A total 'de-Hamasification' of Gaza may be a bad idea
COMMENTARY / WORLD - BY BOBBY GHOSH - BLOOMBERG
Crafting solutions and a path to peace in the Middle East is fraught with difficulties
When the outlook for the days ahead seems so dire, it can be hard to focus on a "day-after plan.” Nonetheless, the Joe Biden administration is working with Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to develop a long-term Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. Some Palestinian representatives are also reported to be involved in the discussions.
As with so much else emanating from the White House in relation to the conflict in Gaza, the details of the plan — or even the discussions around it — are fuzzy. But it is reportedly likely to include a timeline for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. The Washington Post says the plan "could be announced as early as the next several weeks.”
There is little reason to be optimistic that it will get very far. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior figures in his government have made it clear that a two-state solution is a nonstarter: If anything, their opposition to a Palestinian state has hardened since Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack in southern Israel.
There’s also more than a little cognitive dissonance between conjectural conversations about peace and the very real Israeli threat to launch a ground offensive on Rafah, the southern corner of Gaza now crammed with more than a million Palestinians who have fled the destruction of their homes in the rest of the enclave.
But those who study conflict say it is never too early to start discussions about what needs doing after the guns fall silent. "A peace plan has to be on the agenda right now,” says Renad Mansour, a research fellow at Chatham House and the Cambridge Security Initiative. "The idea that you can have an overwhelming military operation in Gaza and then pieces of the puzzle will somehow fall into place afterward — it doesn’t work like that.”
Any day-after plan has to reckon with a slew of difficult questions: Who will rebuild Gaza; who will pay for the reconstruction; who will investigate and adjudicate allegations of war crimes; and not least, who will tend to the physical and psychological trauma inflicted by the war.
But the question that must be answered before any of the others is who will administer the enclave when the war ends. Israel, rightly, will tolerate no role for Hamas in postwar Gaza. Netanyahu has repeatedly said that Israel’s military objective is to eliminate the terrorist group, root and branch.
Nor is Israel likely to acquiesce to a Palestinian proposal for Hamas to join the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella grouping of factions, currently dominated by Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah, that represents the Palestinian people in international forums.
The Biden administration has said it would like the Palestinian Authority, to take charge, ideally with an infusion of "fresh blood” to deal with the institutionalized corruption and ineptitude that have been the hallmarks of Abbas’s government in the West Bank. But Netanyahu has indicated he sees no role for the PA in Gaza, either.
Many in the Arab world share this view and ample evidence suggests that neither of the Palestinian protagonists wants the responsibility. "It is obvious that it cannot be Hamas (that rules Gaza), and Hamas recognizes that,” says Hesham Youssef, a former Egyptian diplomat and senior Arab League official. "Also, it can’t be PA, and the PA recognizes that.”
The most plausible custodian for postwar Gaza is a transitional authority — with the imprimatur of the United Nations and with Arab states in the lead — to provide essential services until permanent arrangements can be made. (The obvious caveat is that the Arab states will require an Israeli promise at least to work toward a Palestinian state.) Youssef believes that an 18-24 month transition might suffice, if it is tied to elections at the end of the period.
But even a transitional authority will need to reckon with Hamas’ large footprint in Gaza. Netanyahu and his allies on the Israeli far-right will insist that any administration in the enclave first conduct a thoroughgoing "de-Hamasification” to eliminate any lingering influence of the terrorist group.
This immediately puts me in mind of the de-Baathification in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein — by common consent, the most disastrous decision by the U.S.-led transitional authority run by L. Paul Bremmer. Departing from the long-established norm, honed through the history of human conflict, of co-opting elements of the defeated regime into postwar administration, Bremmer decreed that no member of the Baath Party would be allowed in his administration. The problem was that most civil servants were Baath Party members, usually because that was the only way to secure a government job.
The result of de-Baathification, as I witnessed first-hand, was months and months of chaos: Deprived of the skills and institutional memory of tens of thousands of civil servants, the transitional administration struggled to provide basic services, from education to sanitation. By the time Bremmer got wise to his mistake and allowed former government workers back into their old jobs, the authority of the U.S.-led coalition had been comprehensively discredited.
