And now, open inter-Palestinian war
Last Thursday the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, appointed the economist Mohammad Mustafa as prime minister, after the previous prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, resigned, along with his government, at the request of Abbas himself.
A highly technical figure, Mustafa accepted the job, "aware of the critical phase the Palestinian cause is going through", while stressing his conviction in the need for a Palestinian state in which Gaza and the West Bank would be reunited.
Within 24 hours Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Palestine Liberation Front (PFLP) rejected the appointment, criticising Abbas for "wanting to form a new government without a real national agreement, which will aggravate inter-Palestinian divisions".
The counter-attack by the Palestinian Authority, of which the Fatah movement is the main member, was not long in coming, accusing Hamas of "being the cause of the new Israeli occupation of Gaza for having taken its action on 7 October". The communiqué marks a complete break with Hamas, pointing to it as the cause of a 'nakba' (catastrophe) even more horrible and cruel than that of 1948", in reference to the first Israeli-Palestinian war, following the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948, a war that resulted in the expulsion of some 760,000 Palestinians from their land, in a diaspora that led them to settle in refugee camps, preferably in Lebanon and Jordan. As a result, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Middle East (UNRWA) was created, initially for an estimated six months. It has been operating for 75 years, now severely challenged by Israel, which accuses it of "collusion with Hamas terrorism".
Relations between Fatah and Hamas effectively broke down in 2007, when, after very severe clashes between the two, the latter gained almost absolute control of the Gaza Strip, proceeding to deepen its relations with Iran and, as confirmed after the entry of Israeli troops into Gaza, to build a veritable underground city, interconnected through numerous tunnels, in which they have been constructing both missile launching facilities and enclosures to house the main military leaders. These facilities have also held the 240 hostages captured in the terrorist attack of 7 October, of whom an estimated 120 are still alive or dead.
Mustafa's appointment as prime minister, as well as his expected government with an eminently technical profile, actually follows the US intention, expressed by both President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to draw up a post-war scenario in which there is no room for extremism. This is all the more difficult given that Hamas has shown no clear signs of changing its stated goal of wiping out the State of Israel, an aspiration that coincides with that so often reiterated by the Iran of the ayatollahs.
In any case, Mohammad Mustafa will have to work hard to change the sentiment of Palestinian public opinion. Indeed, public opinion, 60 per cent of which is in favour of Hamas in the occupied West Bank, criticised the "impotence" of Abbas and the PA with regard to the enormous destruction caused in Gaza by the IDF operation. In addition to the 31,500 dead and 73,000 wounded, according to Hamas's accounts in the Strip, this destruction has left 23 million tons of rubble, which has reduced 60 per cent of Gaza's infrastructure and housing.
Nor do the US-inspired post-war plans coincide with those of Israel's current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who, after rejecting Hamas' latest ceasefire plan, has reiterated his intention to bomb Rafah, the last enclave in the Strip, where 1.5 million Gazans are already crowded together, hungry, fleeing the north and centre of Gaza to avoid Israeli bombardment.
For the moment, the war is far from over, and all the military, political and diplomatic moves fail to define with any precision the contours of the long-awaited day after.