By the autumn of 2025 Gaza’s political and security map looks less like a single theatre dominated by a hierarchic insurgent movement and more like a contested archipelago of local power centres. Hamas’s armed wing has publicly and privately acknowledged the loss of its long-standing military leadership, including confirmation from the group that Mohammed Deif has been killed and repeated Israeli statements that Mohammed Sinwar was eliminated earlier this year.
Those removals matter in practical terms. For two decades Hamas sustained a command culture built around a small cohort of operational leaders who controlled tunnels, weapons production and cross-border operations. The successive removal of senior commanders has degraded centralized coordination, even while the organisation retains regional networks, external political organs and a reservoir of recruits. The result is not instant collapse but a weakened centre and growing contestation on the ground.
Into that weakening centre have rushed multiple actors. Local clan leaders, newly visible militias and criminal networks have all expanded their footprint, establishing checkpoints, humanitarian distribution committees and parallel security arrangements. Independent analyses and field reporting document an uptick in intra-Palestinian clashes and the emergence of armed groups operating autonomously of Hamas in districts such as Khan Younis and Rafah. Those dynamics point to a classic fragmentation pattern: central authority erodes while local bargains and coercive providers of order proliferate.
The fragmentation is not merely an internal governance problem. It has already complicated implementation of the ceasefire architecture and the so called phase two political arrangements. International planners who envision a sequenced withdrawal, international stabilisation forces and technocratic reconstruction now face a terrain where control is patchy and multiple actors will contest access to aid and to political legitimacy. Observers warn that absent credible, sustained international capacity, Gaza risks becoming functionally partitioned between Israeli controlled zones and a mosaic of rival authorities.
Fragmentation creates distinct security risks. Small militias and local strongmen will compete over scarce resources and external patronage, sometimes cooperating with external actors and sometimes aligning with more extreme networks. Reports from on the ground show groups that have collaborated with Israeli forces or sought to monopolise aid corridors, and others that have criminalised distribution chains. That environment raises the possibility of episodic violence, predatory rule, and the entrenchment of actors hostile to central mediation.
Policymakers face three interacting policy trade offs. First, providing security by empowering local actors risks legitimising spoilers who may oppose national reconciliation. Second, insisting on rapid disarmament of any remaining organised military elements without robust stabilization and governance alternatives risks producing vacuums populated by criminal or extremist groups. Third, any international stabilisation force or reconstruction plan will need political cover and credible impartiality to avoid being seen as simply entrenching a new order. International actors have proposed administrative and security mechanisms to fill interim governance gaps, but those proposals require political consensus and resources that remain contested.
Strategically the most likely near term outcome is a prolonged period of layered authority. Hamas will survive as an organisation in diaspora and through remnants in Gaza, even if its centralized chain of command is badly damaged. Simultaneously, a patchwork of local committees, clan authorities and militias will assert control over neighbourhoods and aid routes. That scenario will complicate reconstruction, worsen humanitarian access and create long term governance problems that increase the risk of renewed violence and of regional spillover.
If the international community wishes to avoid a durable, violent fragmentation it must sequence its approach: secure humanitarian access; build locally legitimate administrative capacity; and establish security arrangements that are predictably enforced and internationally monitored. Those steps require patient, long term political engagement, financial commitments and an acceptance that short term tactical stabilisation will not substitute for a deliberate political settlement that addresses governance, justice and reconstruction simultaneously. Fragmentation is reversible only through a combination of credible local governance options and political pathways that create incentives against fragmentation.