How Hamas has maintained its grip on Gaza since 2007

Hamas’s uninterrupted rule over the Gaza Strip since its violent June 2007 takeover is not the mystery it is sometimes portrayed to be. It rests on five mutually reinforcing pillars: an Israeli strategy of division, sustained patronage from Iran and Qatar, the constricting siege that starved Gazans of political alternatives and enabled Hamas’s narrative to prevail, an internally-devised economic machine that fed the movement, and a deliberate reshaping of Gaza’s social fabric.

1. Israel’s “managed divide”

Israel has implemented a strategy intended to divide Palestinians, to keep them from consolidating their national aspirations.

Long-time Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told Likud lawmakers in March 2019 that whoever is against a Palestinian state should support Israel allowing the transfer of Qatari funds to Gaza. Accounting to the recount, he explained that Israel’s allowing of this is part of an overall aim to maintain separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, to prevent the Palestinian Authority from being driven to transfer funds to Hamas, and thus prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. Suitcases of Qatari cash were therefore waved through over the past seven years, even as rockets periodically fell on Israeli towns.  

Finance Minister and pro-settlement firebrand Bezalel Smotrich in 2015 called the Palestinian Authority “a burden” and Hamas “an asset,” summing up an Israeli right-wing consensus that Palestinian division was strategically useful.

So while Israel has periodically punished Hamas militarily, it has stopped short of removing it, likely believing its survival kept Palestinian national aspirations fragmented.

2. External lifelines from Tehran and Doha

Hamas could not have survived the decades-long blockade without state patrons. According to a 2020 US State Department report, Iran has provided Hamas with an estimated $100 million a year—one Israeli security source told Reuters that this figure has risen at times to $350 million—and weapons, training, and tunnelling know-how. The relationship remains transactional: Iran receives a loyal forward operating partner in the “Axis of Resistance,” while Hamas buys strategic depth and military technology that it cannot develop under siege.

Qatar supplies the softer cash. Since 2012, Doha has channeled about $1.3 billion—at points in the aforementioned briefcases—to Gaza to pay civil-servant salaries, subsidize fuel, and hand out one-hundred-dollar stipends to 100,000 needy families each month after Qatar brokered talks between Hamas and Israel in 2018 and 2019. Israeli authorities justified allowing the transfers on the belief that stability buys quiet, even while critics called them “protection payments” paid to criminals. Together, Iranian arms and Qatari money underwrite both Hamas’s military deterrent and its minimal governance payroll.

3. A siege that foreclosed alternatives

Almost immediately after the 2007 Battle of Gaza, which saw Hamas take over the Gaza Strip, Israel and Egypt imposed a land-sea-air blockade. By 2018, Gaza was a “man-made humanitarian disaster,” as Brookings put it, marked by 44 percent unemployment and four hours of electricity per day. Today, Human Rights Watch (HRW) characterizes the closure—which has tightened further since 2023—as “a tight blockade . . . amount[ing] to collective punishment” that has left 1.9 million people displaced and, as a Palestinian woman who spoke with HRW explained, “hopeless, starving, and besieged.” Political space for rivals all but vanished, Fatah’s organizational networks withered, elections became impossible, and ordinary Gazans, struggling to move goods or themselves across borders, saw no viable authority other than Hamas.

Hamas created its own siege by introducing its interpretation of Islam as the divine version, thus silencing any challenging narrative. From 2007 onward, Hamas set out to capture not only the organs of state but also the pulpits. The movement’s Ministry of Religious Affairs installed loyalist imams, issued preapproved Friday-sermon bulletins, and fielded a Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice—a morality police modeled on Iran’s Basij that enforced dress codes and patrolled beaches and cafés. Control of more than one thousand mosques gave Hamas an unrivalled platform to recast Gaza’s religious narrative around the slogans of Tehran’s 1979 revolution: martyrdom, “resistance until liberation,” and the vilification of both Israel and the West. Iranian clerics and Revolutionary Guard media helped circulate posters of Ayatollah Ali Khomeini and Quds-Day rituals that were previously foreign to Gaza’s Sunni milieu, fusing Sunni Brotherhood discourse with Shia revolutionary symbolism.

Independent Sunni and Salafi preachers—many from currents influenced by Saudi-trained scholarship—were arrested and pressured, and Hamas shut down or took over several of the mosques they used, particularly after the 2009 Ibn Taymiyya Mosque confrontation in Rafah.

