Despite Gains, Hamas Sees a Fight for Its Existence and Presses Ahead

JERUSALEM — Hamas, the militant Palestinian faction that dominates the Gaza Strip, has more to boast about in its current 20-day battle against Israel than ever before. Forty-three Israeli soldiers have been killed in fierce fighting. Gunmen infiltrated Israel through tunnels five times. Rockets repeatedly rained over Tel Aviv, and one even led most airlines to halt flights into Israel’s only international airport for two days.

As added leverage for cease-fire negotiations, Hamas seems to have at least the dog tags and perhaps remains of one of the Israelis killed in combat. Internationally, there is both mounting outrage over the hundreds of civilian Palestinians dead and growing consensus that any cease-fire deal should include Hamas’s demands for lifting trade and travel restrictions on Gaza and investing in its economy and infrastructure.

Yet Hamas shows little readiness to declare victory, as it did only 20 months ago, based largely on a single rocket hitting an apartment building in a Tel Aviv suburb. Analysts attributed this apparent intransigence to a fractured leadership, redrawn regional alliances, the sharp downturn in Gaza’s condition and a sense within Hamas that this time the fight is for its very existence.

“All these achievements of Hamas, if they strike a deal without achieving something for the people of Gaza, they will lose everything and will bury themselves,” said Zakaria al-Qaq, a Palestinian political scientist at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem.

“It’s a very critical moment; Hamas is to be or not to be,” he added. “If they didn’t reach what they promised to reach, it will be like a balloon, just punctured.”

With large sections of Gaza devastated and the Palestinian death toll topping 1,000, Hamas waffled over the weekend on the United Nations’ calls for a “humanitarian pause” in hostilities. It said Saturday night that such a pause was unacceptable as long as Israeli troops maintained positions and limited operations inside Gaza, then hours later declared its own pause without conditions, a bewildering back-and-forth that made it difficult to glean a clear strategy.

Politically isolated after breaks with Syria, Iran and especially Egypt, and its effort at reconciling with the Palestinian factions that rule the West Bank having failed to bear fruit, Hamas has all but given up on governing Gaza to focus on the battlefield. Israelis have expressed outrage that thousands of tons of concrete built a vast network of tunnels rather than schools or hospitals, but that argument has little traction in Gaza, where many see violence as the only language that works.

Though weary of war, many Gazans see the so-called resistance as the only possible path to pressing Israel and Egypt to open border crossings, and to ending Israel’s “siege” on imports and exports and naval “blockade.” Hamas and its backers in Qatar and Turkey have also been calling for a seaport and airport in the coastal enclave.

“The only option left for us was to defend ourselves and to make Israel bleed the way that we have been bleeding all these years,” said Ahmed Yousef, a former Hamas official who remains close to its leaders. “It is not acceptable to go back to a situation where we are being squeezed to death and where the whole society is being paralyzed.”

Faraj al-Loul, a plumber shopping for vegetables on Sunday in a Gaza City market, echoed the opinions of many residents interviewed who said life had become so miserable that they were willing to suffer the high costs of war if it could bring change.

“We want a cease-fire, of course, but it has to be based on the demands of the resistance,” he said. “If they refuse to open the crossings, then we’ll all become martyrs, God willing.”

Perhaps the biggest difference between this battle and the last round, in 2012, is Hamas’s relationship with Egypt. Back then, President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, who sprang from the same Muslim Brotherhood that spawned Hamas, was a strong ally, and Egypt brokered the cease-fire that promised expanded fishing and farming zones in exchange for quiet. Now, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, who led the ouster of Mr. Morsi last summer, has branded Hamas an enemy along with the Brotherhood.

Mousa Abu Marzook, a Cairo-based Hamas leader, posted a lengthy missive on Facebook criticizing Egypt for not enforcing the 2012 agreement and for siding with the enemy in the cease-fire proposal it put forward on July 14.

“Our reading of the initiative is that its purpose is to embarrass Hamas,” Mr. Abu Marzook wrote.

“The current Egyptian initiative describes the actions of the resistance as hostile; we reject this description from our brothers in Egypt,” he added. “We reject also that Egypt puts us on the same footing with the Zionist entity, or treats the victim and the executor by the same standard.”

Part of the confusion over Hamas’s positions, several experts said, is caused by internal power struggles between its political and military wings, and among leaders inside and outside Gaza, a longstanding challenge worsened by Gaza’s economic crisis and Hamas’s loss of strategic allies.

“The way to understand the Hamas decision-making calculus is not by Western perspective but by their own perspective,” said Alex Mintz, dean of the school of government at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. “Hamas, the leadership does not care so much about the civilian casualties; what he looks at is the military balance. They think they can gain more. They do not feel pressure as much as we perceive.”

Mouin Rabbani, a senior fellow, based in Amman, Jordan, at the Institute for Palestine Studies, said that it was precisely the political pressure Hamas had been under in recent years that made it unwilling to give in. He pointed to the loss of support from Iran, Syria and Hezbollah; Egypt’s closing of Gaza’s southern border crossing and the smuggling tunnels beneath it; and the failure of the new Palestinian unity government even to pay Hamas workers’ salaries.

“When Israel started attacking the Gaza Strip, Hamas saw an opportunity not only to stand up to Israel but to seek to resolve these broader issues,” Mr. Rabbani said. “This conflict for them is a struggle to lift the blockade of Gaza more than anything else.”

Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations and several European leaders have in recent days promised an easing of import, export and border restrictions as part of a cease-fire, coupled with security protections for Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel even spoke of the need for “economic and social relief” in Gaza on several American news shows on Sunday, but said it must be exchanged for a “demilitarization of Gaza.”

That would mean the destruction of tunnels into Israel and of rocket stockpiles, with international guarantees that they would not be rebuilt or replenished, something Palestinian and Israeli analysts alike said Hamas would never abide.

“This is their ideology, this is what they believe in; it’s the resistance,” said Amos Yadlin, a former Israeli chief of military intelligence and director of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. “To ask Hamas to demilitarize Gaza is like asking a priest to convert to Judaism.”