A baby named Walid Sha’ath was born last week in Rafah, Gaza, a place where a baby is born every 10 minutes.
He is the 2 millionth official resident of the Gaza Strip, cementing Gaza’s ranking as the most crowded piece of land — as well as one of the poorest — in the world.
With elections for the Hamas leadership coming up in December, and with Khaled Mashaal officially announcing that he will be stepping away from the leadership position, political infighting and maneuvering has begun among the candidates to be the new King of Gaza.
Currently there are only two countries in the world that support Hamas: Turkey, which supports more in words than in deeds, and Qatar, which has turned into the terror group’s largest financier, both in terms of rebuilding the Gaza Strip and in terms of funding the terror group.
Regional instability has caused Hamas to pay a heavy price. The organization seems to prefer to stick to its principals instead of acting according to its interests. An example was when Hamas decided to turn its back on the Assad regime at the beginning of the Syrian civil war. Hamas leadership left Damascus and scattered throughout the Arab world. On top of this, Hamas’ connections with Hezbollah quickly came to an end — at least in the beginning of the war.
Therefore, Hamas needs to build a foothold in the West Bank. To do this, Hamas has been organizing civilian infrastructure in various Palestinian cities there. Hamas has been investing tens of millions of dollars to establish these infrastructures not only in the West Bank, but in eastern Jerusalem as well. The money is being transferred via Palestinian businessmen who have permits to cross from Gaza to the West Bank, along with people who cross from Jordan into the West Bank.
This is why Mashaal has been more moderate and realistic, and why he said in his latest speech — given in Qatar a month ago — that Hamas needs to cooperate with Fatah, their political rivals in the West Bank, and not attack them. He is trying to bequeath a less inflammatory situation to his successor.
The deputy head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, went to Saudi Arabia a little more than a month ago. The official reason for the trip was to participate in Hajj, an annual pilgrimage to Mecca, but in reality, he was there to help build a base for his candidacy for the Hamas internal elections.
After Saudi Arabia, he flew to Qatar, where he met Qatari Emir Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most senior Sharia arbitrators in the Sunni world, and one of the central figures in the Muslim Brotherhood.
Haniyeh’s trips — of which there are more to come — are expected to give him major points in the race to the leadership. He has the charisma and the ability to get a large number of people to follow him, and is building himself up to be the strongest person in Gaza.
Mousa Abu Marzook is one of the people running against Haniyeh. He has cultivated a strong working relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood leadership and various other Arab states over the past few decades, and is also the only one left in Hamas with relations with the Egyptian security and political establishment.
Last week marked five years since Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was freed from Hamas captivity in a prisoner exchange that saw Israel release over 1,000 prisoners. Among those prisoners was Yahya Sinwar, one of the founders of the Hamas military wing.
After becoming part of the leadership’s bureau four years ago, he was thought to be the most likely to succeed Mashaal as the head of Hamas. He has a lot of influence in Hamas, influence that will only continue to grow should Haniyeh be elected as leader.
Sinwar represents the polar opposite of Mashaal; he is part of a family of militants (his brother was one of the planners of the abduction of Shalit), he is an integral part of the military wing, ascetic, powerful, tough and has a strong sense of self-discipline.
In September 2015, he was designated a “global terrorist” by the U.S. State Department. A press release noted that when he was released in the prisoner exchange, he was serving “four life sentences for the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers in the late 1980s” and he has “called on militants to capture more Israeli soldiers.”
Sinwar stays away from the press and is therefore relatively unknown to the Israeli public. In Hamas, however, he is a key figure. He managed to create a position for himself in Hamas which didn’t exist previously — a connection between the military and political wings of the terror group. For all intents and purposes, he established the position of “Hamas defense minister.”
If Haniyeh wins the elections, Sinwar will have a lot more influence over how the Hamas military wing operates and have a hand in changing the face of the terror organization, much to the consternation of regional players, chief among them Israel.
The answer as to what direction Hamas is going will come at the end of this year, when the next Hamas leader is elected. However, before they will be able to realize their political ambitions, Hamas’ leaders must tend to the needs of their 2 million residents who are already beginning to boil over in anger. They must ensure that children like Walid Sha’ath don’t feel like they were born into a huge, neglected, poor prison.
Elior Levy is a columnist for Ynetnews.com, where this column first appeared.