Who leads the Palestinian people? Hamas is determined not to lose this fight

Amid a fragile truce in Gaza, the long-drawn struggle over Palestinian leadership is taking a new ominous turn.

- Jonathan Eyal Global Affairs Correspondent

US President Donald Trump continues to claim that the war in Gaza - the "long and painful nightmare" that pits the Israelis against Palestinians - is at an end.

His Vice-President J.D. Vance expressed optimism during his visit this week to Israel that the truce in Gaza, in force since Oct 10, will hold despite recent ceasefire violations.

Yet as countries scramble to put together an international stabilisation force to govern and reconstruct Gaza, a separate and equally crucial battle is developing between various Palestinian armed factions over who should rule the war-shattered territory, and the broader Palestinian community.

The Palestinians may not be heading for an outright civil war. But they are not far from it either, as the struggle for the soul of the nation without a state intensifies. An ominous sign came last week with Hamas publicly executing several hooded men said to be members of clans that had collaborated with Israel.

Internal divisions were inevitable right from the start of the Palestinians' modern history, from that day in May 1948 when Israel was created and around 700,000 Palestinians were evicted or fled in an episode now remembered throughout the Middle East as the "Nakba", or catastrophe.

The displaced Palestinians fled in different directions. A mere decade after their expulsion, significant gaps were already evident between the Palestinians in Jordan to this day a staunchly pro-Western monarchy - and Egypt and Syria, at that time ruled by the Middle East's most radical regimes.

And if this was not enough, the wider ideological confrontation of the Cold War also had a profound impact. While the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) tried since its foundation in 1964 to unite all the various opposition movements to Israel, it is by now largely forgotten that the most active anti-Israeli organisations throughout the 1960s and 1970s espoused various Marxist far-left ideologies.