In the weeks since Israel’s tenuous January 19 ceasefire and hostages-for-prisoners deal with Hamas, and after 15 months of pulverizing and pitiless war, the issue of what should happen to Gaza and its 2.1 million people seems intractable. Given that the entire region is full of fragile and failing states, and with competing powers seeking to play this anarchic situation for their profit, the possibility of stabilization by outside forces appears remote. Donald Trump has floated chimerical ideas about an eventual United States “takeover” of a Gaza emptied of Palestinians — an idea only supported by Israel’s far-right government, with the rest of the world community set against it.

Oddly missing from this debate are Gazans themselves: what they want for their future, how they see their land, who they think should be their rulers, and what they consider to be the most plausible pathways to peace. Given the horrendous price paid for Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023, Gazans might be expected to reject the group for a different leadership and be more likely to compromise on larger political aspirations in favor of more urgent material needs.

Palestinian perspectives on a resolution to the conflict

In fact, a survey we conducted in Gaza in early January, shortly before the ceasefire came into effect, tells a more complicated story. The representative survey was formulated by the research group Artis International and Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Centre and carried out by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR). Using census data and sampling people in shelters based on the locations of their original homes, the survey comprised 500 face-to-face interviews with Gazans — 248 women and 252 men — ranging in age from 18 to 83. The margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The survey found that although Hamas’s appeal has declined precipitously since the war’s early months, political alternatives draw even less support, which opens the way for Hamas to regain its influence over Gaza. The war has also hardened rather than softened Gazans’ maximalist political goals, while eroding support for a negotiated solution. Perhaps most tellingly, the survey showed that the people of Gaza continue to retain strong core values related to their national and religious identity and their attachment to the land, values that they intend to uphold even at the cost of great personal sacrifice. The survey findings suggest no movement towards peace with Israel is likely to fail to address these basic values, at least to some mutually tolerable degree.

In one key survey question, respondents were asked to select which of several possible resolutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they considered both acceptable and realistic. Gazans were almost evenly split between partitioning the land between Palestine and Israel and eliminating Israel altogether. Only five percent viewed the preferred alternative of Western pro-Palestinian activists, a democratic binational state with equal rights for Arabs and Jews, as acceptable and realistic. Overall, Gazans saw a military solution to the conflict as slightly more likely than a diplomatic solution.

Although partition was chosen by 48 percent, just 20 percent supported a two-state solution conforming to United Nations resolutions based on the 1967 borders. Other two-state solutions required “right of return” of the descendants of Palestinian refugees to homes in Israel (17 percent) or reverting to the 1947 UN partition plan for Palestine (11 percent). Of the 47 percent favoring Israel´s dissolution, a clear majority opted for a single state under sharia law that would tolerate a Jewish presence but allow Jews less than full rights (27 percent), followed by those who sought to transfer out Jewish immigrants and their descendants from Israel proper and the Palestinian territories (20 percent).

Many Gazans do not see a political alternative to Hamas

The survey also showed how Gazans’ views of Hamas have changed. Before October 7, 2023, Hamas’s popular support had been withering for some time, owing to stagnant living conditions and lack of movement on Hamas’s promise of armed resistance against Israel and toward creation of a Palestinian state. As PSR’s director, Khalil Shikaki has argued, the October attack was likely an attempt by Hamas to break out of a politically intolerable status quo.

During the initial months of war, attitudes toward Hamas improved. In March 2024, a PSR poll of Gazans found that support for Hamas’s leadership had increased to more than 50 percent, a 14-point rise from before October 7, 2023. By January 2025, however, after decimation of the group’s top figures and further destruction of Gaza, we found Hamas retaining support of only a fifth of Gaza’s population (21 percent). Yet support for other political factions was even lower. In fact, when asked to select from among the current options for Palestinian leadership, Gazans’ most frequent response (32 percent) was that none of them truly represented the people. Indeed, Gazans believe that Israel’s leadership does a much better job of representing Israelis than Palestinian leadership does representing Palestinians. According to Shikaki, most Gazans do not believe Hamas has won the war. “Nonetheless,” he adds, “they do not seem to find a better alternative.”

In short, the survey reveals a Palestinian leadership vacuum that Hamas, as degraded as it is, is rapidly working to fill. Its rebound to power is being aided by absence of a viable alternative plan for Palestinian governance from Israel or Western powers and by a Trump administration proposal long championed by the Israeli far right, population “transfer” (ha’avarah). 

Gazans view the conflict in religious rather than political terms 

Yet despite Gazans’ perceptions of a crisis in Palestinian political leadership, a majority of the population continues to be committed to Hamas’s ideals, passing the midpoint on an identity-fusion scale that measured degree of visceral attachment and inseparability from core values: national sovereignty (50 percent, including self-determination and control of borders and foreign policy), Sharia as the law of the land (53 percent), and ‘right of return’ of refugees and their descendants to homes lost since Israel’s creation (61 percent).

