Will Ramadan be the last chance for Hamas?

Today is the start of Ramadan, a 30-day period in the Islamic lunar calendar of fasting, abstinence and reflective prayer. It may also be Hamas’s last desperate chance to survive Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip, which came in response to the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attack against Israeli civilians.

Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s titular military leaders in Gaza, are fast running out of options as the Israel Defense Force (IDF) closes in on their last remaining positions in southern Gaza. Instigating a third bloody intifada or uprising against Israeli civilians may well be in their minds the only escape from total military defeat.

In that vein, this year’s Ramadan is ripe for added unrest.

Israel is on guard and Jerusalem’s Old City is ground zero. The Temple Mount — or al-Haram al-Sharif as it is known in Arabic — is a kinetic flash point every year during Ramadan. In 2021, an 11-day war between Israel and Hamas erupted after what the Associated Press described as “days of clashes between Palestinian protestors and Israeli police at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

Hamas, to justify its Oct. 7 terrorist attack (codenamed “Al-Aqsa Flood” in reference to Temple Mount), issued a 16-page manifesto in January entitled “Our Narrative.” The group blamed the assault on “Israeli Judaization plans to the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque” and what they described as “Israeli settler’s incursions into the holy mosque” in 2022 during the month of Ramadan.

In fact, Ramadan 2023 was relatively quiet. As Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, political protests over a proposed judicial overhaul “overshadowed the Palestinian arena.”

And the reason behind the Ramadan 2023 lull is clear in retrospect. Deif and Sinwar were planning Oct. 7, in partnership with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC). Hamas was calculatingly intent on avoiding wide-scale conflict with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government until it could unleash a much bigger attack against southern Israel.

Ramadan was a tool to be wielded when needed by Hamas, or sheathed if it served Deif and Sinwar’s broader purposes.

That is why this year, Ramadan has the potential to be particularly violent. This is true not just in Israel, but in the broader Middle East, including for the U.S. troops positioned in Iraq and Syria and aboard naval vessels in the eastern Mediterranean. Violence could even envelop service members stationed in at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the base that houses U.S. Africa Command’s Combined Joint Force for the Horn of Africa.

Hamas needs to act soon. And Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also need it to act soon.

Putin’s willingness to weaponize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was evident on Oct. 7, when in close coordination with Khamenei and the IRGC, he used Hamas’s heinous war crimes against Israel as cover for his counteroffensive against Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine.

Now, especially in light of French President Emmanuel Macron’s bold threat last week to place French troops in Ukraine, Putin needs yet another distraction. Ramadan could be his means to that end.

It would also serve Iran well. Khamenei has used Oct. 7 and the war between Hamas and Israel to distract the West’s attention from his relentless pursuit of a nuclear arsenal. Tehran has already likely achieved nuclear breakout — the capability to assemble a nuclear weapon — and is now zeroed in on testing and developing delivery mechanisms.

Khamenei and the IRGC know a day of reckoning is coming. By bogging down Israel and the IDF with a potential third Intifada during or after Ramadan, Tehran could gain valuable time to prepare for it militarily and accelerate its nuclear program even more.

Russian and Iranian planning for this alignment of the stars might already be underway. Earlier this month, the Kremlin hosted a meeting in Moscow between Hamas and Fatah — the political body that controls the West Bank. Ostensibly, the Red Square summit was billed as a reconciliation effort between the two Palestinian factions, but it was more likely an effort by Putin to pitch Deif, Sinwar and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on the idea of an escalation. Such action could effectively deescalate NATO in Ukraine and the IDF in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

There is a good chance Putin and Khamenei will fail. Abbas, after witnessing the widespread devastation in Gaza, likely has no appetite to see it come to the West Bank. Hamas, militarily speaking, was significantly stronger than Abbas’s forces, yet the IDF easily overran northern Gaza.

Likewise, Netanyahu appears to recognize the gravity of the moment. Last week, he overruled Itamar Ben Gvir, his far-right national security cabinet minister, and signaled that there would be no added restrictions this year on the number of Muslims allowed to worship at al-Haram al-Sharif during Ramadan.

Though the media often sensationalizes violence in Israel during Ramadan, terrorist attacks overall since 9/11 typically spike only marginally during that month — by 15 percent on average, according to a 2018 Small War Journal Study.

Rather, more significant than the religious holiday itself is the need of the players involved — Putin, Khamenei, the IRGC and Hamas’s Deif and Sinwar — to hijack and exploit it.

Hamas and its terrorist allies are already trying. As Seth Frantzman has noted, the “Palestinian Islamic Jihad is calling for Ramadan to be a ‘month of terror,’” and its spokesman has said he “wants Arab countries in the region and pro-Iranian groups to continue to ‘unify’ various arenas and fronts against Israel.”

Late Friday, Abu Obeida, a spokesman for the al-Qassam Brigades in Gaza, followed suit, calling for Ramadan to be turned into a Jihad against Israel and the West. Warning “justice is only secured through force,” he urged “the sons of our people in the West Bank, al-Quds, and the occupied Palestinian territories in 1948 to mobile and march toward al-Aqsa Mosque [on al-Haram al-Sharif].

Deif and Sinwar know that Ramadan might be Hamas’s last chance to turn up the heat and survive in Gaza, by sparking an Intifada or a wider regional war. The effect could be similar to the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive, which began on Vietnam’s Lunar New Year.

Israel and the United States cannot allow that to happen. They must be on guard and mindful of Putin and Khamenei’s machinations, as well as their support of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer.