The lives of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza was reduced to hell at the moment Hamas launched their attack on the morning of Oct 7th, 2023.
At sunrise that day, as news of Hamas’ attack on Israel spread across Gaza, the people knew what was coming. People in Gaza started preparing themselves for the horrors even while knowing no preparation that could save them from destruction.
On the evening of October 7th, the morgues in Gaza were already overflowing. Within hours of Hamas’ attack, Israeli warplanes were already circling over the strip, launching indiscriminate strikes that have now, a year and two weeks later, claimed the lives of over 42,000 Palestinians with no end in sight. Of course, and characteristically, Hamas terrorists themselves had prepared for this eventuality. The military commanders have for the most part stayed safely underground as Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk stated, “We built the tunnels to protect Hamas fighters, but as for the people of Gaza, their protection is the responsibility of the United Nations.” And the political elite of Hamas remained comfortably abroad in Qatar, Turkey, Lebanon, Algeria, and Iran.
Even as they urge the civilians of Gaza to remain steadfast, calling their resilience heroic, these leaders are shielded from the worst of the death and destruction they invite on their own people. Hamas spokesmen have heartlessly spun the assassination of its political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, as evidence of their leadership’s willingness to sacrifice for the cause. But what of the tens of thousands of nameless civilians they led to slaughter? Israeli airstrikes have spilled the blood of thousands of Palestinian children. And anyway, why should the people be capable of sacrifice and resilience? Hamas should have expended effort helping to avoid circumstances which would demand such virtues. Elevating Haniyeh’s death as an act of high sacrifice only cheapens the lives of the countless innocents whose names and faces Hamas leaders have never known. But the name and faces of every Israeli hostage are pasted on signs all over Israel. There aren’t enough trees or standing buildings left in Gaza to paper a fraction of such posters for the children who have died there in the last year. And Hamas says they would do it all over again.
All of this is in keeping with the policies which have dictated Hamas’ governance since the organization was founded. Hamas was never dedicated to its own people. It never cared more about the people of Gaza than about its own political project. Unlike the Palestinian Authority but rather like the radical Israeli right, Hamas has always actively opposed the peace process. This means that it has always opposed the amelioration of the lives of the Palestinian people and the establishment of a Palestinian state. That is why Netanyahu has chosen to continue funding Hamas for years: he and Hamas share a mutual interest. In its charter, written in 1988, Hamas rejected any solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict that involved sharing land with Israel: “Palestine is an Islamic land… It is forbidden to give up or compromise any part of it.”
In 1993, after the signing of the Oslo Accords, Hamas explicitly rejected the agreement. Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin declared: “We will continue the jihad until every last inch of Palestinian land is liberated.” This opposition to any peace process that recognized Israel’s existence was consistent with Hamas’ raison d’etre: the destruction of Israel (which, it apparently bears noting, is not the same as the establishment of a Palestinian state). The next year, in 1994, Hamas carried out several suicide bombings following the Oslo Accords, targeting both Israeli civilians and security forces. These attacks were intended to derail the peace process and undermine the Palestinian Authority’s efforts toward a negotiated settlement.
When Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, it was a gift for the Israeli right, which had, like Hamas, designed and perpetrated obstacles to any peace agreement that would result in two states. And one year later, Hamas’ violent takeover of Gaza after clashing with PA (Fatah) forces was likewise a welcome development for members of the Israeli hard right. That coup underscored the group’s opposition to the PA’s governance and orientation, further deepening the divide between the two Palestinian factions. In 2019, to defend his policy of pumping Qatari dollars into Gaza, Netanyahu explained that “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for [the Qatari money]” because support for Hamas weakened the PA and the PA wanted to get back to the negotiating table. And so Netanyahu continued to line Hamas’ coffers, to the tune of several millions of dollars, assisting in paying for the tunnels running under Gaza today.
On October seventh of last year, Hamas perpetrated horrific crimes: crimes against Israeli civilians the likes of which a healthy mind can hardly bear to imagine. In response, Israel has unleashed its own horrific retaliation on Gazan civilians, inflicting horrors that the same healthy mind cannot even begin to imagine. And the horrors multiply by the day and these bloody days have stained an entire calendar year and more. But Israelis were not the only victims of Hamas cruelty that day. Hamas also betrayed their own people. Gazans have been punished for Hamas’ crimes. Hamas knew that this is what would happen but did it anyway and they would do it again, just as Israel would repeat every crime it has committed against Palestinians if given the opportunity.
Even before this year, Hamas was not popular in Gaza. Those who began to read and pay attention to the people of Gaza in the last year know nothing about the Palestinian “Wake Up” movement of 2009 — a group of Gazan lawyers, human rights activists, and academics formed that movement to protest against Hamas’s Interior Minister, who imposed harsh restrictions on personal and public freedoms, including dress codes, personal appearance, and women’s rights. Nor do they know of the “We Want to Live” protests which broke out ten years later in March 2019 were an outcry from the Gazan citizens compelled by dire economic conditions and heavy taxes to take to the streets and force Hamas to recognize and reckon with their anger. These protests were a rare expression of public dissent against Hamas rule. People hit the streets and protested for economic reforms, job opportunities, the overthrow of the blockade which crushed daily life, and the amelioration of internal political strife.
