Hamas fighters on Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: Majdi Fathi via Reuters Connect

As tensions in the Middle East escalate and global attention focuses on the war with Iran and fragile talks over Lebanon, Hamas is quietly exploiting the ceasefire in Gaza to tighten its grip on civilian life while rebuilding its military strength behind the scenes.

Even as Hamas operatives seem to keep a lower profile on Gaza’s streets, the Palestinian terrorist group’s hold of roughly half the enclave remains readily apparent through checkpoints, tight control over goods, and the takeover of civilian institutions, including hospitals, Israel’s Channel 12 reported. 

According to new Israeli military intelligence assessments, Hamas is exploiting the cover of the ceasefire to rapidly rebuild its operational capabilities, restore its command structure, and tighten its grip across strategic sectors of the war-torn enclave.

Israeli officials estimate that Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, is rebuilding its forces, with its ranks now totaling roughly 27,000 members.

The terrorist group has also reportedly maintained monthly salary payments to some 49,000 officials who oversee the administration of daily life in Gaza.

Across the enclave, Hamas continues to oversee ministries responsible for the economy, education, health, and welfare, along with 13 municipalities, maintaining a largely behind-the-scenes system of governance.

Under the ceasefire, the Israeli military currently controls 53 percent of Gaza, while Hamas remains entrenched in the nearly half of Gazan territory it still controls, where the vast majority of the population lives.

Beyond its efforts to rebuild military capabilities, Hamas is tightening its hold over civilian life, extending its reach through local authorities, revenue collection, and control of aid and goods, including taxation, attempts to dominate aid distribution, regulation of commerce, and the imposition of commercial fees.

With the apparent goal of operating under the radar, Hamas has reportedly embedded itself within civilian institutions, including hospitals and charitable organizations, where it collects money from patients and exerts de facto control over management and resources.

There have also been reports of Hamas intensifying its crackdown and social control across the enclave, amid allegations of widespread abuse, coercion for food, sexual exploitation, rising child marriages, and an increase in child pregnancies.

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), while pre-war numbers of child brides fell to 11 percent in 2022, a decrease from 26 percent in 2009, marriage records from 2025 showed that at least 400 girls between 14 and 16 had become wives.

Even as Hamas’s military presence appears less visible on the ground, the organization continues consolidating power behind the scenes through civilian institutions, the economy, and the health system — quietly rebuilding its influence across Gaza’s daily life infrastructure.

Israeli officials have warned that Hamas’s ongoing rebuilding efforts are allowing the group to retain control and steadily sustain its influence despite over two years of military conflict.

Last month, the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) — an Israel-based research institute — released a report explaining how the US-Israeli war against the Islamic regime in Iran has disrupted the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza, which requires Hamas to disarm in order for Israeli troops to withdraw.

The report warns that such delays are giving Hamas a window of opportunity to rearm and further tighten its control over Gaza, complicating fragile efforts to move forward with the next stage of the truce.

ITIC’s assessment shows Hamas has moved to reassert control over parts of the war-torn enclave and consolidate its weakened position by targeting Palestinians it labels as “lawbreakers and collaborators with Israel.”

With its security control tightening, Hamas’s brutal crackdown has escalated, sparking widespread clashes and violence as the group seeks to seize weapons and eliminate any opposition.

According to ITIC’s report, Hamas is also rebuilding its military capabilities by smuggling arms from Egypt and producing weapons independently, while simultaneously consolidating civilian control through expanded police presence, regulation of markets, and the distribution of financial aid to residents in areas it governs.

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that two Hamas officials said the Palestinian terrorist group planned to surrender thousands of automatic rifles and small weapons which belonged to Gaza police and other internal security organizations. However, this would not entail full disarmament, which according to the US-backed peace plan is a key prerequisite for beginning major reconstruction of Gaza and for Israel to further withdraw its force.

According to several reports, Hamas recently rejected the Board of Peace’s eight-month phased plan for the terrorist group to disarm. US President Donald Trump proposed the Board of Peace in September to oversee his plan to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, subsequently saying it would address other conflicts.

Earlier this month, Hamas demanded that Israeli forces exit Gaza first before giving up weapons.

The disturbing wave of near-daily attacks by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in the West Bank is advancing a quiet but steady effort by the Israeli government to annex the West Bank.

While opposition from President Donald Trump has led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step away from threats to formally annex the territory, his government is now taking gradual steps to accomplish the same goal. Turning a blind eye to settler violence — as violent incidents have escalated, the Israeli government has not prosecuted any Israeli perpetrators since 2020 — is perhaps the most visible warning sign, but far from the only one.

In a classified meeting in late March, Israel’s security cabinet approved 34 new settlements — including illegal outposts that were retroactively legalized — in what constituted the largest number of settlements ever approved at one time by any Israeli government.

In February, the government issued new land registration orders in the West Bank for the first time since 1967, enabling vast swaths of land to be declared state property. At the same time, Israel expanded its jurisdiction over parts of the West Bank that have been under Palestinian control since the Oslo agreements.

