Since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas, the war in Gaza has been dogged by a persistent question: What happens after the conflict ends?
Recent events point to one worrying scenario: Gaza, without a centralized governing authority, could be dominated by warlords and organized crime.
Wartime is notorious for giving rise to black markets and criminal gangs, and the conflict in Gaza is no exception. In one troubling episode in November, armed gunmen looted a convoy of 109 United Nations aid trucks. Over the last year, a contraband trade in tobacco has become a particular problem for humanitarian aid convoys, with organized gangs ransacking aid shipments for cigarettes smuggled inside them that can sell for $25 to $30 each.
The Israeli military is determined to wipe out Hamas, but Israel has not laid out a plan for the day after the conflict stops. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has resisted calls for the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza.
Hamas was a repressive regime that used violence against its own people. But because it also ran the local government in Gaza, its weakened condition threatens to leave the territory without any governing institutions.
Such power vacuums create ideal conditions for so-called criminal governance, in which criminal mafias, sometimes linked to families or tribes, take over much of the traditional role of a government within their territories, competing with weak official institutions. It may even devolve into outright warlordism, in which territory is carved up between armed groups into self-governing fiefdoms.
Such groups are difficult to dislodge, often fueling long-term cycles of violence in countries like Haiti, Somalia and Afghanistan. I talked to experts on organized crime and warlordism who described how a grimly predictable pattern has played out around the world — and the risk that something similar might unfold in Gaza.
War creates black markets
“Basically, every single country that’s under a war footing creates a black market immediately,” as soon as there is any kind of rationing or other restrictions, said Benjamin T. Smith, a professor at Warwick University in England who studies the history of organized crime.
Black markets enrich and empower the groups that control them, fueling the rise of strong organized crime networks. In some cases — such as in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Sicily after World War II — they evolve into quasi-political entities.
Gaza may have had a head start on that process. Even before the current conflict, longstanding Israeli and Egyptian restrictions on imports created shortages of basic goods and a thriving black market for them. Some of Gaza’s clans, which are extended family groups connected by blood and marriage ties, have long been deeply involved in that trade, said Yaniv Voller, a senior lecturer in Middle East politics at the University of Kent in England who studies the roles of tribal militias and other armed groups in the region.
“They’ve always been involved in the trafficking economy, human trafficking, drug trafficking, but also commodities that couldn’t cross the border with Israel,” Voller said.
Some of the raids on convoys could have been carried out by desperate people simply trying to obtain food and other necessities. But my colleagues Vivian Yee and Aaron Boxerman reported in June that it was primarily armed criminal gangs that were attacking convoys daily, not desperate Gazan civilians carrying out spontaneous looting.
And it is likely that the armed gangs raiding convoys have ties to Gaza’s clans, according to Voller. “I can imagine that you have Hamas leftovers also involved, but it’s primarily the clans,” he said.
From filling a vacuum to ‘criminal governance’
In Gaza, the Israeli military campaign has toppled the Hamas government, but there is no civilian administration or other authority to take its place. And because Israel often raids specific areas and then withdraws, it leaves a power vacuum, leading to widespread lawlessness and crime (and sometimes the return of Hamas to those areas).
It is possible, of course, that Hamas may survive the war with enough strength to reestablish at least partial control in Gaza. But if Israel succeeds in its goal of destroying or neutralizing the group, then it is “inevitable” that Gaza’s clans would step in to fill the governmental void as some of the only organized forces left on the ground, Voller said. Something similar happened during wartime in Iraq and Syria, he noted, even though many had believed that tribes were no longer influential in those countries.
“Tribes always provide security services, and they do that not just to protect themselves, but also because it provides them with financial opportunities,” he said. “It’s a very natural response to the collapse of central authorities.”
It is possible, of course, that such groups could be more humane than Hamas. But research suggests that there are still high logistical and economic costs to fragmented, unofficial governance.
The Israeli government has suggested in the past that the clans might formally take over governance — a plan that the clans themselves roundly rejected. But that official refusal may not prevent the clans and other groups from exercising de facto local authority after the war.
“The way you make power is by having weapons, but also by distributing to the population, which of course is starving, in horrendous conditions,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on nonstate armed groups at the Brookings Institution.
Long-term instability
Gaza is a tiny territory compared to countries like Haiti, Somalia, or Afghanistan. And its borders are tightly controlled from the outside by Israel and Egypt, both of which have a strong interest in ensuring the situation within Gaza does not become so chaotic that it threatens the security of its neighbors — which is, after all, how this war started in the first place.
But the longer Gaza is left without any civil administration, the more powerful smaller armed groups will have an opportunity to become — and the harder it may be to dislodge them. “Once these clans or these organizations actually gain control over the region, it’s very difficult to come to them and say, ‘Look, OK, you’ve done your share, now it’s time for us to come back,’” Voller said.
In many parts of the world, situations like that have led to a kind of hybrid system, in which formal government authorities exercise some control at the national level, but gangs exercise day-to-day control over their local territories.
Drug cartels in Mexico, paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland and Central American gangs like MS-13 have shown that model can be resilient and profitable for the armed groups involved. But for ordinary citizens, that means living in a violent, authoritarian system in which their safety and livelihoods are contingent on the whims of men with guns.
Another option, history suggests, is to eventually integrate armed groups into a future government. That isn’t a panacea: It can mean that organized crime groups persist, often allied with political parties or government officials, and prey on the public. But it does allow a transition to peacetime governance and some centralization of formal authority.
“The Balkans are a prime example,” Felbab-Brown said. “In Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the political party formation and the formation of strongmen often has very deep linkages to the smuggling networks of the late 1990s.”
But if there is no central government, or the one that exists is too weak to assert control, outcomes can be far worse.
That worst-case scenario is currently playing out in Haiti, where armed groups that began as small criminal gangs often affiliated with different politicians have now become so powerful that they have overwhelmed the country’s government, subjecting ordinary citizens to the rule of the gun.
“Today the big Haitian gangs have all developed a political mantle,” Felbab-Brown said. “They are no longer just subservient to political masters, they often try to dictate things to Haitian politicians.”
Haiti is, as I say, a worst-case scenario. But as the question of what will happen in Gaza’s “day after” remains stubbornly unanswered, it offers a chilling reminder that even successfully defeating Hamas, without a plan for what will replace it, could be a source of future crises.
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The post A Power Vacuum in Gaza Could Empower Warlords and Gangs appeared first on New York Times.
