Every few months, a diplomat, an academic, or a newspaper editorial invokes the Good Friday Agreement as a template for ending the conflict in Gaza. The logic goes like this: the IRA disarmed, Sinn Féin entered government, and Northern Ireland found peace. If it worked there, it can work here. Hamas just needs the right incentives.
This comparison is not just wrong. It is dangerously wrong, because it leads policymakers to look for a political solution to what is, at its core, a gang problem.
The Gang That Became a Government
Consider Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13. The organization began among Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles in the 1980s, spread back to Central America through deportations, and eventually came to control entire neighborhoods and municipalities in El Salvador. It extorted businesses, ran courts of a kind, enforced its own brutal order, and made the civilians around it miserable. It had its own culture, its own symbols, its own initiation rites. Young men with no prospects and no future joined because membership offered something that nothing else could: identity, protection, income, and belonging.
Now look at Gaza. Hamas has controlled the territory since 2007. It runs ministries, pays salaries, operates a court system. But its fighting force is composed overwhelmingly of young men with no meaningful economic future, no freedom of movement, and no horizon beyond the organization itself. They wear matching uniforms and green headbands. They train together, live together, and define themselves entirely through membership. The organization is not merely what they do. It is who they are.
This is not a resistance movement with a political wing waiting to govern. This is a gang that got big enough to run a postal service.
Why Disarmament Terrifies Them
The IRA comparison assumes that behind every armed movement there is a Sinn Féin: a cadre of politically ambitious men who want ministerial portfolios more than they want weapons. That was true in Belfast. It is not true in Gaza City.
For a Hamas fighter in his twenties, disarmament does not mean a transition to politics. It means becoming an unemployed young man in a destroyed city, without status, without income, and with a target on his back. Israel has armed rival factions inside Gaza. The Palestinian Authority, which Hamas violently expelled in 2007, has not forgotten. Disarm, and the knives come out.
MS-13 members understood this dynamic intuitively. Leaving the gang was not merely difficult; it was a death sentence. The organization’s omertà was enforced not by ideology alone but by the very rational fear that exit meant elimination. Hamas’s rank and file are operating under the same calculus. The rhetoric about muqawama, resistance, and armed struggle is real, but it is layered over something more primal: these men cannot afford to stop.
What the Civilians Actually Think
Here is the part that Western commentary consistently gets wrong. Gangs do not represent the communities they control. They prey on them.
Salvadoran civilians living under MS-13 did not celebrate the gang’s presence. They paid extortion, kept their daughters indoors, and buried their sons. They were hostages to an armed organization that had made itself impossible to remove. The conflation of MS-13 with the Salvadoran people would have been recognized immediately as absurd.
The conflation of Hamas with the Palestinian people of Gaza is no less absurd, and considerably more consequential. Gazan civilians have lived under Hamas coercion for nearly two decades. They have watched the organization divert humanitarian aid, conscript their sons, and use their homes and hospitals as operational infrastructure. They are not Hamas’s constituency. They are Hamas’s environment.
Those civilians would be the primary beneficiaries of genuine disarmament. A Gaza without Hamas’s armed apparatus is a Gaza where aid reaches the people it is meant for, where young men have options beyond the organization, and where reconstruction becomes possible. The people who want Hamas disarmed most urgently may well be the people of Gaza themselves.
The Wrong Template, the Wrong Lesson
El Salvador’s eventual approach to MS-13 under President Nayib Bukele was not negotiation. It was dismantlement: mass arrests, removal of the organization’s ability to operate, and a deliberate effort to separate the gang from the civilian population it had colonized. The civil liberties costs were real and serious. But the results were also real: homicide rates collapsed, and ordinary Salvadorans could walk their streets again.
Nobody is suggesting that Gaza can or should replicate Bukele’s methods. The circumstances are not equivalent. But the underlying logic deserves serious attention: you do not negotiate a gang into irrelevance. You dismantle its capacity to coerce, you offer its members a genuine off-ramp, and you work to restore the civilian population’s ability to live without the organization’s boot on its throat.
Offering amnesty to Hamas members who disarm, as Trump’s plan does, is a start. But amnesty alone will not move men who fear that disarmament is just a prelude to being killed by their enemies. The process requires security guarantees, third-party monitoring, and a credible path to civilian life: work, housing, a future that is not the organization.
Stop Flattering Them
The IRA framework flatters Hamas. It implies a latent statesmanship, a political vision restrained only by circumstance, waiting to be unlocked by the right agreement. The evidence for this is thin. What the evidence actually supports is an organization whose identity is inseparable from armed violence, whose members have powerful personal reasons to keep fighting, and whose continuation depends on there being no peaceful alternative that can compete with what the organization provides.
That is a gang. Treating it as something more sophisticated has not produced results. It has produced eighteen months of stalled negotiations, a fragile ceasefire that serves Hamas’s need for time, and a Gaza population that remains caught between an occupying army and an armed organization that has never once prioritized their welfare over its own survival.
Understanding what Hamas actually is, rather than what we wish it were, is the precondition for any policy that might actually work.