The Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel—and the subsequent Gaza war—are rarely understood in their primary political context, which is the power struggle among Palestinian factions.

The near-universal assumption is that Hamas viewed its surprise offensive as another phase in a long-term war against Israel. There’s some truth to it, but that misreads why Hamas decided now to deliberately provoke a massive Israeli response—which is the long-standing power struggle between the Islamists in Hamas and their smaller ally, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), against the secular nationalists of Fatah who control the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and, more importantly, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which represents Palestinians diplomatically.

Fatah, of course, knows this full well, but a surge of nationalist sentiment and shared outrage at the mass killing and suffering of the 2.2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza muffled nationalist leaders like President Mahmoud Abbas (also the chairman of the PLO) in publicly acknowledging Hamas’ breathtaking cynicism.

But now that we’re into the fifth month of the carnage with no end in sight, Fatah leaders appear to be sensing enough of a mood shift among Palestinians to permit such criticisms without unsustainable political blowback. Their denunciations of Hamas have been harsh and, if this perspective eventually takes root among most Palestinians, potentially devastating.

U.S., European, and Arab pressure for PA reform led Abbas on March 14 to replace then-prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh with economist Mohammad Mustafa. Hamas snidely called Abbas “out of touch with reality,” and implied that, following Oct. 7, it should have a direct say in any change of government within the PA. It was one of the first overt assertions of a newfound degree of self-appointed national authority by the Islamist group—which is portraying itself, on the basis of the major conflict it has engineered with Israel, as the real leader of the Palestinians.

The intensity and bluntness of the official Fatah reply strongly signaled that Palestinian nationalists are in no mood to give any ground to the fundamentalists.

“Those who caused Gaza to return to living under Israeli occupation and caused a nakba [catastrophe] to befall the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza, have no right to make dictates related to national priorities,” Fatah said, batting aside Hamas's assertion of authority. “The real side that is out of touch with reality and the Palestinian people is the Hamas leadership that has until this moment failed to realize the extent of the catastrophe endured by our oppressed people in Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian territories,” it continued, shifting quickly into a narrative framework that, for the first time in major Palestinian politics, acknowledged the full extent of Hamas’ responsibility for deliberately provoking Israel’s entirely predictable onslaught.

Fatah’s statement flung the accusation of unilateralism back at Hamas, saying the Islamists consulted with no other Palestinians before launching “an adventure on Oct. 7 that has led to a nakba that is more severe than the 1948 Nakba,”—one of the most punishing accusations in the Palestinian political lexicon.

The statement then asks if Hamas is consulting with any other Palestinians while it negotiates indirectly with Israel to ensure the safety of its leaders, many of whom “live a life of luxury” in ”seven star hotels”—implicitly in Qatar where most of the Hamas Politburo has resided since fleeing Syria in 2012. This exile and “luxury” has “blinded it [the Hamas leadership] to........

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