And in late 2025, Israel approved plans to establish the highly controversial E1 settlement project, which would divide the West Bank into a northern and southern region, effectively rendering the contiguity of any future Palestinian state obsolete.

So, when Netanyahu claims to view the crisis of settler violence “with great severity” and vows to crack down on that violence to “the fullest extent of the law” — as he did in November 2025 — his words ring hollow. Since the start of the year, Jewish extremists in the West Bank have committed more than 200 violent attacks against Palestinians, with six killed in March alone. Yet despite the widening cracks this issue is causing between Israel and its allies, Israel’s leader has not addressed it since December, when he downplayed the problem as being caused by “a handful of kids,” and said the attacks are overblown by the media.

It’s not just a handful of kids. And if a nation as tiny and embattled as Israel can effectively take on Iran and its proxies across the Middle East, it should be able to tackle a problem of its own making that is threatening not only the lives of innocent Palestinians in the West Bank, but also the relationship between Israel and the United States, and the future of the Jewish state itself.

A death knell for the two-state solution

It is not only critics and international observers who have described Israel’s increasing control over the West Bank as amounting to de facto annexation, and noted that it threatens any remaining prospect for a two state solution. Proponents of these policies have characterized their efforts in much the same way.

The architect of the government’s annexation efforts, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, described recent moves as “bringing down the curtain” on the two-state solution, and “killing the idea of a Palestinian state.” Defense Minister Israel Katz, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, said “we will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state” as he announced the government’s moves in February alongside Smotrich. Katz earlier praised Israel’s “practical sovereignty” over the West Bank.

Eli Cohen, another Likud minister, heralded recent measures for ushering in “de facto” Israeli sovereignty over “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name for the West Bank that is often used in Israel. (That name was used internationally prior to the region’s renaming under the Jordanian occupation that began in 1948.)

Smotrich, who was given oversight of a newly created settlements administration within the defense ministry as part of his coalition agreement with Netanyahu in early 2023, has overseen record levels of settlement construction and expansion. He has also argued that Israel should encourage Palestinian migration from the West Bank, a policy that would amount to ethnic cleansing.

Out-of-control attacks

The IDF Chief of Staff recently called the dramatic escalation of attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank “morally and ethically unacceptable,” saying they are causing “extraordinary strategic damage to the IDF’s efforts.”

For the first time in its history, the IDF was recently forced to divert troops away from an active war zone — in this case, fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon — in order to confront violent settlers in the West Bank. That development was, alarmingly, reminiscent of those that preceded the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, when IDF battalions were disastrously moved away from the Gaza border to the West Bank for the very same reason.

Smotrich and others have often framed attacks by settlers as acts of self-defense. But this year has seen more violence perpetrated by Jews in the West Bank than by Palestinians. And while Palestinian violence against Jews is treated as terrorism, attacks by Jewish extremists are no longer being handled with the seriousness they once were. According to Israeli rights group Yesh Din, between 2020 and 2025, more than 96% of police investigations into settler violence in the West Bank ended without indictments. Only 2% concluded with full or partial convictions.

That’s likely in part because the Israeli police force, which is tasked with combating the rise in attacks by Jewish extremists, has since 2022 been overseen by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a man who spent most of his career as an attorney defending violent Jewish extremists.

Ben-Gvir has worked to ensure that various tools law enforcement agencies once used to deal with Jewish terrorism are no longer available. The use of administrative detention was suspended for Jewish suspects; the Shin Bet’s Jewish extremism department has been sidelined; and Ben-Gvir has effectively outlawed the government from using the term “terrorist”  to apply to Jews.

More bad signs: David Zini, the man Netanyahu tapped to replace the previous head of the Shin Bet — whom he fired — is from the same far-right movement as Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.

A policy of de facto control

The fact that the government is effectively allowing these attacks to continue on a near-daily basis with virtually no accountability points to a clear and unsettling conclusion: permanent Israeli control of the West Bank, home to 3.8 million Palestinians and half a million Israelis, is part of the government’s agenda.

Proponents of annexation often describe it as a necessary response to terrorism that will keep Israel safer. Annexation, they insist, would send a strong message to those who seek to destroy the Jewish state.

But in reality, annexation is itself a threat to the Jewish state.

The founders of the state of Israel were very clear: it would not only be a democracy, but the world’s only country with a Jewish majority. Annexing the West Bank would effectively mean that Israel is no longer a majority Jewish state. And if Palestinian residents were not given the full rights of citizenship — unlikely, under the most far-right government in Israeli history — it would mean that Israel was no longer a democracy.

The idea that annexation would somehow stop terrorism or keep Israelis safer is delusional. Not only would it increase tensions and violence, but it would also empower Israel’s harshest critics, weaken its crucial international alliances, further erode its dwindling support among Americans and bitterly divide the Jewish diaspora. Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans — and American Jews — support a two-state solution to the conflict and oppose annexation efforts.

