanges of gunfire escalated; one family member shot a Hamas fighter dead, and the neighborhood was soon besieged. Family members reported seeing “around two dozen bodies in the street, with many wounded and homes on fire.”
Hamas’s Interior Ministry said it had begun taking steps to “restore order” and was offering an amnesty for rival fighters who had not committed murder.
Its paramilitary Rada’a unit declared it had “neutralized a number of wanted people and taken control of militia positions,” and vowed to “strike with an iron fist anyone who tampers with the security of the home front.”
What began as a fragile cease-fire with the promise of hostage releases has — in the absence of a credible, enforceable plan to disarm armed factions — turned into a test of whether Gaza’s violence can be contained or will simply be reorganized under the same forces that brought it suffering in the first place.
[READ MORE: Trump Turns to Ukraine After Gaza Breakthrough]