Many of the demonstrators bore the brunt of Hamas’ severe crackdowns: they were punished with arrests, beatings, and intimidation. Sometimes, Hamas went so far as to shoot live ammunition into the crowds of pedestrians protesting against the movement, a forbidding sign of how far they were willing to go to silence the people. Despite the initial excitement and the courage which fueled the protest movement, the people were powerless to effect real change. Many of the leaders of the protests, disillusioned and afraid of retribution and a dark future, decided to leave the Gaza Strip in search of a better life elsewhere. Their exodus was reflective of a deep despair on the part of the Gazan people under Hamas rule. Crushed by the occupation and Hamas corruption, leaving seemed the only path to a life worth living. Those they left behind have tried hard to create a better future for themselves.
But that better future is more illusory now than it has ever been before. The people of Gaza see that Hamas forced them down a path of utter destruction. Despite their cities lying in ruin — with tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed and no functional hospitals, schools, universities or any of the trappings of life left — Hamas clings to power, refusing to concede its rule. Sinwar went to his grave knowing Netanyahu would safeguard his legacy. Hamas and Netanayhu serve each other’s goals, intentionally or otherwise.
It is crushing that “We Want to Live” was the slogan of the young people of Gaza when they took to the streets. Crushing and telling. Protestors avoided demanding political solutions, focusing instead on basic issues such as gas, taxes, and electricity, operating on the principle that solutions should first address the financial and daily living challenges. They were insisting on basic human necessities because in the seventeen years of Hamas rule over the Gaza Strip basic human needs were not provided. Instead, Hamas provided repression, wars, bloodshed, and destruction. After every war — in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 — Hamas repeated the same hollow speeches about their own victory, a “victory” that comes at the cost of thousands of lives and destruction of homes. How could any Palestinian fail to hate them for all they have done to our people?
Hamas has been the pretext that Israel dreamed of to further suffocate Gaza, tighten the siege, and destroy the Palestinian state project while deepening the division between Gaza and the West Bank. Israel besieged and strangled Gaza from the outside, while Hamas suffocated it from within. And even now, as ever, Hamas has continued that work. No one in Gaza is spared from its cruelty. Even now Hamas brutally punishes Gazans for speaking out against their rule.
Because of them the Palestinian people in Gaza are living through one of the worst years in their history, without even being allowed to speak about their suffering, pain, and plight. All that remains in Gaza are tents, food banks, lines of children waiting to fill up clean water, and struggles to secure clothes for the children — a situation that bears no resemblance to the “resilience” imagined by the Arab and Western diaspora.
Consider the words of one author (M.J), writing from Gaza:
I’m writing this for the group of ignorant people who only became aware of Gaza after October [2023] and are attacking us, saying “as if you were in paradise before October.”
Before October 7th, we were living well. In Gaza Municipality, we were preparing a project to collect containers from public streets, increase green spaces, and there was a special nursery for planting white lilies. We were working on a tourist guidebook titled “Where the Sun Pours Its Light,”… We had our own Gaza brands of restaurants, hotels, shops, chalets, and factories that exported abroad. There was significant investment and activity by businessmen without any contribution from the Gaza government, which only imposed huge taxes on them. Yet, they continued their work, creating the images of Gaza you see before October and accompany with sad music.
We were doing well and were on high steps of the ladder. There was unemployment, power cuts, and high levels of poverty and travel problems. There was a security equation that preserved our national dignity as a community besieged by the enemy. But these were all problems that could be solved through national consensus and elections, and other possible solutions that we had started to implement by opening up work through the Gaza government in the occupied territory.
We were not in tents, nor were we hungry or thirsty. We were in a suppressed community in terms of exercising our political rights and cultural activities. We were dealing with the intolerance of a faction (Hamas) controlling the levers of commercial movement and jobs. We needed elections, consensus, and a national plan for struggle. Now, we need many things, the least of which is a street to walk on, a house to replace the tent, cemeteries, prosthetic limbs, and many things you can’t imagine like clean water and an hour of electricity.
Hamas has bragged that the globe has trained its eyes on Gaza since its brutal attack last year. But global attention is nothing to be proud of when it is earned through mass destruction, killing, displacement, and starvation perpetrated by Israel against the residents of Gaza.
Yes, Gaza was an open-air prison, where its residents could not leave except through the Rafah crossing to Egypt and, in rare cases, through Israel to the West Bank. (Even when a Gazan attempts to leave this open-air prison, Hamas demands a bribe to add their name to the list of travelers, with the bribe reaching up to $1,200.) Hamas has collaborated with Israel in making this open-air prison even worse, instead of trying to force a permanent diplomatic solution which will finally end the regimes of terror which have characterized Palestinian life since 1948.
Gaza was once an open-air prison. Now it is a mass grave where residents await death — whether from an Israeli airstrike, a sniper’s bullet, lack of medical care if they fall ill, or even being crushed by an airdropped box of food aid. Starvation, bombing, shots, neglect: how many different ways has human life in Gaza been extinguished?
There are still outsiders who dare to characterize Hamas’ attack last year as an act of resistance. As a Palestinian, I hold you in contempt. I condemn your narcissistic usurpation of my people’s pain for your own shallow and cruel political posturing. What you call an act of resistance will be remembered forever by the Palestinian people as the day the gates of hell opened on the people of Gaza. Those gates still have not closed.