As al-Barghouti notes, as part of the “deception strategy,” al-Sinwar spent the two years prior to the Tufan al-Aqsa operation feigning containment; for instance, he “went to the Egyptians to develop trade” and “spoke with the Qataris about expanding the economy in Gaza.” Al-Barghouti recounts that “[a]ll these matters were taking place as part of the deception.”[12] Simultaneously, al-Sinwar publicly “disbanded the Elite Force (Quwwat al-Nukhba)” of al-Qassam to further deepen the appearance that Hamas was seeking normalized relations with the occupation; after the “Elite Unit,” or al-Nukhba Force, was dissolved, “everything was restructured into brigades.” This cell-based rearrangement, in many ways a return to the early distributed al-Mujāhidūn al-Filasṭīniyyūn and Qassam formations of the mid-to-late 1980s and the First Intifada, would allow for decentralized structures that could, should conditions permit, operate semi-autonomously.