To avoid that fate, any transitional administration in postwar Gaza will need a free hand to retain many of the tens of thousands of Palestinians who worked for the Hamas government — many of whom were card-carrying members of the group. "Israel may call them all Hamas, but the people who have been running Gaza for the past 17 years are, first and foremost, Gazans,” says Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. "We need to distinguish between senior Hamas leaders and the rest: It’s not (Hamas military commander) Yahya Sinwar who maintains the electricity and sewage systems.”
Will the transitional authority be allowed to retain the prewar workforce, though? "It depends on the Israeli intentions,” says Zaid Al-Ali, a senior program manager at the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. "If they want Gaza to be properly administered, they have to be intelligent about it. But if they want to make Gaza unlivable, then they will cast the net wider and say everyone (with a Hamas connection) has to go.”
The Hamas administration is far and away the largest employer in Gaza. There is no exact count of government workers in the enclave, but the payroll is thought to top 50,000 — that was the number of workers whose salaries were paid by Qatar in 2021.
How many of that number have survived the Israeli military offensive is unclear, but a significant number of the estimated 29,000 Palestinians killed so far will likely have been civil servants. "You have to wonder how many will remain at the end of the war,” says Toby Dodge, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. "And from that group, many will be tempted to leave a devastated Gaza, if nothing else then for the sake of their families.”
Given the scale of the task, whoever is left responsible for Gaza’s reconstruction will need all the hands they can get. They should be allowed to get them from wherever they can.
Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering culture.
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Palestinian FM says Hamas knows it cannot be in new government
GENEVA:?Palestinian foreign minister Riyad Al-Maliki said Wednesday he believes Hamas understands why it should not be part of a new government in the Palestinian territories.
Maliki told a press conference that a “technocratic” government was needed, without the?group which is fighting a bitter war against Israel.
“The time now is not for a national coalition government,” Al-Maliki said. “The time now is not for a government where Hamas will be part of it, because, in this case, then it will be boycotted by a number of countries, as happened before,” he told the UN correspondents’ association.
“We don’t want to be in a situation like that. We want to be accepted and engaging fully with the international community,” he explained.
Palestinian prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh announced Monday the resignation of his government, which rules parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, citing the need for change after the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza ends.
A decree from Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said the government will stay on in an interim capacity until a new one is formed.
Maliki said the priority was engaging the international community on to help provide emergency relief to Palestinians, and then looking at how Gaza could be reconstructed.
“Later, when the situation is right, then we could contemplate that option. But what comes first is how to salvage the situation. How to salvage innocent Palestinian lives. How to stop this insane war and how to be able to protect Palestinian people,” he said.
“That’s why I think Hamas should understand this, and I do believe that they are in support of the idea to establish, today, a technocratic government.
“A government that is based on experts, individuals who are completely committed to take up the reins and the responsibility for this period — a difficult one — and to move the whole country into a period of transition into a stable kind of situation where, at the end, we might be able to think about elections.
“And after elections, the outcome of the elections will determine the type of government that will govern the state of Palestine later.”
Maliki is in Geneva to attend the United Nations Human Rights Council. The war in Gaza began after Hamas?launched an attack on October 7 that killed about 1,160 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli figures. Hamas militants also took hostages, 130 of whom remain in Gaza. Israel’s retaliatory bombardment and ground offensive in Gaza have killed at least 29,954 people, most of them women and children, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
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Hamas Is Losing Every Battle in Gaza. It Still Thinks It Could Win the War.
On the run, Yahya Sinwar is betting the militant Islamists can achieve a political victory by surviving Israel’s onslaught.
By Marcus Walker - Anat Peled - Summer Said - Feb. 29, 2024
Senior members of Hamas’s leadership in exile met in Doha, Qatar, earlier this month amid concerns that its fighters were getting mauled by an Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip . Enemy troops were killing dozens of militants each day as they methodically overran Hamas strongholds.
Then a courier arrived with a message from Yahya Sinwar , the head of Hamas in Gaza, saying, in effect: Don’t worry, we have the Israelis right where we want them.?
Hamas’s fighters, the Al-Qassam Brigades, were doing fine, the upbeat message said. The militants were ready for Israel’s expected assault on Rafah , a city on Gaza’s southern edge. High civilian casualties would add to the worldwide pressure on Israel to stop the war, Sinwar’s message said, according to people informed about the meeting.?
