TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Last week, the militant group Hamas said it would dissolve its civilian administration, which was part of the US-brokered peace deal from 2025.
But Gazans report that many institutions operate as they always did. Eyad Saleh, for example, said he went to the usual government offices to get a copy of his university diploma that he lost during the war.
"There's nowhere else to go in Gaza except the institutions run by Hamas," Saleh told DW on the phone from Gaza City. "The only entity providing services to residents is the same body that was in place before the war, with the same employees."
The 19-year-old lost the document when he was displaced. He hopes to apply for a scholarship abroad, as he was among the best in his school. Studying elsewhere, he hopes, will be his ticket out of Gaza.
Na'ama Saeed, 39, suffers from chronic disease, and she went to the Ministry of Health this week to try to get a medical referral document.
"The responsible authority in Gaza is still the Ministry of Health, and it is the only entity authorized to issue the necessary official documents," Saeed told DW. "If there were another official body we could turn to without dealing with the current government, we would not hesitate."
Official plans but no change on the ground
In October 2025, the US peace plan outlined plans for a new administration consisting of independent technocrats. The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a transitional body made up of Palestinian experts supervised by the Board of Peace was established by US President Donald Trump.
It began its work in early 2026. However, the 15 committee members remain stuck in Egypt's capital Cairo, awaiting Israel's permission to enter Gaza and take up their work.
"There is no change, nobody is stepping in to take over," Ghassan Khatib, a lecturer in international politics at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah, told DW.
Moreover, Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist organization by several countries, already said that its ministries will stay in place along with their appointed staff, while it would continue to oversee security and policing in parts of Gaza left under its control.
About 30% of land under Hamas control
After the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, Israel retaliated, displacing nearly the entire population of 2.2 million people and destroying large parts of Gaza. The war has been described as genocide by several experts and a UN commission of inquiry.
While Israel has vowed to "eliminate Hamas," the militant group remains in power, albeit only in about 30% of Gaza. Israeli troops now occupy the remaining 70% of the narrow territory on the Mediterranean Sea. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describes the new partition as a buffer zone to deter further attacks by Palestinian militants.
Meanwhile, the ceasefire process has stalled, with Israel and Hamas blaming each other for violations. Over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since the ceasefire in October 2025, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza.
A key issue remains the decommissioning of Hamas' weapons. Hamas has refused to disarm until Israel halts its attacks on Gaza and withdraws.
"Hamas knows that Israel wants the weapons to be surrendered, but Hamas will not raise the white flag and will not give up completely," said Ibrahim al-Madhoun, a Gazan political analyst close to Hamas and currently based in Turkey.
He added that handing over the civilian administration was "an attempt by Hamas to break the deadlock, especially after negotiations held in Cairo with Nikolay Mladenov, which did not yield any results." Mladenov is the High Representative of the Board of Peace mediating the talks.
Hamas' popularity under scrutiny
Protests and dissidents have been regularly silenced with force. Last month, a call to protest against Hamas organized on social media by Palestinians living abroad was not heeded by people in Gaza.
"We realize that those who say 'I don't trust any of the political factions' are becoming 60% of the sample that we use in our polls," Ghassan Khatib, founder of the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center (JMCC), who specializes in public opinion studies, told DW. "This number has been increasing."
However, surveys should be treated with caution due to the difficult situation in Gaza, pollsters say. A growing number of people appears to have lost confidence in the two main political parties: Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank, and Hamas, which seized power in Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2007.
Since then, Israel — and, at times Egypt too — has tightened its closure of Gaza's land crossings, sea and airspace. Frequent military escalations and several wars between Israel and Hamas have shaped people's lives over the past 20 years.
The dire humanitarian situation in Gaza
Without any political solution in sight, life for Gazans remains extremely difficult. Aid organizations continue to criticize Israel for obstructing more aid from entering Gaza. Israel's civil administration COGAT claimed the opposite in a report published last week.
On Sunday, UN Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Ramiz Alakbarov "strongly" condemned the obstruction of humanitarian operations by Gaza's "de facto authorities" in a reference to Hamas.
A day earlier, armed men linked to Hamas allegedly forced their way into a food distribution point in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, Alakbarov's statement said. Hamas's actions "endangered humanitarian personnel, intimidated workers delivering life-saving food assistance and disrupted life-saving humanitarian operations," he said. Hamas has denied the allegations.
Eyad Saleh, the Gazan student who hopes to study abroad, only wanted to be identified using his middle and second names for fear of reprisals. He belongs to a generation of young Palestinians who grew up in Gaza under Hamas rule, isolated by a closure imposed by Israel. For him, the presence of Hamas on the ground means that he needs to choose his words carefully, but he said a new start was desperately needed.
"I don't care about political factions," he said. "But I believe Gaza deserves better than Hamas and better than any other political faction in Palestine, because they have all failed."
Read: What's Behind Hamas's Move to Dissolve Gaza Government
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