On August 12, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published Poll No. 97, its first full survey since the fighting in Gaza subsided: 1,270 respondents, interviewed August 5 to 8, margin of error 3.5%. In Gaza, interviews were possible only beyond the Yellow Line and in shelters, a limitation worth holding in mind.
The coverage fixed on one number: Support for Hamas has fallen from 35% to 24% in 10 months. That is the least consequential finding in the survey.
What matters is what did not happen alongside it. Hamas lost 11 points and Fatah gained nothing, remaining at 24%. The share of Palestinians who say that neither movement deserves to represent and lead them has risen from 31% to 44%.
The political system did not shift. It emptied out.
No heir apparent
Seventy-nine percent want Mahmoud Abbas to resign. Sixty-five percent describe the Palestinian Authority as a burden on the Palestinian people rather than a national achievement, up from 56% 10 months ago. Fifty-one percent support dissolving it altogether. These are not the readings of an unpopular government. They are the readings of an institution whose public has stopped assigning it a purpose.
And it has no heir. Abbas is 90. Asked who is most suitable to succeed him, 39% named Marwan Barghouti, imprisoned in Israel since 2002; in a three-way presidential race he takes 54% of likely voters, against 26% for Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya and 14% for Abbas.
The most popular successor to the president of the Palestinian Authority is a prisoner serving five life sentences. That is the measure of the vacuum.
Legislative elections are scheduled for November 28, the first in 20 years. Only 49% believe they will be held on schedule, and two-thirds believe that if held they will not be free and fair. Two-thirds also oppose the internationally backed requirement that candidates accept the PLO’s commitments, the outside world’s principal instrument for shaping Palestinian politics from within. Here, too, the attempt to reeducate the Palestinian public has failed.
Among likely voters, Fatah would take 32% and Hamas 29%. An election on that arithmetic does not settle who leads the Palestinians. It ratifies the deadlock and issues it a certificate.
The rifle paradox
Hamas has already agreed to disarm, accepting the Mladenov proposal for the second phase of the Trump plan shortly before the survey.
Its own public rejects that outright. Seventy-two percent say Hamas should not disarm before Israel fully withdraws from Gaza. The same 72% believe that if it does disarm, the war will resume and Israel will not withdraw. And 53% believe that even after handing over its weapons Hamas will remain an armed movement.
There is no contradiction here. Only 20% now believe Hamas emerged victorious, against 39% 10 months ago, and satisfaction with its wartime performance has fallen from 60% to 42%. The public has withdrawn its admiration and kept its insurance policy.
Disarmament therefore cannot be handled as a phase in a reconstruction timetable. Forty-one percent expect the present situation, with the killing continuing, simply to persist; only 30% expect calm and reconstruction. A public that expects the war to return will not give up the means of fighting it.
Discrediting an armed movement and disarming it are two different projects.
Tactical moderation
The survey does contain real movement. Support for armed struggle as the route to statehood has fallen from 41% to 27%, its lowest in four years, while support for negotiations has risen from 36% to 44%, its highest.
The shift is real. What matters is where it comes from.
The public remains precisely divided on whether armed resistance has worked: Half say it produced only destruction, half reject that assessment. The objectives have not moved either. Asked to name the highest national priority, 43% chose Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and a state with east Jerusalem as its capital, and 28% chose the return of the refugees, while 58% say two states is no longer practical.
This is a tactical judgment about efficiency, reached by a public that has revised none of its goals and does not believe they are attainable. “Moderation” without a plausible destination is not a constituency for peace. It is a disappointment waiting for a date.
Legitimacy through resistance
Satisfaction with the Houthis stands at 61%, the highest of any actor measured; Hezbollah and Iran receive 50% each. US President Donald Trump receives 5%.
Now measure the institutions built to govern the day after. Trust in the Board of Peace overseeing the Trump plan stands at 24% – 13% in the West Bank. Trust in the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza stands at 32% – 16% in the West Bank.
Call it resistance-based legitimacy. Standing is conferred on whoever is seen to confront Israel, not on whoever is seen to deliver. Every mechanism built to govern Gaza is being asked to earn authority in a currency it does not hold and cannot mint.
Washington’s blind spot
The danger is not that Hamas is winning. Hamas is losing, and nothing is taking its place.
The survey describes a 90-year-old president with no heir, an election that will confer a mandate on no one, an armed movement that has signed away its weapons on paper while its public holds a veto in practice, and legitimacy denominated in confrontation rather than reconstruction.
The data does not support treating Palestinian disillusionment with Hamas as consent to disarmament it points in the opposite direction. Nor does it support treating the November 28 election as a path to legitimacy, when the likeliest outcome is a parliament that simply certifies the existing deadlock. Governance mechanisms whose sole claim is technical competence are trusted by only 13–16% of Palestinians in the West Bank, where most of the population lives.
The world has spent three years asking who will govern Gaza. The more urgent question is who will govern Ramallah, and whether anyone has planned for the answer being no one.
Vacuums in this region are never left empty for long. They are filled by whoever is armed when the filling begins. ■
Sagiv Steinberg is a Middle East geostrategic analyst and communications expert, formerly a senior editor in media organizations in Israel and internationally.