Hamas’s military wing in Gaza is waging an unequal fight with the strongest military in the Middle East—a war brought on by the U.S.-designated terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel . But Sinwar, the mastermind of that attack and one of Israel’s prime targets, is playing a different game. His goal is for Hamas to emerge from the rubble of Gaza after the war, declare a historic victory by outlasting Israel’s firepower, and claim the leadership of the Palestinian national cause.?
The militants, commanded day-to-day by Sinwar’s brother Mohammed, have changed their tactics since a short cease-fire in November. Hamas fighters are now trying to avoid large firefights and instead use small-scale ambushes—using tools ranging from rocket-propelled grenades to recorded voices of hostages to lure Israeli troops into traps.?
The ambushes have little chance of holding territory against Israel’s armored maneuvers . But they’re tailored to Hamas’s limited capabilities, and to Sinwar’s war aim.?
“It’s a very sound tactical logic,” said Eyal Berelovich, a civilian analyst for Israel’s armed forces and a military historian at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “Their strategic goal is to survive.”?
Many in Israel’s military, from senior commanders to ordinary soldiers who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, worry that their accumulation of tactical wins on the battlefield might not add up to a lasting strategic victory. After nearly five months of intense fighting, Israel is still far from its declared war aim of eliminating Hamas as a significant military and political entity.?
“Fighting the enemy is like a game of whack-a-mole,” said an Israeli reservist in Khan Younis with the 98th Division. He said many soldiers sense the lack of a plan and wonder what their efforts are for. “It will be very hard to destroy Hamas.”?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised a “total victory” that annihilates the radical Islamist group. Israel’s military defines its mission more cautiously: to reduce Hamas’s capabilities to a level where the group can never again launch an attack like Oct. 7.
But many in Israel’s military believe the government’s reluctance to flesh out a plan for who should govern Gaza after Hamas is leaving a political vacuum that could help Hamas to grow back.?
Gaza’s civilians continue to bear the brunt of the war , with thousands killed by airstrikes and ground fire and many more desperate for food, medicine and safety . Around 30,000 residents of the enclave have been killed in Israel’s invasion, most of them women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities, whose numbers don’t otherwise distinguish between militants and civilians. Israeli officials privately say the total death count is roughly accurate but dispute the composition, saying over one-third of those killed were Hamas fighters.?
Hamas leaders in Gaza have told Egyptian officials and the group’s political wing in exile that the Al-Qassam Brigades have lost at least 6,000 men killed, out of an estimated 30,000 fighters before the war. Israel says it has killed about 12,000 Hamas militants in Gaza so far, plus about another 1,000 during the fighting in Israel on Oct. 7.?
U.S. and Egyptian intelligence officials believe the true losses are roughly in the middle between the Israeli and Hamas claims. Military analysts say Hamas can recruit new fighters to replace its rank-and-file soldiers, but that replacing experienced commanders is more difficult.?
Israel has so far lost 242 soldiers killed in Gaza, in addition to over 300 killed on Oct. 7.?
Degrading Hamas’s capabilities is a realistic goal for Israel’s military, said Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, a think tank in Washington. But sustaining it would require fully occupying Gaza, which would give Hamas a target for a never-ending insurgency, he said. “Recent history shows that you can be an effective insurgency on a shoestring,” said Ibish. “Anyone can make an IED,” or homemade bomb, he said. “It’s easy to get a pistol. If you’re willing to die, you can kill soldiers.”?
Which side achieves its broader goal depends in part on the war of narratives. Israelis see the war in Gaza as necessary self-defense after Hamas’s gruesome killing of about 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, the bloodiest day in the country’s history.?
But the deepening humanitarian crisis and the scale of destruction in Gaza have strained Israel’s relations with countries around the world, including with its closest ally, the U.S . President Biden recently called Israel’s use of firepower “over the top.”?
The U.S. is pushing for a cease-fire and Biden on Monday expressed optimism about a deal to pause the fighting and release hostages , but Israel and Hamas warned that their negotiating positions remain far apart.
Israel is betting that its military can do enough physical damage to Hamas to win security for itself, outweighing the diplomatic cost of worldwide opprobrium.?
Hamas is betting that it can evade the Israelis’ best efforts to crush it, allowing it to regenerate and claim a political victory.?
