Displaced Palestinians gather amid destroyed buildings in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on January 22, 2025. (AFP)
Washington, January 30 (RHC)-- The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is pressuring Egypt to push the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas out of the besieged Gaza Strip.
On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told his Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty that the two sides must maintain “close cooperation” in an attempt “to ensure Hamas can never govern Gaza.”
Israel began its campaign of genocide in Gaza in October 2023, after Hamas carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in retaliation for Israel’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
However, after 15 months of ruthless aggression, the occupying regime failed to achieve its prime objective of eliminating Hamas, despite killing at least 47,306 Palestinians, mostly women and children. The campaign has currently paused amid a fragile ceasefire.
The U.S. State Department added on Tuesday that Rubio also “reinforced the importance of holding Hamas accountable.” A day earlier, Trump once again called for forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan, despite strong opposition from Cairo and Amman to the plan which has been slammed by the United Nations as “ethnic cleansing.”
The Palestinian leadership has been divided between Fatah and Hamas since 2006, when the latter scored a landslide victory in parliamentary elections in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas has ever since been running the Palestinian enclave, while the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is run by the ruling Fatah party and led by President Mahmoud Abbas, has been based in the autonomous parts of the occupied West Bank.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had declared that the goal of the war for the regime was the total defeat and elimination of Hamas.
However, former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken implied in one of his final appearances, on January 14th, that the regime had failed in achieving this goal.
Blinken said assessments by the U.S. had revealed that “Hamas has recruited almost as many new” fighters “as it has lost.” “That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war,” he added.
Israel managed to assassinate two top leaders of the movement – namely Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar – and according to the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), its weapons stockpile is also depleted, but as the dust settles in Gaza, it is clear that the resistance movement has not been eliminated and is still there.
Hamas fighters have prominently featured in the handover of Israeli captives as part of the ceasefire deal with Israel. And members of the Hamas-run civil administration have resumed work. If there is any authority in Gaza, it still appears to be Hamas, Al-Jazeera said in a report.
After “over a year of fighting, the [Hamas] fighters remain very much in control of Gaza,” Hugh Lovatt of the ECFR said.
“Hamas is trying to show Israel that it failed to destroy it but also that the movement will have a veto over Gaza’s future going forward because neither Israel and the PA nor the international community will be able to impose a post-conflict governance or security arrangement,” Lovatt said.
Israel aimed to destroy Hamas’s infrastructure, particularly its extensive tunnel network. However, Israeli media reports suggest that much of the network remains functional, though estimates of its intactness vary widely.
Hamas members told the ECFR that many tunnels have been preserved, restored, or even expanded in some areas. According to the ECFR, Hamas even recycles “unexploded Israeli rockets, bombs, and artillery shells to use as improvised explosive devices and produce new projectiles.”
The Gaza Strip, home to some 2.4 million Palestinians, has been under Israeli siege since June 2007. The blockade has caused a decline in the standards of living as well as unprecedented levels of unemployment and unrelenting poverty.
[ SOURCE: PRESS TV and AFP NEWS AGENCY ]