Israel itself is not currently an apartheid state. All citizens of Israel — whether they are Arab, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, black or white — have equal rights. Yet the West Bank already complicates that picture. Palestinian residents of the West Bank live under the Palestinian Authority, and are not Israeli citizens. Jewish residents of the West Bank are Israeli citizens. While Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to military law under the Israeli justice system, Jewish residents operate under civilian law.

If Israel annexed the West Bank, there could be no more debate: Israel would become an apartheid state.

It is true that Judea and Samaria is the heartland of ancient Israel, home to more biblical Jewish sites than anywhere else. It is also true that Israel captured the territory in a war of self-defense from Jordan, which occupied the territory after seizing it in the war of 1948. And it is true that Palestinian leaders have rejected numerous offers of statehood over the past century, all of which would have granted near-total Palestinian control of the West Bank.

Those facts do not grant Israel the cause or right to apply sovereignty to an area inhabited by millions of people who do not wish to be under its control.

The rise in extremist violence, the impunity that has met these attacks, and open calls for “sovereignty” are not separate developments. They are part of the same dangerous trajectory — one that is leading to an undemocratic state that is becoming unrecognizable to many who love it dearly.

The post The de facto annexation of the West Bank is a recipe for utter disaster appeared first on The Forward.

Yale University Law School in New Haven, Conn. Photo: Juan Paulo Gutierrez/Flickr.

On April 7, the Yale MacMillan Center hosted a panel titled, “The War on Iran: A Roundtable Discussion.” The speakers repeatedly made false claims about Iran’s modern history and politics. When these claims were challenged by Iranians in the audience, they were met with dismissal and mockery.

This panel epitomizes a larger problem with how Iran is discussed at Yale. Our academic culture has allowed perceived expertise to shield weak and morally suspect arguments, while the voices of Iranians are only tolerated if they reinforce an established narrative.

Laura Robson, Elihu Professor of Global Affairs and History, started by saying she was “not an Iran expert.” She then described Iran’s 1953 government change as the United States collaborating with the British government to remove the democratically elected Prime Minister, “Mustafa” Mossadegh, in favor of the return of an autocratic monarchy.

This is inaccurate, not only because Robson actually meant “Mohammad” Mossadegh, but also because he was never democratically elected. When confronted, the professor claimed that descriptions of anybody, even beyond Iran, as democratically elected need to come with asterisks, morally equivocating dictators with other democratically elected leaders. She continued by saying there’s no question that the regime that the US replaced him with [Pahlavi 1953-1979] was more repressive than the one that came before it.

While criticisms regarding treatment of political prisoners apply to both the Pahlavi and Mossadegh periods, Robson omitted the fact that under Pahlavi, women gained the right to vote, run for office, and divorce. The legal marriage age was raised from 13 to 18. The first public gay wedding in the Middle East was held in Tehran, and the couple was congratulated by the Empress.

Arash Azizi, a fellow at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, said that former Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif speaks on behalf of the Iranian people, when the mass protests that occurred earlier this year — in which tens of thousands of people were killed — show that the regime clearly lacks popular support. This is something universally acknowledged by even those who oppose the current war.

The controversial US Special Envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, claimed that sanctions and war “have not done one iota” to weaken the Iranian regime or reduce its violence, and returned to the same conclusion he has defended for years: that blind faith in endless negotiation remains the only path forward regardless of past failures.

Contrary to this claim, the sanctions have significantly weakened the regime economically and constrained its terror proxies, and their conduct during this war shows how untrustworthy incessant negotiation attempts have been.

When an Iranian who had lost friends in the Ukrainian PS752 plane shot down and covered up by Zarif’s government asked the panel how they sleep at night knowing they support figures like Zarif, the panelists laughed and joked about using melatonin. The Iranian student’s emotional testimony was deemed uncivil by panel moderator Travis Zadeh, Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies, but the mockery that followed was treated as acceptable.

This is the problem with Iran discourse at Yale, and beyond Yale. Treating academic credentials as a pass to ignore views that don’t fit the pre-established political ideology of “experts” is not merely due to ignorance and disconnect from reality. It is a deliberate decision to launder these fundamental misunderstandings as facts in classrooms where future political leaders sit.

Iranian voices are already silenced through repression, Internet shutdowns, and executions. What little space that remains for Iran discussion is then hijacked by academics who avoid any resolution by framing everything about the region as “too complicated,” treat the region as a monolith, and present the regime’s terrorists as authentic Iranian voices.

Foreigners are told that any intervention is wrong, because Iranians must decide their own future. But when Iranians speak, they are silenced here and silenced in Iran by the very same policies that these foreign experts and discussion panels present as the best solution for Iran.

To make any progress towards peace, that choice must be reconsidered.

The Yale Daily News initially signaled interest in publishing this piece, but declined to move forward after heavy editorial pushback by at least one staff member.

Hadi Mahdeyan is an Iranian international student at Yale University, and a fellow at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA). Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CAMERA.