On Monday, July 6, Hamas dissolved its emergency committee, the executive body of its administration in the Gaza Strip, effectively relinquishing the power it’s held since its victory in the 2006 elections and the subsequent failure of the coup d’état led by Fatah and U.S. imperialism.
Now Hamas will transfer administration of the devastated Gaza Strip to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a puppet body created as part of Trump’s ultra-colonial plan and placed under the control of the Board of Peace. This concession offers a victory to Israel and U.S. imperialism. Hamas is carrying out this transition under the threat of a resumption of a high-intensity genocidal war and under pressure from its bourgeois allies, including Qatar, Turkey, and Iran, who have decided to abandon the Palestinian people to their fate.
The Continuation of the Genocide and the Betrayal of the Bourgeois Regimes
The announcement that Hamas will relinquish power comes amid escalating pressure from Tel Aviv, which has used the imperialist war against Iran as a pretext to once again suspend the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Meanwhile the Israeli army has further consolidated its colonial control over the territory, seizing 70 percent of the Strip. Since the sham ceasefire, Israel has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians. A UN-mandated commission of inquiry recently denounced the continuation of the genocide.
During meetings in Cyprus on June 30 and July 1, a committee of technocrats convened along with the Board of Peace, which is represented by European Parliamentarian, Nikolay Mladenov and Tony Blair, the butcher of Iraq and Kosovo. They discussed the creation of “civilian zones” behind the “yellow line” in the territories occupied by Israel, where thousands of Gazans could be “relocated.” This is nothing more than a new version of the “humanitarian city” project in Rafah, in which Israeli Minister of Defense, Israel Katz,wanted to confine hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert himself described it as a “concentration camp.”
But Hamas’s decision is also inseparable from the movement’s growing isolation and the decision by its allies in the region to abandon the Palestinians to their fate. While Iran has inflicted a military and strategic defeat on U.S. imperialism, Hamas has tried to link the Gaza Strip to negotiations between Iran and the United States, within the framework of the ceasefire on “all” fronts demanded by Iran. But the appeal launched on Tuesday, June 9, went unanswered.
As Jaser Abu Mousa notes in Foreign Affairs, this is yet another sign of the deteriorating relationship between Tehran and the Palestinian movement:
BLOCKQUOTE/Iranian leaders seemed frustrated that Hamas launched the attacks of October 7 without giving them sufficient warning. Iran, in turn, did not do much for Hamas during the war in Gaza. Hamas then did little when Iran itself came under attack. Both entities are currently rebuilding, but Iran’s new leaders are more focused on controlling the damage in their country, rebuilding, preserving their nuclear program, and managing a cease-fire than on aiding their onetime ally./BLOCKQUOTE
For Iran, this is undoubtedly a way to punish Hamas for its stance on the war, specifically its call for Iran not to attack Gulf countries and to find a diplomatic solution, while simultaneously condemning the Israeli-American attack. This appeal to spare the Gulf monarchies was likely made under intense pressure from Qatar.
But despite this concession, relations with Qatar have also deteriorated. Abu Mousa writes:
BLOCKQUOTEHamas has also lost much of its support from Qatar. For over a decade, Qatar granted the organization’s leaders permanent residency, let them maintain a formal office in Doha (at Washington’s request), and featured them on Al Jazeera—Hamas’s primary platform for reaching the Arab world. Qatar also funneled around $360 million per year to the group in Gaza. But in November 2024, after Hamas killed the American Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin and rejected several cease-fire proposals, Qatar kicked some officials out of Doha at the behest of the United States. Qatar expelled more Hamas leaders in 2026 when they refused to condemn Iranian missile attacks on Gulf capitals./BLOCKQUOTE
While part of Hamas’s leadership is now in Turkey, Erdoğan has limited his support for the movement as he tries to forge closer ties with Washington and establish himself as a provider of markets for Western imperialists.
Concessions to Imperialism
Under intense pressure from Israel and the United States, and isolated by the betrayal of the bourgeois regimes in which it had placed its trust, Hamas agreed to continue negotiations and dissolve its governing bodies. The organization’s spokesman, Hazem Qassem, stated on Monday, July 6, that “The movement advanced in removing occupation excuses, with Hamas fulfilling commitments. Now, mediators, guarantor states, and the U.S. must ensure the ceasefire is implemented*.”* The New Arab, reports that, according to Qassem, this announcement constitutes a political concession aimed at depriving Israel of any pretext to delay a ceasefire.
The movement’s decision prompted a terse response from the head of the UN Committee on the Status of Peoples in Gaza (NCAG), Ali Shaath, who stated that “the committee will be ready to assume its national responsibilities as soon as the necessary means and conditions for its operation are met.” While Israeli authorities denounced the move as a “maneuver,” the Board of Peace explained in a tweet that it has “taken note of the announcement today regarding the dissolution of the ‘Emergency Committee’ in Gaza.” Regarding the continuation of negotiations, the Council called for the complete disarmament of Hamas and the implementation of the UN Security Council’s settlement resolution, demanding “the consolidation of all weapons under the control of the NCAG as provided for in the Comprehensive Gaza Peace Plan and United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803.”
