Support for Hamas triples in West Bank after prisoner exchange deal

Poll also reveals that the majority of Palestinians remain unhappy with all of their current leadership options

Support for Hamas has more than tripled in the West Bank since the Oct 7 attacks led to a deal securing an exchange of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages.
Three polls by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research indicate Hamas has seen a measure of success in shifting public opinion – at least in the West Bank – in favour of its course of action during the 10-month conflict with Israel.
However, they also reveal that the majority of Palestinians split between the West Bank and Gaza remain unhappy with all of their current leadership options, reflecting long held political disillusionment.
The surveys, led by veteran pollster Dr Khalil Shikaki, 71, show a spike in West Bank support for Hamas from 12 per cent in September 2023 to 44 per cent in December. It dips in the second poll in March to 35 per cent before rising again in the third in May to 41 per cent.
Dr Shikaki, who was recently described in the New Yorker as the “Gallup of Palestine”, has charted Palestinian public opinion in about 300 polls through peace initiatives and upsurges of violence for the last 31 years.
In an interview at his Ramallah headquarters last month, he attributed Hamas’ first leap in popularity to the November ceasefire, which saw 105 Israeli civilian hostages released and swapped for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
“All of the prisoners released were from the West Bank. And so if you are able to release prisoners through violence, you are able to demonstrate to Palestinians the efficacy of violence. Hamas did that in the first survey,” said Dr Shikaki.
A second factor that contributed to support remaining higher than before Oct 7 was the belief that Israel did not want to negotiate an end to occupation.
“Occupation can be changed either through diplomacy or violence. If diplomacy is out, then violence is the only alternative. Palestinians will not tolerate or accept the status quo,” he said.
Thirdly, the Palestinian Authority had “never been as low in terms of legitimacy, credibility, support,” with demand for the resignation of octogenarian president Abbas reaching 94 per cent.
The same surveys show no major shift in support for Hamas in the Gaza Strip before and after the war began. It has hovered at about 38 per cent, although it dipped to 34 per cent in March.
Palestinian politics has been defined over the past decade by bitter power struggles since Hamas expelled Fatah during its chaotic takeover of the Gaza Strip when it won the 2006 elections.
The rift left the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority governing only parts of the West Bank, which was captured by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War.
China said on Tuesday it had brokered an agreement between the two factions to form a unity government that would deliver a post-war Gaza administration.
However, Israel, which has vowed to crush Hamas, swiftly rejected the deal, and analysts warned the deep enmity between the two groups would be hard to paper over.
Palestinian public opinion also differs starkly between the two territories.
In the latest PCPSR poll in June, conducted among 1570 people split almost evenly between the West Bank and Gaza, a two thirds majority said they expected Hamas to win the war, although among these, fewer Gazans – 48 per cent – expressed this opinion.
While almost nobody in the West Bank expected Israel to be victorious, a quarter of Gazans did.
A larger percentage of West Bankers also believe the Gaza Strip will remain under Hamas’ control in future, while half of Gazans believe the group will retain power.
Findings show that nearly 80 per cent of Palestinians believe the Oct 7 attack has put the Palestinian issue at the centre of regional and international attention. At the same time, more than 60 per cent of Gazans report losing family members in the current war.
Dr Shikaki has dedicated his career to discovering what ordinary Palestinians really think and to give them a voice.
His work has given him unique insights into the shifting barometer of Palestinian opinion on war, peace and politics and its underlying reasons.
Asked why 48 per cent of Gazans and 79 per cent of those polled in the West Bank expected Hamas to win the war, Dr Shikaki pointed to the Palestinian view that one of the strongest armies in the world had been unable to defeat a small insurgent force for months.
“I think people in this case attribute determination, political will, perhaps even religion as behind why they are successful and that they cannot be defeated,” he said.
“Part of it might also be that this is Hamas’ not just military but rather a social, political and economic force, and an idea about values and how the hell can you fight that?”
Dr Shikaki was born as a refugee in Rafah, Gaza before training as a political scientist at the American University of Beirut and completing his doctorate at New York’s Columbia University.
When he began teaching in 1986, it dawned on him that there was no reliable data “on what Palestinians want and what they stand for,” so he vowed to rectify this.
He published his first survey in 1993 and has since risen to prominence as one of the defining pollsters of the region, at times being drawn into back-channel discussions to help negotiators understand the public mood.
He shrugs off the risks of having to tell leaders views they often don’t want to hear and has reconciled himself with upsetting actors on all sides of the Middle East’s tangled politics.
“We have to report whatever the findings are,” he said, conceding that sometimes his data has been “used and misused” by politicians for their own ends.
He makes no claim about speaking directly to negotiators trying to resolve the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict but they are likely aware of the polling results.
“We talk to everybody. We get phone calls, we get questions from the Israeli military, from the Palestinian security services and from the Palestinian organisations including Hamas,” said Dr Shikaki.
“We get a lot of questions about the findings and people want to know what is going on, but we have no knowledge of how they use the information.”
Conducting scientific polling in wartime had been particularly challenging, leaving officials dependent on humanitarian organisations for information to make a representative survey of Gaza’s internally displaced population.
As the embattled north of the Strip was too dangerous for teams to visit, margins of error had to be recalibrated.
And while previous surveys may have been logistically easier to conduct, navigating political sensitivities, and egos, has always been a challenge.
Dr Shikaki had a complicated relationship with Yasser Arafat, the keffiyeh-wearing late leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, whose distinctive image still decorates walls and buildings in the West Bank.
In 1994, one year after the launch of the Oslo peace accords, Arafat demanded Dr Shikaki send the results of every public poll directly to his personal fax number.
A couple of months later, Yitzhak Rabin, the former Israeli prime minister who at the time was Arafat’s main negotiating counterpart, demanded the same fax.
“Both Arafat and the Israelis were very much interested in getting to know where the winds were blowing and we provided that,” he explained.
In the early days of Oslo, support for violence was 18 per cent, allowing Arafat to taunt Hamas about its unpopularity.
But at times, the Palestinian leader would try to order the polling centre to stop asking “wrong” questions that exposed the chronic unpopularity of his deputy Mahmoud Abbas, or the public’s unfavourable view of alleged corruption.
Dr Shikaki never listened to instructions from Arafat or anyone else, even when his office was trashed in 2003 by thugs after he had released “shocking” findings about the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
The survey of Palestinians in Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank had revealed that an overwhelming majority of about 90 per cent would prefer to live either in a Palestinian state or their host country rather than go back to their ancestral homes in Israel.
“A lot of people didn’t like the fact that we released the data,” he said.