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Jacob Linker

What Hamas Destroyed in Gaza

Recently the PLO Executive Committee member Ahmad Majdalani said the following: “Hamas, with its adventurous approach, has destroyed all the achievements of the Palestinian people. The Gaza Strip has gone back 100 years after this military adventure (October 7) that harmed the Palestinian cause.” He’s got a good point, given how Hamas’s actions undid decades of development, prevented concessions the Palestinians were going to get from Israel, and hasn’t changed the terms of an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement.

To get an understanding of just how much Hamas ruined the place, I’ll break down the following into two parts. First, what Gaza looked like before October 7th. Second, what further concessions Israel was poised to make to the Palestinians before Hamas attacked Israel.

What Gaza looked like before October 7th

Before October 7th, Gaza wasn’t that bad a place. It had “dozens of new and modern resorts, chalets and coffee shops” such as the five-star al-Mashtal hotel, the Blue-Beach resort, and the boutique Al Deira Hotel. It was brimming with seafood restaurants and had a “middle class that enjoy[ed] spin classes, fine dining, [and] private beaches.” It had air-conditioned indoor shopping malls such as the two-floor 19,400 square foot Gaza Mall, three story Al-Andalusia Mall (complete with a movie theater, restaurants, beauty and clothing retailers, a supermarket, a children’s playground, and swimming pool), and 10,000 square foot Capital Mall. There were public parks with artificial lakes in Gaza City. Other luxuries include a water park, a luxury car dealership with new BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes, and upscale neighborhoods like al-Zahra in Gaza City and Hamad in Khan Younis.

Nor were Gazans completely restricted from leaving the strip. From January to June 2023, there were 352,000 crossings from the Gaza strip according to UN Data. Egypt would approve 98.5% of Gazans’ exit permits, which resulted in Gazans having 100,000 crossings in 2021, 145,000 in 2022, and 76,000 in the first six months of 2023 (presumably summing up to 152,000 for the whole of 2023, had October 7th not occurred). And with Israel, there were 276,338 crossings in the first six months of 2023 – likely due to repeat crossers like the approximately 18,000 Gazans approved to work in Israel as of September 2023 (injecting $2 million into Gaza’s economy) and the 10,000 Gazans who entered Israel for medical treatment in 2022 (per the anti-Israel NGO B’Tselem).

Nor was the humanitarian situation particularly bad by the standards of a developing country. Coleman Hughes has observed that according to Palestinian Sources and the CIA World Factbook, Gazans were better than the global average in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, and under-5 morality – and in the same neighborhood as Egypt, Mexico, or Vietnam.

Rates of being obese or overweight were between 64.1% and 67.5% for Gazan mothers and 65% for Gazan health care workers, and “Gaza was largely self-sufficient in vegetables, eggs, fresh milk, poultry and fish, and local agriculture also produced much of the red meat and fruits consumed inside Gaza.” If there was food scarcity, it was a small issue and one only 16% of Gazans attributed to the blockade (compared to 31% blaming Hamas and 26% blaming inflation).

Gaza had pretty consistent electricity access by regional standards too. The average Gazan in 2022 had 12 hours’ worth of electricity a day provided by the Gaza Power Plant and Israeli feeder lines – which provided 75% of Gaza’s electricity. The remaining 25% was provided by informal power systems, including private generators and over 12,400 rooftop solar panels (the highest density in the world, used by at least a third of Gazans). 16 hours’ worth of electricity isn’t good by the standards of a developed county, but it’s not particularly different from neighboring Egypt, Iraq, or Lebanon, and certainly better than Syria, Libya, or Yemen.

How do you explain all of this, despite around a 45% unemployment rate in 2022? For starters, that unemployment rate is likely inflated, as it doesn’t account for informal workers, tunnel diggers, and tunnel-smugglers. But much of this could be attributed to the billions in aid the Palestinians have received, such as $4.5 billion from the UN between 2014 and 2020, $1.3 billion from Qatar from 2012 to 2021, $500 million from Egypt, and $80 million from the European Union. Many Gazans likely don’t work because they’re on the international dole. As for the rest, international aid promotes their well-being.

Were there problems? Of course. Its growth was still dampened by conflict after all, and Hamas was frequently more interested in investing in military infrastructure than civilian infrastructure. The lunatics even recorded themselves digging up water pipes to make rockets! It just wasn’t much better or worse than comparable developing countries. And it was certainly a place that was good enough that we should lament that it was ruined by Hamas’s war.

Things were getting better for the Palestinians

The above being said – the Palestinians were poised to make a lot of progress before October 7th.

For starters, in June 2023, Israel, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority struck a deal to develop the gas fields off of the coast of the Gaza Strip. This $1.4 billion dollar deal would have made “improbable partners out of Israel and Hamas” in the enterprise and created an additional revenue stream for the Palestinian Authority which has been having frequent difficulties securing funds from Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

And on June 14, 2023, Israel’s top security chiefs signed off on several concessions to Hamas which would have reduced the Palestinian Statelet’s semi-isolation from the outside world. These included a renovation of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, the construction of a port, and an increase in entry visas for work in Israel. The plans for 10,000 additional permits had already been approved.

Although this still would have been well below the 120,000 Gazan workers who entered Israel daily since Hamas’s takeover of the Strip in 2007.

Furthermore, there were signs that Israel’s looming normalization with Saudi Arabia was going to include substantial concessions to the Palestinians. American Secretary of State Antony Blinken was set to visit Saudi Arabia on October 10th, 2023 in order to discuss the Palestinian component of an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement. Per Blinken, the Saudis felt it was “hugely important to make sure that if there was going to be normalization, there was also a pathway toward a Palestinian state.”

While a “pathway” is a vague, ambiguous, and non-committal term, July 2023 reporting indicated that it was Israel’s understanding that “significant action on the ground” for the Palestinians’ benefit was necessary for a Saudi deal to go through. Evidently, the prospect of territorial concessions to the Palestinian Authority was enough of a possibility that hardcore settler-advocate Bezalel Smotrich felt a need to push back against it publicly. And the following month, a Saudi envoy emphasized the role of territorial concessions in a normalization framework.

Conclusion

All Hamas’s attack did was set back a decade and a half of Palestinian developmental progress and get a lot of people killed. It’s made Israelis more reluctant about the two-state solution, isolated Gazans and Palestinians overall economically, and failed to delay Israeli-Saudi normalization very much. While most Israelis still favor a demilitarized Palestinian State if that’s the price for Saudi normalization, that was already the case before Hamas brought an apocalypse upon Gaza.

About the Author
Jacob Linker is a lawyer and writer in the New York City area. You can follow him on Twitter here. https://x.com/JacobALinker
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