Gazans also show a marked tendency to view the conflict with Israel in religious rather than political terms. But Palestinians´ religious belief need not imply intolerance of other groups. For example, in a 2016 survey of Palestinian Muslim youths, we found that many were disposed to place much greater value on the lives of Palestinians than on those of Jewish Israelis. Yet when they were asked to take the viewpoint of Allah (God), they valued the two more equally. Their belief in God encouraged a more universal valuation of human life, attributing moral worthiness to Muslims and non-Muslims alike even amid prolonged conflict.

Nevertheless, when religion becomes identified with an assertive socio-political agenda ostensibly sanctified by God or a “party of God,” opponents become enemies of God who are easier to vilify, even kill. In the January survey, barely one percent of Gazans considered themselves “not religious,” 67 percent identified themselves as “somewhat religious”, and 31 percent as “truly religious.” Both somewhat and truly religious considered Israelis significantly less “human” than Palestinians on a visual scale ranging from an ape-like figure through stages of semi-erectness to a fully upright human, with lower ratings indicating moral degeneracy and a violent nature. Respondents identifying themselves as “truly religious” were most committed to Palestinian sovereignty and the right of return and most willing to make major sacrifices, including fighting and dying, for those outcomes.

Not all values and conditions seen as non-negotiable for Palestinians

It is important to note that for most Gazans, religious and political commitments are not all-determining. Although most Gazans consider the core values associated with being Palestinian as central to their identity, only smaller minorities consider these to be ‘sacred’ and nonnegotiable: just 30 percent of Gazans view the right of return as immune to any trade off for peace; 20 percent view sharia that way; and 15 percent, national sovereignty. Nonetheless, the great majority (82 percent) judged that even the cause of national sovereignty was significantly more important than family safety and security. This finding parallels our survey results from the most committed combatants for and against ISIS in Iraq in 2015-17, whereas in ongoing survey work in Taiwan, for example, we find much greater concern for family security than sovereignty.

To measure how Gazans view their physical and spiritual strength relative to other groups, the survey used an approach previously tested with Iraqis, Ukrainians, and the U.S. armed forces, among others. Respondents see a pair of semi-nude bodies side by side with national flags attached to their heads, which can be increased or decreased in size and musculature using a slider. They are then asked to move the slider to assess the relative “physical” versus “spiritual” strength of each national group. Gazans considered Palestinians to be far stronger spiritually than physically. This was the opposite of how they perceived Israel, the United States, and their own putative ally Iran, which they considered much stronger physically than spiritually.

Economic incentives of punishments could backfire

There may be a broader takeaway from these findings about Gazans’ deep spiritual commitment to Palestinian core values. In similar studies conducted elsewhere, groups that perceive themselves as relatively weak physically but strong spiritually tend to be those that are more militant or radicalized and willing to continue fighting, even against a far more powerful foe. They perceive their readiness for self-sacrifice as an advantage over their adversaries.

Paradoxically, the continued strength of Gazans’ commitments to the Palestinian cause may point to forms of compromise that have until now been overlooked. For example, in my previous discussions with Hamas leaders, in public attribution for The New York Times they suggested that they do not consider a sovereign Palestine “from the river to the sea” and the dissolution of Israel as nonnegotiable, sacred values. Studies we conducted from 2006 to 2013 indicated that even the right of return, though held to be sacred, can be reframed so as to remain non negotiable in principle but negotiable in practice. But our research also shows that material offers, such as economic incentives or punishments, that aim to compel Palestinians (or Israelis) to forsake their core values only backfire, increasing resistance to peace deals and support for violence. 

Requiring Gazans to abandon their land, as Trump has proposed, would be tantamount to demanding that they cease to be Palestinian: to exist in their own right where “land is honor” (al-’ard hiya al-ard). It would only add to generations of displaced Palestinians, unassimilated through a combination of willful choice and unwillingness of host nations to fully accept them, longing to return to the land as much as diaspora Jews longed for Zion. Absent an Israeli willingness to make some concessions on Palestinian core values and the international community’s willingness to enforce the terms of such an agreement, the survey suggests that Gazans will fight on—at least if the committed minority of devoted actors are still able to inspire people to take on unfathomable odds to seek to eliminate Israel. And Israelis would assuredly respond with incomparably greater destructive force.

After waging 15 months of “total war” and achieving many of its declared material objectives, Israel may be further from pacifying Gaza than ever. This is not just because Israel has not offered anything resembling a political strategy or a plausible plan for a Palestinian future, while further radicalizing Palestinians to seek revenge for relatives killed and homes lost. (Our survey shows a positive association between having experienced family displacement and preferring a military over a diplomatic end to the conflict.) It is also because Gazans, at least the most committed among them, believe that their identity and place in the world are more imperiled than ever: a sentiment not unlike the one that inspired the establishment of the Jewish state and fostered its people’s intense will to fight. 

Scott Atran is Emeritus Research Director in Anthropology at France’s CNRS, Co-Founder of Artis International, and Distinguished Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Centre.