Last month, after weeks of clashes in the Palestinian city of Ein el-Hilweh in Lebanon, the parties reached a ceasefire. The fighting, which left 31 dead and led thousands to flee, pitted the Fatah faction of the PLO—which is led by Mahmoud Abbas and governs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank—against Islamist groups. Nada Homsi explains:

The clashes began when a Fatah gunman attempted to assassinate a leader of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jund al-Sham group, according to security sources within the camp. The next day, Islamist militants killed the Fatah security commander Abu Ashraf al-Armoushi and four bodyguards. Fatah retaliated with force and attempted to expel militant groups from the camp.

By longstanding convention, the Lebanese state does not have jurisdiction over Palestinian refugee camps, leaving residents to handle security. In Ein el-Hilweh, radical Islamist groups like Jund al-Sham have exploited the lack of state oversight and loose internal security to establish their influence, which Fatah has been unable to subdue. According to Fatah and Hamas officials, the groups are made up of Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians, and are divided ideologically.

Hamas’s status as a relatively moderate Islamist party has allowed it to play a mediating role between hardline militants and Fatah. . . . But some in Fatah—including the senior official Azzam al-Ahmad, a member of the group’s central committee—have accused Hamas of playing a role in the fighting, which Hamas denies.

Meetings between Fatah and Hamas to discuss the clashes seem to have given Hamas a larger role in administering security in Ein el-Hilweh, which was traditionally primarily the job of Fatah’s National Security Forces.

In the past few days, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda offshoot that led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, has consolidated its rule in the core parts of Syria. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has made a series of public statements, sat for a CNN interview, and discarded his nomme de guerre for his birth name, Ahmad al-Shara—trying to present an image of moderation. But to what extent is this simply a ruse? And what sort of relationship does he envision with Israel?

In an interview with John Haltiwanger, Aaron Zelin gives an overview of Shara’s career, explains why HTS and Islamic State are deeply hostile to each other, and tries to answer these questions:

As we know, Hamas has had a base in Damascus going back years. The question is: would HTS provide an office for Hamas there, especially as it’s now been beaten up in Gaza and been discredited in many ways, with rumors about its office leaving Doha? That’s one of the bigger questions, especially since, pre-October 7, 2023, HTS would support any Hamas rocket attacks across the border. And then HTS cheered on the October 7 attacks and eulogized [the Hamas leaders] Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar when they were killed. They’re very pro-Palestinian.

Nonetheless, Zelin believes HTS’s split with al-Qaeda is substantive, even if “we need to be cognizant that they also aren’t these liberal democrats.”

If so, how should Western powers consider their relations with the new Syrian government? Kyle Orton, who likewise thinks the changes to HTS are “not solely a public-relations gambit,” considers whether the UK should take HTS off its list of terrorist groups:

The better approach for now is probably to keep HTS on the proscribed list and engage the group covertly through the intelligence services. That way, the UK can reach a clearer picture of what is being dealt with and test how amenable the group is to following through on promises relating to security and human rights. Israel is known to be following this course, and so, it seems, is the U.S. In this scenario, HTS would receive the political benefit of overt contact as the endpoint of engagement, not the start.