In Gaza, Hamas Just Resigned From a Government It Still Runs

One thousand days into the Gaza war, with more than 73,000 Palestinians killed and roughly 90 percent of the territory destroyed² according to authorities in the enclave, Hamas announced on Monday that it was getting out of the business of government. Mohammed al-Farra, head of the Government Emergency Committee, the wartime skeleton of the administration Hamas has run since seizing Gaza from its rival Fatah in 2007, submitted his resignation and dissolved the committee¹, with the group declaring its readiness to hand authority to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, or NCAG. That committee is a 15-member body of Palestinian technocrats created under the US-brokered October 2025 ceasefire, authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 2803¹⁴, chaired by Ali Shaath, and supervised by the Board of Peace that President Trump chairs. A Hamas spokesman told The National the group "has relinquished all governing authority and power in Gaza" and invited the committee to come take over⁵.

So the question that matters: after 1,000 days of war and nine months of a battered ceasefire, who actually governs Gaza now? My answer, after working through what changed on Monday and what did not, is uncomfortable but clear. Hamas gave up the title of government while keeping every instrument that makes a government real. The dissolution is a genuine political maneuver with real diplomatic consequences, but it is not a transfer of power, because power in Gaza today is measured by three things: who polices the streets, who taxes the trucks, and who punishes the accused. All three still answer to Hamas.

Start with what stayed. Hamas's own Government Media Office said the administration's roughly 60,000 employees will remain in their posts³ as "state employees" under any future NCAG authority. CNN's reporting was blunt that the announcement "changes little on the ground" in the half of Gaza not occupied by the Israeli military, where Hamas security forces remain in firm control. Those forces are not idle. A June report from the UN Commission of Inquiry documented hundreds of extrajudicial punishments and dozens of executions⁸ carried out since the ceasefire, not by courts but by Hamas's military wing and police units, targeting anti-Hamas activists and members of Israeli-backed armed groups. The UN human rights office had already warned in October that executions without trial amount to a war crime⁹. This is what a functioning, if brutal, justice system substitute looks like. It did not dissolve on Monday.

Neither did the revenue base. An investigation by the Israeli outlet Shomrim found Hamas re-imposed taxes and commissions on goods entering Gaza after the ceasefire, charging private trucks fees that can reach 50,000 shekels per vehicle⁷, generating an estimated 200 million shekels, about $66 million, in the ceasefire's early months alone, plus profits from diverted fuel and commissions of up to 40 percent on money transfers. Reuters reporting carried by the Times of Israel described Hamas reinstating import fees and monitoring every truck¹⁰ with checkpoints along aid routes. A government that taxes, polices, and punishes is a government, whatever its letterhead says.

Now the committee that is supposed to replace it. The NCAG is not vaporware. It has a vetted roster agreed by the Palestinian factions and Israel, a chairman, a mission statement, and since the spring it has even begun recruiting a new police force¹¹ whose applicants must pass Israeli vetting. What it does not have is a single square meter of Gaza. The committee has sat in Cairo since January, blocked from entering the territory³, unable to exercise any measure of authority. Israel refuses to let it in until Hamas disarms; Hamas refuses to disarm until a Palestinian administration is established and Israel honors its ceasefire commitments. Monday's announcement was Hamas's attempt to break that deadlock rhetorically, or at least to relocate the blame for it.

And here is where the strongest case for taking the dissolution seriously deserves a fair hearing. Muhammad Shehada of the European Council on Foreign Relations argues the move is a savvy appeal over Prime Minister Netanyahu's head directly to Trump, demonstrating that Hamas will surrender civilian governance entirely and daring Israel to reciprocate. That pressure is real, and Israel's hands are not clean in this stalemate. Israeli forces have expanded rather than withdrawn during the ceasefire's second phase¹², with a stated goal of holding roughly 70 percent of the strip, and Gaza's Health Ministry counts more than a thousand Palestinians killed since the truce began¹³. The mediators' own bridging proposal implicitly concedes that Hamas's institutions are the only administrative machinery Gaza has: it would rehabilitate about 10,000 Hamas-linked police officers⁵ into the new force while requiring Israeli-backed militias to disarm too. Dismissing the announcement as pure theater conveniently absolves Israel of its share of the vacuum.

But acknowledging the pressure play does not rescue the claim that governance changed hands. Diplomatic sources told the Jerusalem Post that in recent talks Hamas has walked back prior understandings, refusing access to weapons stored in tunnels and rejecting the condition⁶ that arms in Gaza be held exclusively by the technocratic government. Israel's foreign minister calls this the pursuit of a "Hezbollah model," in which a civilian committee collects the garbage while an armed movement retains the veto over everything that matters, and on the evidence that warning is hard to dismiss. Even the Board of Peace, the body most invested in the transition succeeding, responded that its judgment would rest on "actions, not promises"⁴ and restated its core principle of one authority, one law, one weapon. A technocratic committee entering a territory where Hamas keeps its rifles and its tax checkpoints would govern at Hamas's sufferance. That is not administration. It is franchise management.

What about alternatives growing in the cracks? They exist, and they are instructive mostly for their smallness. The Popular Forces, the Israeli-backed militia founded by Yasser Abu Shabab, carved out the first patch of Gaza not administered by Hamas since 2007¹⁵ in eastern Rafah, complete with recruitment drives for teachers, doctors, and engineers. But the enclave holds roughly 2,000 civilians in a strip of two million, the group numbers only several hundred fighters¹⁶, it operates under Israeli military protection, and Abu Shabab himself was shot dead in December in a clash his own tribe declined to mourn. Where Hamas can reach such groups, it hunts them. Clan militias and Israeli-armed gangs are symptoms of fragmentation, not seeds of a state.

So after 1,000 days, the honest ledger reads like this. Israel controls most of Gaza's ruined ground. Hamas controls most of what still functions as Palestinian public life within it: the payroll, the police, the checkpoints, the punishments. The NCAG controls a headquarters in Cairo and a stack of well-vetted plans. Monday's dissolution moved a name off an org chart and shifted diplomatic pressure onto Israel, which now faces a harder case for keeping the committee out. That is not nothing. But the test of a real transition was never an announcement at a hospital press conference. It is whether the armed man taxing a flour truck at a checkpoint answers to Ali Shaath or to the Qassam Brigades. Watch for three things: the NCAG physically operating inside Gaza with its own vetted police, Hamas conceding exclusive weapons authority to that committee, and the truck fees stopping. Until at least one of those happens, Gaza has not gotten a new government. It has gotten a government that no longer wishes to be named.