Hamas has been reasserting its rule over half the Gaza Strip ever since Phase 1 of the truce with Israel came into effect on Oct. 10, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

Refusing to give up its power and disarm, as the planned Phase 2 of the Trump peace plan stipulates, the terrorist group has sent civil servants back to work, has been collecting taxes—including from Palestinians living in tents—and has opened courts for those who can afford to utilize them, the report reads.

Bloomberg interviewed merchants, vendors, restaurant owners and ordinary residents, who described an overall feeling of resignation.

“Our livelihoods are shattered. Why aren’t [Hamas] letting us make a living?” a vendor who agreed to be identified only by his first name, Ahmed, was quoted as saying.

Gaza resident Maisara Mohammed published on Facebook a screenshot of the Hamas-run Land Authority’s notice giving him one week to pay two years of accrued fees.

“This is after my house, my apartment and the building I had were destroyed,” the report cited him as writing.

Political science professor Mkhaimar Abusada told Bloomberg, “Hamas is taking advantage of delaying the second phase of Trump’s plan by rebuilding its political and security control” in the territory it still holds.

Abusada, who taught at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University, emigrated during the war and is currently at Northwestern University in Chicago.

The distribution of cooking gas, handled in a private market before the war, has been seized by a Hamas-formed “Petroleum Commission,” according to Bloomberg.

The gas is also used for heating; now the terrorist group rations a half-full cylinder to each family.

Many businesses must pay high extortion sums to “middlemen” for the gas needed to keep their doors open, Gaza restaurateur Ahmed Shaldan was cited as saying.

These measures have been employed to entrench Hamas’s dictatorship, whose powers have been significantly eroded in its two-year war with the Israel Defense Forces.

The number of Gazans on Hamas’s payroll has consequently been reduced by a third from 50,000, Bloomberg reported.

The terrorist group’s armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, has been halved to 20,000 members, including teenage recruits, according to Israeli assessments.

A Hamas spokesperson said that the organization “will never give up its arms as long as the occupation continues, and will never surrender even if it has to fight with its nails.”

U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan calls for an International Stabilization Force (ISF) to deploy in the Strip’s territory currently held by the IDF, east of the area that Hamas controls. But with Hamas’s refusal to renounce its power, Abusada remarked, “Hamas will give Netanyahu the justification to delay Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.”

The post Hamas entrenches rule on backs of Gazans: report appeared first on JNS.org.