As the war in Gaza continues to intensify, the Palestinian Authority has been conspicuously quiet. Since its establishment in 1993, and particularly since the Second Intifada, in the early 2000s, the PA has been losing credibility not only diplomatically but also among the Palestinian people. Hamas rushed to fill the subsequent vacuum in ideas, politics, and security. Today the Palestinian people are paying the price. Any political arrangement made after this war in Gaza needs to focus not just on the future of the coastal strip but also on rehabilitating the PA.

Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestinian people have been presented with two competing, irreconcilable visions of their future. One, posited by the Palestine Liberation Organization—a secular, though by no means democratic, group and the parent of the Palestinian Authority—envisioned a diplomatic process leading to a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. The other, promoted by Hamas, a designated terrorist group and a member of the larger Muslim Brotherhood network, called for the establishment of a Palestinian state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean—in other words, the destruction of Israel—to be achieved through violence. Diplomacy, terror, governance, charities, political organizing, messaging: The opponents used all tools at their disposal to advance their objectives both on the ground and in the hearts and minds of Palestinians.

[Graeme Wood: What is Israel trying to accomplish?]

In the days immediately following the signing of the Oslo Accords, the PA held a clear advantage. Oslo itself gave the Palestinian people hope for achieving freedom after 25 years of occupation. The establishment of the PA saw Palestinians governing themselves on parts of their land for the first time in living memory, and PLO leaders, who had symbolized the Palestinian cause for generations, returned to live among their people, generating a sense of pride.

But that moment turned out to be the high point. The peace process stalled and later collapsed. Its failure undermined the PA’s central message—that liberation could be achieved through diplomacy—and cast doubt on not only the wisdom of having signed on to Oslo but also the PA’s very raison d’être.

The PA was not solely responsible for the devolution of the peace process. Yes, it made mistakes, including failing to take matters of security seriously during the 1990s, which eroded trust among Israelis. Israel, for its part, continued expanding its settlements, which fueled Palestinian suspicion. Each side at different times adopted maximalist, inflexible negotiating positions, and the United States was unwilling to take the parties to task. Hamas, meanwhile, used terror to derail diplomacy: In a grisly pattern that dominated much of the 1990s, every advance in negotiations was followed by a spate of Hamas terror attacks against Israeli civilians.

Failed diplomacy certainly injured the PA, but it was only part of the story. For the rest, the PA had itself to blame. It governed on the model of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s in Tunisia—a model whose corrupt authoritarianism produced a region-wide backlash during the Arab Spring. Government jobs were political favors to be doled out to supporters; public funds, many of them from international aid, were mere means toward the enrichment of officials. Efficiency, responsiveness to the public, and the provision of services were all an afterthought. Palestinians became disenchanted with the PA and with government itself.

Hamas saw a political opportunity in the PA’s troubles. In 2006, the newly elected PA President Mahmoud Abbas called elections, and Hamas ran an effective campaign focusing on the PA’s corruption and promising clean governance. With that messaging and a well-organized political machine, Hamas won the elections. A year later, it clashed with the PA old guard in Gaza. The latter’s security forces were fractured, riddled with internal rivalries. A victorious Hamas was able to expel the PA from Gaza, and has since been firmly in control of the coastal strip.

Reeling from the shock of defeat, the PA then came under international pressure to reform itself, particularly from the George W. Bush administration, which rallied European and Arab countries around this objective. The PA appointed a new prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who instituted significant reforms. Yet his approach did not sit well with other PA political leaders, who worked to undermine him and pushed him out in 2013.

The PA has been steadily losing ground ever since. Today, a staggering 87 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that the PA is corrupt, 78 percent want Abbas to resign, and 62 percent believe that the PA is a liability. This loss of popular legitimacy has had real-life implications. Even before the current war in Gaza, areas of the West Bank were practically ungoverned. The international community, appalled by the PA’s corruption and dealing with competing crises elsewhere, reduced aid. Diplomatically, outside powers continued to treat the PA as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians. But in reality, world leaders have largely given up on it.

In the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, Hamas’s initial popularity has evaporated—today 72 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza believe that Hamas is corrupt—but the group maintains its power through fear and brutality, not the consent of the governed. Its October 7 terror attack, which claimed the lives of more than 1,400 Israelis, was meant in part to bolster its image of strength and reinforce its message that terror can yield political dividends—a message amplified by Hamas’s media mouthpieces, most prominently the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera Arabic TV channel.

The PA’s response to the Hamas attack has underlined its irrelevance and its insecure standing among its people. In the first hours and days, the PA was noticeably silent. Then it was hesitant and confused, wavering between mirroring Hamas’s messaging and weakly denouncing “violence against civilians by any party.” The timorousness was apparent in the readout of President Joe Biden’s phone call with Abbas, in which the American president, not the leader of the organization purporting to be the “sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” stated that “Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination.”

Under different circumstances—if the PA were a more effective, clean government, better trusted by its people—one might imagine it returning to Gaza when this war ends and leading the process of reconstruction and recovery. But Palestinians have no confidence that the PA has their interests at heart; the international community does not trust it to administer funds on the scale of those that will be needed for reconstruction; and the PA anyway lacks the institutional infrastructure to do the job.

[Read: Egypt’s Gaza problem]

In the absence of a PA that can be counted upon, the people of Gaza and the international community will be forced to choose from a menu of bad options. Israel may have to reoccupy Gaza—an outcome that neither the Gazan people nor Israel want, and which would be costly for both. Or Hamas might remain in power, injured logistically but empowered politically to resume its oppressive rule and prepare for the next round of devastating war. Or outside actors may stand up an international administration that sounds good on paper but will be extremely difficult in reality to sustain.