While the implementation of the Trump plan is being delayed by Israel — which is preventing the UN peacekeeping force from entering the Gaza Strip and constantly violating the terms of the ceasefire — Hamas is likely trying to find a way out by putting the ball in the court of the colonial state and hoping that other states supporting the colonial plan will pressure it to restart negotiations. In his speech, Qassem stated that it is now“up to the mediators, the guarantor states, and the United States to ensure the implementation of the ceasefire.” This position has also been adopted by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which denounces the “procrastination” of the Board of Peace, given that leaders of the pro-Israel international Far Right sit on its board. In reality, this desperate strategy poses a mortal danger to the Palestinian people and amounts to placing their hopes in regimes that, with the exception of Iran, have actively supported the genocidal war in Gaza and covered up Israel’s crimes. As for Trump, who is trying to break the deadlock in Iran, he could agree to the continuation of the genocide and the recolonization of Gaza in exchange for Israel’s “moderation” on the Iranian front.
The movement thus seems to believe it can exploit certain ambiguities in the Trump plan, as Ismat Mansour explains in comments to The New Arab:
BLOCKQUOTE/Tel Aviv wants a force that will contribute to disarming Hamas and the factions, or at minimum one that will confront them if they resist… Hamas wants the opposite, and that is a force whose primary function is to push the Israeli military out and take its place./BLOCKQUOTE
Hamas considers an Arab occupation of Gaza to be a “lesser evil” compared to maintaining an Israeli presence, allowing it to retain its weapons and continue to maintain a presence in Gaza without directly governing the Gazan territories. But even if the movement were to manage to maintain its influence without directly wielding power, the Arab occupation force could instead serve as a tool, at the behest of imperialists, to perpetuate genocide and colonization.
Despite the difficulties Trump is encountering in creating this occupation force, it could include states fully aligned with Israel, such as Morocco — whose colonization of Western Sahara is actively supported by Israel — which has already sent soldiers to Israel, on June 18, to study the conditions for a possible deployment. While Israel rejects any possibility of a Turkish deployment, Egypt is hardly an ally of the Palestinian cause, given that el-Sisi actively contributed to the Gaza blockade and Egyptian oligarchs enriched themselves through the genocide. The “lesser evil” of an Arab occupation, led by a Palestinian committee under Washington’s control, would thus constitute a significant victory for Zionist colonialism and imperialism and could pave the way for an escalation of the Palestinian people’s oppression.
The Struggle for Palestine Must be Global
The Palestinian people are thus caught in the deadly trap set by Trump’s ultra-colonial plan. But it is a trap that Hamas also helped create due to the limitations of its bourgeois strategy, as the movement staked everything on alliances with the reactionary bourgeois regimes of the region. This strategy had already backfired on the Palestinians when Arab regimes exerted immense pressure to force the various components of the Palestinian movement to accept the principle of negotiations within the framework of Trump’s colonial plan. It is now backfiring again, as Hamas, under similar pressure, has agreed to transfer control of Gaza to a pro-imperialist authority.
Even after inflicting a crushing defeat on the United States and Israel, Iran has no intention of using the new balance of power it imposed during the war and its control over the Strait of Hormuz to serve the workers and the popular classes of the region against imperialism. Tehran primarily wants to protect its allies in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and to strengthen its positions in order to find common ground with imperialism, which would mean abandoning the Palestinian people to their fate. while It is absolutely necessary to stand in the military camp of the oppressed Iranian nation against Israel and imperialism, that support has to include total independence from the Iranian regime which neither wants nor can permanently expel imperialism from the region, and which cannot liberate any people because of its class nature and its profoundly reactionary character.
In light of the history of the Palestinian struggle, such an outcome was predictable, given that the regimes of the region have consistently betrayed the Palestinian people. By allying themselves with the region’s bourgeoisies, who use the Palestinian struggle as a bargaining chip in their dealings with imperialism, much like the Gulf petro-monarchies, Palestinian organizations have deprived themselves of their strongest allies: the workers and popular classes of the Middle East, who are overwhelmingly in solidarity with Palestine. While the struggle of the Palestinian people is the undercurrent of class struggles throughout the region, Palestinian leaderships, for example, have helped to curb the massive solidarity that was expressed during the First Intifada in 1987 – from the mobilizations in Egypt to the general strike in Sudan – for fear that the movement would turn against the bourgeoisies with which they had allied themselves, even to the point of accepting the capitulation of Oslo.
Faced with the mortal peril posed by Trump’s Gaza plan, and the disastrous consequences that Hamas’s political concessions could entail, popular sectors of the Arab world must urgently mobilize in the streets to extricate the Palestinian people from this deadly trap and build, through the methods of class struggle, a shield to protect Gaza and the Palestinians from the resumption of a high-intensity genocidal war and the plans of Trump and Netanyahu. Only a movement of workers, the popular classes, and youth operating on a regional scale and politically idependent of Hamas, can put an end to genocide and colonization while confronting the “Arab kings” who are complicit in the genocide.
The defeat of the United States weakens all the authoritarian regimes in the region that are structurally dependent on U.S. support to repress their populations, such as the reactionary Jordanian monarchy or el-Sisi’s bloody dictatorship in Egypt. Therefore, it is urgent that the workers, youth, and working classes of the region seize this opportunity. This is a struggle that the workers and youth of the imperialist countries must also support, drawing inspiration from the example of the Italian anti-colonial general strikes, to deprive Israel of the support of its imperialist allies, which have aided and abated Israel in its genocidal war against the Palestinian people.
This article was first published in French at Revolution Permanente on July 15, 2026.
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