Gaza: A year under fire.
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00:00Well, on the line for us now to help us reflect on one year of war is Herlid El-Jindi. He's the
00:06director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East
00:11Institute in Washington DC. He joins us on the line from there. Hello to you and thanks for speaking
00:16to us. Yes, thank you for having me. Look, it has been a devastating 12 months for Palestinians and
00:24as I say, the war is still going on today. People are still being killed in Gaza.
00:30I wonder, first of all, just what reflections you have at this one year mark?
00:38Well, I think a year ago or 11 months ago or nine months ago, nobody imagined that we would be
00:48where we are today and that the war would be continuing and in fact even escalating.
00:55The Israelis are talking about depopulating the northern part of Gaza, where maybe
01:02300,000 or 400,000 still remain under pretty horrible conditions. If you recall,
01:13last January, in fact, we were told by the Israeli leadership that the north had now been
01:21complete, Hamas has been totally defeated, and they were moving to the center and to the south.
01:28And we've seen systematically over that time period Gaza's infrastructure, Gaza's hospitals
01:36and universities, virtually all of the institutions that sustain life have been destroyed.
01:44I think for most, and there's no end in sight. And so I think for most Palestinians, they see
01:52this as a war of annihilation that is intended to drive ultimately the population out of Gaza,
02:01to make Gaza uninhabitable by human beings. And it looks very much like that on the ground.
02:07And it's unclear what, if anything, it would take for Israel to stop.
02:17Right. I mean, you say that this war seems sort of unending or there's no immediate end in sight
02:23to it. We have seen over the past year, some international efforts to try and secure a
02:29ceasefire. Of course, there's been nothing lasting. And you say from the Israeli perspective
02:33that they're not interested in your view in a ceasefire at this point. What about the leadership
02:38of Hamas inside Gaza and those abroad? Are they interested at this point, do you think,
02:46to try and negotiate some kind of deal or not? I think the leadership of Hamas has become much
02:53more hard-lined. If you remember, Israel assassinated the political head of Hamas,
03:01who was also the chief negotiator in the ceasefire talks back in late July.
03:08Yahya Sinwar, everyone knows, who's now the official leader of Hamas and believed to be
03:16one of the masterminds of the October 7th attack. He's quite hard-lined and he's quite
03:21sort of unyielding. That said, I do think that Hamas is, I mean, they have said,
03:31you know, after months in the spring of kind of dragging their feet, they did finally accept
03:39President Biden's ceasefire proposal. And since then, we've seen the Israeli leadership kind of
03:47shift the goalposts and add new demands. But at the end of the day, I think Hamas does want to see
03:55an end to the war. I think they're willing to sign a ceasefire, but not one like last November,
04:02in which they released the hostages, they released 100 hostages and then the fighting
04:08resumed immediately after. So Hamas is going to agree to something. It will have to be something
04:14that brings a permanent ceasefire, which is not something Netanyahu is willing to accept. He has
04:24said, I will accept a partial ceasefire, we'll bring home the hostages and then we'll continue
04:29the war indefinitely. And one thing we know is that access to Gaza is very hard indeed. Journalists
04:36from abroad can't get in. So we don't really have a clear sense of what Palestinians there
04:42believe right now. But look, as an analyst, and I do appreciate this may be a very hard question
04:47to answer. I wonder, a year in, how much support do you think Hamas still has in Gaza? How might
04:54it have changed since before October 7? It's like you said, it's extremely hard to know,
05:01maybe impossible to know with any kind of certainty. I think generally, it's fair to say
05:09that support for Hamas inside Gaza has declined over the last year, even as it has increased
05:18in the West Bank and Jerusalem or among Palestinians outside, which is not that
05:26surprising. The people who are suffering the most are also the least supportive of Hamas.
05:33I think the overwhelming majority of Palestinians in Gaza want to see an end,
05:40they want to see Hamas agree to any terms. But it's not clear what kind of
05:48pressure they can bring. Most people are focused on survival and finding safe shelter,
05:57finding medical assistance, finding food. As we know, Israel has heavily restricted
06:05food and medicine and water and fuel into the Gaza Strip. So I think the people there are
06:12not so concerned with anything other than an end to the war and finding adequate shelter and food.
06:23Just a final question for you, because you've previously, some time ago, been an advisor to
06:27the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, that of course, not Hamas, this is the government now run
06:34by Mahmoud Abbas. If you were still working in that capacity, what would you be advising the
06:40PA to do now in terms of trying to draw an end to the war, but also on that thorny question of
06:46whether or not the Palestinian Authority should be playing a role in Gaza once this does come to
06:51an end? Well, I mean, this is, there's no question there's been a massive leadership vacuum. And it
07:01is that leadership vacuum and the political division between Hamas and Fatah for all of
07:07these many years that has actually opened the way for the disaster that is now unfolding.
07:15I think the first order of business for Mahmoud Abbas would be to put his house in order.
07:21To put the Palestinian house in order. And that means some kind of national unity, some kind of
07:30consensus across all of the factions, including Hamas. And to, you know, to have, to put together
07:42a plan for how it will absorb Hamas into the body politic and at the same time return to Gaza.
07:50These are, these are massive and complicated internal political endeavors that are,
08:02it's not going to happen overnight. So there's really, there isn't much that Mahmoud Abbas can
08:08do at this stage except kind of, you know, to set the stage for a future Palestine that is
08:17unitary and cohesive, because what he's, what he's managed to oversee is the opposite of that.
08:27Khaled al-Jindi, lots more I'd like to ask you,
08:29but unfortunately we are out of time. Thank you very much indeed.