This war will end, and when it does, the governance of Palestinians will be of urgent concern. As long as the PA remains weak and discredited, the Palestinians will lack a positive model to rally around. Its rehabilitation is therefore a long-term necessity, not only for the people under its authority but for any enduring prospect of peace.

Rehabilitating the PA will require Israel to reexamine its policies in the West Bank— addressing the growing problem of settler violence and making meaningful gestures to enhance the PA’s authority and improve Palestinian quality of life. It will also require a serious effort, using both incentives and pressure, to ensure that the PA cleans up its act and presents a government that both Palestinians and the international community can trust.

Israel is not the only Middle Eastern power that has a tortured relationship with the Gaza Strip. Although it’s not a combatant in the current war, Egypt has played an important role in the immiseration of Gazans over the past 16 years, as together with Israel it has sealed the air, land, and sea borders around the strip.   

Keeping Hamas out of the Sinai Peninsula has been an imperative for the Egyptian government since at least 2007, when the Islamist group defeated the security forces of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority in Gaza in a short civil war. Hamas’s success could inspire extremists in Egypt, Cairo reasoned, and so the blockade of the strip served Egypt’s interests as well as Israel’s.

The last round of violence in Gaza took place in 2014, a year after Major General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power in Egypt in a coup d’état that overthrew Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Then, Egyptian leaders reasoned that having Israel mortally damage Hamas, itself a late-1980s creation of the Palestine branch of the Brotherhood, would greatly diminish the Islamist threat to both countries. And so Egypt privately counseled Israel to destroy Hamas. But the Israelis demurred, fearing the chaos and power vacuum that would likely result.

[Read: Inside Gaza’s last Catholic parish]

Today, the situation is reversed. The Israeli objective is to destroy Hamas, while Egypt warns of escalation and of the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. President Sisi has amassed tons of aid for the strip’s residents in a city about an hour to the west of the Rafah crossing, and he is demanding that the Israel Defense Forces allow the trucks in. He decried Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza’s civilians during a visit with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. And yet, for all of Sisi’s indignation, he has not opened Egypt’s borders to Palestinians seeking safety from Israel’s airstrikes.

Gaza and the war that is tearing it asunder present a domestic political conundrum for the Egyptian leader. To begin with, Egyptian and Palestinian nationalism are deeply intertwined. In the 1930s, Egyptians, and particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, were among the first in the Arab world to raise alarms about Jewish migration to Palestine. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s revolutionary leader and second president, from 1956 to 1970, linked Israel’s creation to the colonial depredations Egyptians had been fighting since the late 19th century. Nasser positioned himself rhetorically as the champion of not just Egyptian but also Arab causes, and among these, he and his contemporaries saw no greater cause than Palestine. For many Egyptians steeped in this worldview, President Anwar Sadat’s 1978 peace with Israel was disorienting. The agreement brought relief from the military burdens of confrontation with Israel, but the abandonment of ideals, principles, and identity overshadowed those material benefits. As a result, many Egyptians regard Sadat’s separate peace as illegitimate.  

Sisi is therefore caught between history, morality, and geopolitical necessity. His two immediate predecessors were overthrown: President Hosni Mubarak, by mass protests in 2011, and Morsi by the coup that Sisi himself mounted in 2013. Sisi is watching his own back, and he must know that some of the groups that played a role in 2011 can trace their origins to the mobilization of activists in solidarity with Palestinians during the Second Intifada, in the early 2000s. Moreover, Israel is deeply unpopular with the Egyptian public, as President Sisi also seems to be. When he came to power, he promised Egyptians prosperity, security, and more effective governance. Instead he has given them an economic crisis, corruption, and coercion.

The crisis in the Gaza Strip, therefore, presents a domestic problem for Sisi as much as it does a foreign-policy one. Perhaps that’s why the Egyptian foreign ministry’s October 7 statement, which was noticeably not released in English, fails even to mention Hamas’s terrorist attacks but warns of the consequences of Israeli escalation following a “series of attacks against Palestinian cities.” Days into Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza, Sisi said that the Israelis had crossed the threshold of “collective punishment.”

The statements sought to place Sisi on the right side of Egyptian public opinion without going so far as to arouse the ire of Israel and its friends in the United States—especially in Congress, where some members have sought to punish Sisi for his deplorable human-rights record. Over the past 44 years, Israelis have grown used to Egyptian invective; they know that’s all it is, because Sisi and the Egyptian Armed Forces rely on Israel for the security of the Sinai Peninsula.  

[Read: Israel is walking into a trap]

In the end, the plight of Palestinian civilians has not moved Sisi to open humanitarian corridors. Egypt’s leadership maintains on principle that Gaza is Israel’s responsibility, and it does not want a refugee problem in the Sinai Peninsula. Officials in Cairo fear that allowing tens or hundreds of thousands of Gazans to find refuge on Egyptian soil would give Israel the opportunity to dump Gaza back on Egypt, which occupied the territory for most of the time from 1949 to 1967. Responsibility for Gaza, or for an enormous influx of refugees, could destabilize Egypt at a time when the country is broke and has its own security problems.  

Gaza therefore poses a dilemma for Sisi: Abandoning the Palestinian population to its fate, let alone cooperating with Israel or the United States, would run afoul of public sentiment that Sisi desperately needs to keep onside. But true humanitarianism toward Gazans would disrupt a tense and fragile political equilibrium. Solving that dilemma calls for a deft political and diplomatic touch that Sisi has never demonstrated. He’s more inclined to try to solve his problems with brute force—an approach unlikely to hold out much hope to the Palestinians of Gaza.