“We brought the Palestinian cause to the forefront. We have changed the status quo,” Sinwar said in a message delivered to Egyptian officials soon after Oct. 7.?
Sinwar and other Hamas leaders initially hoped to trigger a wider war against Israel in the Middle East. But Hamas’s main allies Hezbollah and Iran didn’t want an all-out conflict, leaving Hamas to face Israel’s invasion of Gaza mostly alone.?
Early on, Hamas often sought to attack Israeli troops with platoon-sized groups of up to 30 men, according to Israeli officers and military analysts.?
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In densely built neighborhoods of Gaza City, teams of Hamas fighters carried out coordinated attacks. One group would try to block an advancing Israeli unit. Another group would attack it from the flank. The militants would try to inflict casualties, then disappear into ruined buildings or the maze of tunnels beneath the enclave. But such actions led to heavy losses of Hamas fighters and commanders.?
Hamas drew lessons during the November pause, said Israeli commanders and analysts. It shifted to hit-and-run attacks by tiny groups of two or three men, sometimes just one individual.?
The new guerrilla tactics were observed throughout the Gaza Strip, said Berelovich, indicating that at that time, Hamas still had a functioning command-and-communications structure in the enclave.?
The shift has reduced Hamas’s losses, but also the number of Israelis they are able to kill and wound. “The change in their tactics indicates that their need to survive has outgrown their need to coerce Israel,” said Berelovich.?
Ambushes usually involve a rocket-propelled grenade, especially the Al-Yassin 105 round fired from a shoulder-held launcher, which Hamas developed from a Russian design. One fighter fires the RPG, a second man bears an AK-47 automatic rifle, and a third man wields a video camera for social media.?
Hamas’s propaganda videos often end just as the RPG explodes, leaving it unclear how much damage was done to the target. The grenades usually do only limited damage to Israel’s heavily armored Merkava tanks, but can be effective against less-protected vehicles as well as soldiers on foot, said Guy Aviad, a researcher on Hamas and former Israeli officer.?
Other Hamas ambushes use so-called sticky bombs, improvised explosives that attach themselves to Israeli armored vehicles with magnets or duct tape.?
Osher, a tank driver with the Israeli 4th Brigade, recalled being wounded by a sticky bomb in Khan Younis in December. While his unit was searching for a tunnel shaft, a single Hamas fighter ran across the street and attached the bomb to the tank near the driver’s position.?
“There’s someone outside,” Osher heard a comrade say just before the device exploded. The force of the blast hit him through the armor. “Driver is OK,” Osher recalled saying, even though he wasn’t. “I couldn’t see or hear, I was concussed,” he said. He followed his training and drove the tank backward to a preplanned evacuation point. His crew told him his face was bleeding.?
Hamas also tries to kill Israeli troops by putting booby traps in buildings throughout Gaza, many Israeli soldiers say. Booby traps have been widely found in the homes of Hamas operatives, but also in many civilians’ homes, Israeli soldiers said.?
Early on the explosives were placed around the buildings’ entrances. The Israelis soon stopped using the front door, instead blasting or bulldozing their way through the walls of a house. Hamas has adapted, placing explosive traps in items inside buildings, from gas storage balloons to children’s’ toys, Israeli soldiers said.?
In some places, Hamas has tried to lure Israeli soldiers into traps by planting explosives in items belonging to Israeli hostages taken on Oct. 7.?
The commander of an Israeli unit tasked with reaching and evacuating wounded soldiers recalled an incident when soldiers found a bag bearing Hebrew writing that belonged to a resident of Kibbutz Be’eri in southern Israel. Peering carefully inside the bag, the soldiers saw two grenades primed to go off if the bag was picked up, the commander said.?
In other cases, Hamas used voice recordings of hostages begging for help in Hebrew to try to draw soldiers into an ambush. Near the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, a recording of Israeli voices played for several days over loudspeakers, recalled an Israeli infantryman who fought there late last year. “Please help me, please help me,” the voice said in Hebrew, followed by different voices speaking English with an Israeli accent, and the voice of a child, the infantryman said. “It sounded real. It was so very eerie,” he said.?
When Israeli forces first heard such voices, they sent men to check whether hostages were really present, resulting in ambushes and some injuries, the infantryman said. The troops soon switched to using robots to investigate the source of the sound.?
