Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas denounced Hamas in harsh terms and demanded that it release the remaining Israeli hostages.
In a fiery Tuesday speech, Abbas called Hamas “sons of dogs” and blamed the organization for the destruction inflicted upon the Gaza Strip. His remarks appear to be his greatest denunciation of Hamas since the war began and mark the apparent collapse of a July unity agreement signed in Beijing by Abbas’s Fatah, another political party in the Palestinian territories, and Hamas.
Fatah is the largest and most dominant force of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Fatah governs the Palestinian Authority.
“Sons of dogs, release the hostages and block their justifications,” he said in a televised speech from Ramallah, located in the West Bank.
In a speech that also condemned Israel as committing a “genocide” in Gaza, Abbas accused Hamas of “inflicting severe damage to the Palestinian cause” since taking majority control of the Gaza Strip in 2007.
“It has provided the occupation with dangerous free services, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and allowed this criminal occupation to find free justifications for executing its conspiracies and crimes in the Gaza Strip, with one of the most prominent excuses being hostage-taking,” he said, referring to Israel’s occupation of the strip.
After handing over the remaining hostages to stop “the Israeli genocide that the Gaza Strip is being subjected to,” Abbas said Hamas should disarm and cede power to his Palestine Liberation Organization.
“Hamas must end its control over the Gaza Strip, hand over all its affairs to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the legitimate Palestinian National Authority, and refrain from carrying arms, transforming into a political party that operates according to the laws of the Palestinian state and adheres to international legitimacy,” he said.
In response, Hamas questioned Abbas’s “competence,” but refrained from responding in kind with harsh language. It decried his apparent insistence, “repeatedly and suspiciously, on placing the responsibility for the crimes of the occupation and its ongoing aggression on our Palestinian people.”
A Hamas official took issue with Abbas’s “derogatory language” toward a “significant proportion … of his own people.”
The rivalry between Hamas and Fatah goes back decades. Hamas favored an embrace of militant Islamic ideology and a hard-line approach to Israel, in contrast to the secular leftist, pragmatic approach of Fatah.
The two fought a small civil war in Gaza in June 2007 after Hamas militants threw several Fatah members off a 15-story building. The five-day war led to Fatah’s complete withdrawal from the strip to its center of power in the West Bank.
The decadeslong divide showed signs of easing in July, when the longtime rivals signed an agreement on “ending division and strengthening Palestinian unity.” Abbas’s renewed denunciation could spell the complete collapse of the agreement, a development predicted by some analysts at the time.
Jonathan Fulton, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council think tank, told the Washington Examiner last July that he was “skeptical” this agreement would “result in a meaningful change.” He noted the previous unification attempts have “never worked, yet it might be that the intensity of the war in Gaza may change the calculus, but I don’t think so.”
Hamas finds itself in its worst position since the beginning of the war. The collapse of the January truce with Israel has brought renewed pressure on its military and civilian infrastructure, while the first major protests against its rule began last month. Its one major ally, Iran, has seen its position in the region collapse with the crippling of Hezbollah, fall of Bashar al Assad in Syria, and a renewed U.S. military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen.
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Abbas and the Palestinian Authority have faced their own problems, with West Bank radicalism and sympathy for the militant approach of Hamas increasing as the war has progressed.
While the more destructive war in Gaza has consumed global headlines, the West Bank has concurrently dealt with its worst violence since the Second Intifada. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 915 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank between Oct. 7, 2023, and April 14, 2025, with 109 of those deaths occurring during expanded operations this year. At least 29 Israelis were killed during the same period.