Both Hamas and Tehran are using the unstable ceasefire in Gaza to try to recover from the blows Israel has dealt them and to advance their long-term aim of destroying Israel and all the Jews there. Some 17 months after Hamas — backed by Tehran — murdered 1,200 people during its Oct. 7, 2023, anti-Jewish pogrom it still holds some 24 living hostages and the bodies of another 35.
Until Hamas is dismantled, and Tehran’s capacity to acquire nuclear weapons eliminated, the threat of a new Holocaust hangs over the people of Israel.
According to reports in the Arab-language press, Hamas has offered to scale back its missile arsenal, but not give them up entirely, in exchange for a five-to-10-year ceasefire. It continues to demand Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. Its proposals are aimed at winning time to rearm and prepare new pogroms.
Meanwhile, Israeli troops remain inside Gaza’s border with Egypt — the Philadelphi corridor — in a buffer zone along the Israeli border and along parts of the Netzarim corridor in northern and central Gaza. Thousands of Israeli soldiers are also deployed around Gaza in advance of a possible return to combat.
U.S. envoy meets with Hamas
President Donald Trump’s administration sent hostage envoy Adam Boehler to Doha, Qatar, to negotiate directly with Hamas, angering the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which wasn’t part of the talks. Boehler discussed the number of Palestinian prisoners Israel would have to release in exchange for the remaining hostages.
“We’re the United States,” Boehler told CNN after he was criticized for the direct talks. “We’re not an agent of Israel. We have specific interests at play.”
“As of now,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said March 10, Boehler’s negotiation “hasn’t borne fruit.” But that “doesn’t mean he was wrong to try.”
Trump sent Israel weapons that had been held up by former President Joseph Biden. The U.S. imperialist rulers aim to promote stability to pursue their own economic and political interests in the region, not what is best for Jews or Israel.
The biggest immediate danger is Tehran’s drive to build nuclear weapons and delivery systems capable of hitting Israel. While Israel’s defense systems have blocked most air attacks by Tehran, nothing is 100% effective. Even one crude nuclear weapon strike could kill thousands in Israel.
Washington and Tehran
The Trump administration has been combining tough language with offers to negotiate with Tehran. “I’d rather see a peace deal than the other,” Trump told reporters March 7, after he sent a letter to Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, “but the other will solve the problem.” This is an implicit threat of a U.S. or Israeli military attack.
Tehran’s threats against Israel and its military interventions across the Middle East through Hamas, Hezbollah and other allied militia forces are widely unpopular among working people and oppressed nationalities in Iran. There are dozens of protests across Iran every week by retired workers demanding adequate pensions, nurses and oil workers demanding a living wage, and actions calling for freedom for union and political prisoners. “Enough warmongering, our table is empty,” is a popular call.
Any strike of inhabited areas in Iran by U.S. military forces could devastate working people there.
Israel needs to destroy Iran nukes
But a pinpoint strike by the Israeli military on Tehran’s nuclear sites would be different. Taking out these sites would not be easy, despite Israel’s destruction of most of Iran’s antiaircraft batteries over the last year.
The Iranian rulers have put one of their nuclear sites so deep underneath a mountain that it’s believed that it would take at least two of the largest U.S. “bunker buster” bombs — the more than 13-ton GBU-57 — to destroy it.
Time is running out for the Israeli government as Tehran moves to replace its antiaircraft systems.
While Netanyahu, a capitalist politician, looks to U.S. imperialism to help defend Israel, he knows that if Tehran’s nuclear program is not stopped, Israel has to be ready to act on its own or there could be a world without Israel.
The Israel Defense Forces has captured Hamas documents that prove that Tehran, with the help of Hezbollah, encouraged and financed Hamas for years in planning the Oct. 7 pogrom — including providing more than $150 million in military equipment. Tehran helped form Hamas’ elite death squads and brought some of the thugs to Tehran for training.
Hamas’ declining support in Gaza is increasingly apparent. The area is in ruins with most buildings destroyed and with little running water or electricity. Many Gazans blame Hamas’ deliberate use of civilians as human shields and its placements of tunnels, command posts and arms storage in residential areas and under hospitals, schools and mosques.
“People here do not want more war,” Palestinian journalist Ahmed Abd al-Salam, who lives in Gaza, wrote in Media Line March 11. “They want normal lives, without destruction, without endless suffering. But they cannot say this out loud.”
But many Gazans are losing their fear and finding ways to speak out against Hamas and its attempts to reimpose its brutal dictatorship.
A Palestinian woman in Gaza recently contacted Israeli Corey Gil-Shuster, who conducts street interviews in Israel and the West Bank for his Ask Project, a popular YouTube channel.
She told him that it’s important Gazan voices are heard and volunteered to get answers to the question “Who should rule Gaza?” Because women in Gaza are not allowed to approach men they don’t know, she got men to ask the questions and film the answers, Gil-Shuster told the Militant. Most did not want their faces filmed.
Only one person said they wanted a “unified government,” which would let Hamas continue to exert influence. Several said they want the Palestinian Authority — which rules the West Bank — to return to Gaza.
“We’ve had enough of what Hamas put us through,” said one man. “We want neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas,” said another. “We want international forces.” One man said he wants “only Netanyahu!”
“We don’t care who rules us, as long as we can live a decent and peaceful life,” said another.
Overcoming the consequences of decades of Hamas rule won’t happen overnight. Jew-hatred and other reactionary views were promoted in United Nations-funded schools in Gaza. Workers, farmers and fishermen in Gaza need to gain confidence that they can begin to take their destiny into their own hands.
But getting rid of Hamas would remove a key obstacle to this and open the door to working people in Israel, Gaza and the region being able to find ways to come together, to break down divisions and forge a road forward to defend their own class and national interests.