The military campaign in Gaza has focused, understandably, on dismantling Hamas’s armed infrastructure. But demilitarization alone cannot produce durable security.
Without a parallel process of ideological deradicalization – what this article calls “de-Hamasification” in the context of the Gaza Strip – the destruction of Hamas’s battalions will yield, at best, a temporary pause before the next iteration of violent extremism fills the void.
This is not a pessimistic forecast; it’s a structural one.
Depth of the problem
Hamas did not merely govern Gaza after its 2007 takeover. It systematically remade the cognitive landscape of its population.
Through control of education, mosques, welfare systems, media, and public ritual, Hamas embedded a worldview in which Israel’s destruction is not a political option but a religious and national imperative, and violence is its natural instrument.
The process of Hamasification unfolded across nearly two decades and two generations.
Gaza’s population today has grown up with a singular ideological grammar.
The October 7 massacre and the war that followed have added layers of trauma, displacement, and loss that create fertile soil for continued radicalization, not moderation.
But anyone claiming deradicalization in Gaza will be easy is not engaging seriously with the problem.
What the evidence tells us
The academic and policy literature on deradicalization identifies three mutually reinforcing levels of intervention: the individual (identity, emotion, belief); the communal (family, religious networks, local leadership); and the institutional (governance, education, economy).
Effective programs address all three. Programs that address only one – typically, the security dimension – consistently fail to produce lasting change.
Comparative analysis of post-conflict deradicalization offers two relevant clusters of cases.
The Western model – Germany and Japan post-1945 – succeeded because military defeat was total, institutional reform was deep, and economic reconstruction was rapid.
Iraq and Afghanistan failed because external intervention lacked local legitimacy, religious authority, and any credible political horizon for the population.
Gaza shares more with the latter than the former.
There is no reconstructible democratic institutional legacy. The dominant collective identity is built around the “resistance” narrative. And suspicion of external – particularly Israeli – intervention is not a marginal sentiment but rather near-universal.
The more instructive comparisons come from the Arab world.
Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, and Jordan have all, in different ways, confronted Islamist radicalization within their own societies and developed models combining security pressure with systematic re-education toward a state-sanctioned religious and civic ethos.
Neither model is replicable wholesale in Gaza, since they operated within functioning state frameworks with established governmental authority; however, they still offer operational principles that are relevant.
Four conditions for viability
A credible de-Hamasification strategy rests on four mutually dependent conditions.
First, sustained military pressure and demilitarization. Hamas must not be allowed to reconstitute its military capacity while other processes unfold.
This requires not only disarmament but also dismantling – DDR (disarmament, demobilization, reintegration) in its full sense, including the organizational infrastructure that would allow rapid rearming.
Israel must retain overriding security responsibility, regardless of whatever civil administration governs the Gaza Strip.
Second, a tangible political horizon.
This is the condition most frequently omitted from Israeli strategic discussion, and its omission fatally undermines everything else.
A “theology of peace,” meaning a moderate religious framing, civic education, and alternative national narratives, is perceived as propaganda unless it is attached to something real.
Without a credible pathway toward Palestinian political expression and eventual statehood, no re-education program will gain traction with the population it needs to reach.
Palestinian sovereignty, in any viable model, must be limited and conditional on demilitarization milestones, but it must exist as a genuine prospect, not a rhetorical device.
Third, rapid civil reconstruction.
The physical destruction of Gaza creates both a necessity and an opportunity. Reconstruction is itself a political instrument: It can be sequenced to reward demilitarization and cooperation, creating material “pull factors” toward moderation.
Without economic recovery, employment, and restored infrastructure, ideological change has no material foundation.
Reconstruction that proceeds independently of political conditionality, however, risks rebuilding the conditions for renewed radicalization.
Fourth, Arab state engagement.
Israel has neither the legitimacy nor the cultural tools to implement deradicalization within Palestinian society directly. An Arab coalition, with Egypt and the UAE as the primary actors – given their experience and their existing deradicalization infrastructure – is indispensable.
This means religious authority (credible ulama [Islamic scholars] capable of contesting Hamas’s theological framing), educational content, institutional capacity, and political legitimacy that no Western or Israeli actor can supply.
The Palestinian Authority problem
Any stable governance framework requires the Palestinian Authority as an anchor.
Not because the PA is currently fit for purpose but because it remains the only Palestinian entity capable of conferring legitimacy on a post-Hamas political order in the eyes of Arab states and the international community.
The PA under its current leadership has failed to prepare for, or even seriously engage with, the post-October 7 reality.
Integrating the PA into a reconstruction and deradicalization process while simultaneously demanding genuine internal reform (backed by Arab state pressure and international oversight) is a difficult needle to thread.
It is, however, the least bad option available.
The honest assessment
The probability that all four conditions will be met simultaneously – sustained Israeli military commitment, a credible political horizon, coordinated Arab engagement, and a reformed PA – is low.
It requires a quality of strategic vision and political courage from multiple actors, including Israel, that is not currently in evidence.
That assessment should be stated clearly, not buried in diplomatic hedging.
The purpose of laying out this framework is not to predict success but rather to identify what success would require so that decision-makers and the public can evaluate the gap between current policy and any strategy actually capable of producing durable stability.
Military demilitarization, a political horizon, economic reconstruction, and social deradicalization are not sequential stages. They are simultaneous requirements.
A strategy that addresses only the first, as current Israeli policy largely does, is not a strategy for winning. It is a strategy for postponing.■
Ofer Guterman is a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). This article is based on a comprehensive policy study titled ‘De-Hamasification of the Gaza Strip: Learning from Western and Arab Models of Deradicalization.’