The Israelis reduced Hamas’s opportunities for ambushes by pulling out of Gaza City in the enclave’s north in January. But Hamas soon began filtering back into areas that Israeli troops had left. Israel’s military has conducted a series of raids to clear neighborhoods of Gaza City for the second time.?
In the battle for Khan Younis, the biggest city in southern Gaza, Israel’s massive forces have dominated the ground and the air so much that Hamas fighters are at risk whenever they show themselves.?
“Once they go overground, they’re no big challenge. The challenge is to flush them out from underground,” said Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus, commander of the Israeli 98th Division, which is fighting in Khan Younis .?
But the Israelis have made only partial progress in finding and destroying Hamas’s vast tunnel network.?
Israeli officials now estimate that Hamas built around 350 miles of tunnels under Gaza, which is less than 30 miles long and up to 8 miles wide. There are thought to be several hundred tunnels under Khan Younis alone, which occupies an area roughly the size of the Bronx in New York.
Sinwar himself was believed for some time to be hiding in the tunnels under his hometown of Khan Younis, surrounding himself with hostages, but Israeli officials are no longer sure. Israel has made it a priority to kill or capture the 61-year-old militant, who spent 22 years in Israeli prison before becoming Hamas’s leader in Gaza in 2017.?
Israeli analysts say Sinwar is ready to die for his cause, confident that Hamas will carry on. Some Egyptian intelligence officials, who like Hamas’s political leadership in exile have received bullish messages from Sinwar about the war, think he has lost touch with reality while hiding underground for months.?
The scale of Hamas’s tunnel network distinguishes the fighting in Gaza from any other battles between regular forces and Islamist militant groups in recent history, say military analysts.?
Hamas uses the tunnels as military headquarters, to maneuver across the enclaves’ cities, protect its leaders, hide Israeli and other hostages, manufacture weapons and conduct hit-and-run attacks. “Until you take all of this away from Hamas you won’t be able to beat it,” said Aviad.?
Israeli military in Gaza
The tunnels also contain a fixed-line phone system that Hamas used to communicate earlier in the war, along with walkie-talkies, burner SIMs and satellite phones. But with Israel hacking into those systems, the militants have increasingly shifted to using runners to convey verbal or written messages.?
The Israeli army has found no systematic solution for finding and destroying Hamas’s tunnels , many soldiers said. Tunnel entrances have been found in homes, schools, mosques, courtyards, streets and farm fields. Some are covered by steel doors, others by mattresses in a home. Israeli forces have mostly relied on drones and robots to search tunnels, only sending soldiers in later to avoid firefights in the narrow passages.?
The war is becoming a series of sporadic encounters with individual militants who try to shoot at Israeli soldiers or set off explosives, said the medical-evacuation commander. His unit is rescuing wounded men every two to three days now. At the start of the invasion, it was dealing with between five and 10 wounded soldiers every day. “The pace of events and the intensity is declining. We see there is less and less of the enemy,” he said.?
“I didn’t see a single soul,” Israeli staff sergeant Corey Feldman said of his combat experience in Gaza. “We were shot at every day,” he said, but usually the enemy quickly disappeared. “They didn’t stick around long enough to engage in firefights.”?
In late January an Israeli unit was preparing to detonate two buildings northeast of Khan Younis, part of the army’s effort to clear a kilometer-wide buffer zone inside Gaza’s border with Israel. Hamas militants emerged from a tunnel and fired RPGs, which set off the detonation charges, collapsing the buildings on top of the Israelis and killing 21 soldiers.?
More often, though, the Israelis can bring to bear their firepower and surveillance capabilities. A sergeant from Israel’s 5th Brigade recalled how his unit uncovered and destroyed a Hamas team lying in wait to ambush them. A Hamas spotter posing as a civilian was ready to send a signal to trigger roadside bombs as Israeli vehicles passed by, he said. Fighters armed with RPGs were poised to emerge from tunnels after the explosion.?
The Israeli unit called in airstrikes. D9 armored bulldozers plowed over the road, detonating the hidden bombs harmlessly. Engineers blew up the tunnel shafts.?
“We’re having a lot of success inside Gaza. The question is what is the plan for the day after,” said the sergeant. “I don’t think there is any clear idea.”
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Who will be the next Palestinian PM? Mohammad Mustafa is a leading candidate.
