A radical suggestion for destroying Hamas

Terrorism expert Audrey Kurt Cronin has analysed the way terrorist groups end and concluded the most likely way Hamas will die is if Israel supports the growth of an alternative Palestinian leadership.

Cronin, who Director of the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology and the author of How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns, has published an article in Foreign Affairs considering possible trajectories for ending Hamas’s control of Gaza.

She argues the current strategy has not succeeded in undermining Hamas.

She points to a March 2024 opinion poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research which shows support for Hamas among Gazans topping 50 percent, a 14-point rise since December 2023.

Cronin says Israel’s analogy of destroying Hamas as the US destroyed Islamic State does not hold, both because Islamic State is still carrying out successful attacks and because the underlying territorial conflict creates a stronger base for Hamas.

“Military force can degrade Hamas’s hold on Gaza, but without a political solution to the underlying territorial dispute, the group would soon reemerge in some form and resume targeting Israeli military forces and civilians.”

She argues Israel needs to help Gazans defeat Hamas.

“The far more likely way that Hamas could fail is through popular backlash. Hamas rules Gaza through oppression, using arrests and torture to suppress dissent. Gazans widely loathe its internal General Security Service, which surveils and keeps files on people, stamps out protests, intimidates journalists, and tracks people accused of “immoral acts.” “Since October 7, many Palestinians have expressed anger at Hamas for having misjudged the consequences of the attack—a serious targeting error that has indirectly led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Gazans. And suffering Palestinians are well aware that Hamas built an elaborate tunnel system to protect its leaders and fighters but did nothing to protect civilians.