This monopoly over religion made it difficult to challenge Hamas’s version of Islam, branding dissenting scholars as subversive and thereby stripping Gaza’s society of alternative moral reference points. By melding Iranian revolutionary motifs with tightly policed Sunni institutions—and by bludgeoning or co-opting every counternarrative—Hamas ensured that piety, like jobs or welfare, flowed through a single partisan gatekeeper, completing the movement’s capture of Gaza’s public sphere.

4. An economy of taxation, monopolies, and laundering

Inside the enclave, Hamas built a revenue engine that insulated it from donor whims. Smuggling tunnels under Rafah initially provided funding routes for the movement; when Egypt destroyed most tunnels in 2013 and 2014, Hamas shifted to taxing trade through the reopened above-ground crossing. In 2021, the Palestinian Authority estimated Hamas nets up to thirty million dollars a month, mainly from fuel and tobacco levies, in addition to smaller tariffs at the Israeli Kerem Shalom gate.  

Beyond this, Hamas has four main revenue streams: local taxes, transfers from abroad, donations channeled through cryptocurrencies and front charities, and, more recently, Hamas-owned businesses in Gaza. Such businesses include bakeries, livestock and poultry farms, vegetables and fruit production, and shopping malls, and Hamas's assets are said to be worth $500 million or, according to some US officials, possibly up to one billion dollars. US Treasury sanctions detail how real-estate portfolios in Turkey and shell companies worldwide launder profits back into Gaza. The movement also competed directly with private merchants—importing construction materials, cigarettes, electronics, cars, groceries and even fish—undercutting local businesses while enriching the military-political elite.

5. Dismantling Gaza’s traditional order

Hamas understood that durable rule required more than money; it demanded monopolizing social authority. The organization systematically shredded the social fabric, replacing clan elders, independent preachers, and grassroots youth groups with its own patronage networks and a “parallel society whose main goal was serving Hamas’s interests.” Loyalty to the movement became the new currency of advancement; dissenting clerics were sidelined, notable family leaders co-opted or coerced, and welfare committees repurposed to deliver Hamas-branded assistance. The outcome, visible in Gaza’s wartime fragmentation, is a populace that often lacks alternative communal reference points robust enough to organize collective resistance to Hamas’s rule.

This social engineering coincided with structured intimidation and human rights violations. Coercion is the final hinge on which Hamas’s rule turns. Rights monitors describe a pattern of arbitrary arrest, torture, and public intimidation designed to awe critics across the political spectrum. The Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights logged eighty-seven complaints of arbitrary detention and 113 of torture or ill-treatment by Hamas security forces in just the first nine months of 2022—figures comparable to those lodged against the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the much larger West Bank. HRW and Amnesty International—during protests in March 2019 in which Gazans chanted “we want to live”—documented mass beatings, nighttime home raids, and the arrest of journalists and rights defenders, calling the crackdown “brutal” and “systematic.” Intimidation escalates in wartime: Amnesty International found that during the 2014 war, Hamas abducted, tortured, and summarily executed at least twenty-three Palestinians after the group accused them of “collaborating” with Israel after perfunctory secret trials. Such abuses by Hamas, Amnesty International added, amount to war crimes. Survivors of more recent detentions say the same tactics persist. One Gazan lawyer recounted being arrested and tortured multiple times since 2019, saying that Hamas’s current torture and murder threats are “credible.” This underscores how fear, as much as patronage, sustains the movement’s grip.  

The bottom line

Hamas’s survival is the product of interlocking external indulgence and internal adaptation. Israeli leaders tolerated—or at times actively facilitated—Hamas’s endurance to sabotage Palestinian political unity. Iranian arms and Qatari cash substituted for the formal revenues a besieged microeconomy could not provide. The blockade itself narrowed the political marketplace, while Hamas’s taxing, smuggling, and laundering operations ensured some degree of self-funding. Finally, by eroding traditional social structures and installing its own normative order, Hamas removed the societal guardrails that might once have curbed its power.

These five dynamics have proven mutually reinforcing: Each time Israel sought short-term quiet or Iran sought strategic leverage, the economic and social foundations of Hamas’s rule deepened. Each tax dollar or suitcase of cash further entrenched the new norms Hamas had imposed. Reversing that logic—ending division, lifting the siege responsibly, rebuilding an independent economy, and restoring indigenous social cohesion—will be indispensable if Gaza is ever to see governance that is accountable to its people rather than to the imperatives of a single faction.

‍