Palestinian leaders hope that Mustafa could now emerge as a unifying figure during the Israel-Hamas war
By REUTERS - FEBRUARY 29, 2024
Mohammad Mustafa, who is expected to become prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, is one of the leading Palestinian business figures and a rare ally of PA head Mahmoud Abbas, who has overseen Gaza reconstruction under Hamas Islamist rule.
A US-educated economist, he once ran the Palestinian telecoms company Paltel and, more recently, the PA's public Palestine Investment Fund (PIF), with nearly $1 billion in assets funding projects across the Palestinian territories.
He was tapped a decade ago to help lead reconstruction efforts in Gaza after an earlier war between Israel and the Islamist militant group Hamas.
Could Mustafa be the solution to bring unity?
Palestinian leaders may hope he could now emerge as a unifying figure if asked to rebuild the enclave after nearly five months of Israeli bombardment since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7.
The internationally recognized PA, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank but lost control of Gaza to Hamas in 2007, aims to reunify governance of Palestinian lands after the Gaza war.
Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh, a member of Abbas's Fatah faction, stepped down this week to pave the way for a unity cabinet, and Fatah and Hamas are expected to meet in Moscow this week to discuss the future. Though close to Abbas, Mustafa is not a Fatah member, potentially making him less contentious.
t is not yet clear when Abbas might nominate him and how long it could then take to form a government.
If appointed, Mustafa will face a huge management and diplomatic task. Swathes of Gaza are now rubble. The West Bank, too, has seen the worst violence in decades.
In addition to overseeing billions in expected international aid, Mustafa will need both political buy-in from Hamas and its supporters and cooperation from Israel, which wants to eradicate Hamas.
Washington, which wants the PA to play a leading role in the post-war governance of Gaza, has called for deep reforms in how it is run.
"Everyone is in crisis. Fatah is in crisis in the West Bank, and Hamas is clearly in crisis in Gaza," Palestinian economist Mohammad Abu Jayyab said. Mustafa, 69, could represent the "way out" for both, he said.
Background on Mustafa
Abbas appointed Mustafa as PIF chairman in 2015. He served as a deputy prime minister responsible for economic affairs from 2013 to 2014, when he led a committee tasked with rebuilding Gaza after the seven-week war in which more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed.
Speaking at Davos on January 17, Mustafa said the "catastrophe and the humanitarian impact" of the war now was much greater than a decade ago.
Gaza health authorities say 30,000 people are confirmed killed, with thousands of others believed buried under rubble.
Israel says it will never cooperate with any Palestinian government that refuses to repudiate Hamas and its October 7 attack, in which 1,200 people were killed and 253 abducted, according to Israeli tallies.
Mustafa, in his Davos remarks, described the October 7 attack as "unfortunate for everybody."
"But it's also a symptom of a bigger problem ... that the Palestinian people have been suffering for 75 years non-stop," he said.
"Until today, we still believe that statehood for Palestinians is the way forward, so we hope that this time around, we will be able to achieve that so that all people in the region can live in security and peace," he said.
He is a member of the executive committee of the Abbas-led Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which recognized Israel at the start of the peace process in 1993, hoping to establish a Palestinian state in territories captured by Israel in a 1967 war - the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.
Biden administration officials have previously said they have urged Abbas to bring new blood, including technocrats and economic specialists, into a revamped PA to help govern post-war Gaza. But they have said they do not want to be seen pressuring for the approval or rejection of specific individuals.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions on whether it would support Mustafa’s appointment or had any concerns.
What is the way forward?
Mustafa has said the PA could do better "in terms of building better institutions, providing better governance so that ... we can reunite Gaza and the West Bank."
But "if we cannot remove occupation, no reformed government, no reformed institutions can actually build a good successful governing system, or develop a proper economy," he said.
Mustafa has a Ph.D. in Business Administration and Economics from George Washington University and has worked at the World Bank in Washington. He was born in the West Bank city of Tulkarm.
He said in his January 17 remarks that $15 billion would be needed just to rebuild homes.
He said he would continue to focus on humanitarian efforts in the short and medium term, expressing hope that Gaza's borders would be opened and a reconstruction conference convened.
Asked what future role he saw for Hamas, Mustafa also said the "best way forward is to be as inclusive as possible," adding that he would like Palestinians to unite around the PLO agenda.
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