Every time I joined a demonstration against Hamas inside the Gaza Strip, I thought this might be the beginning of the end of its rule.
I was young. I had big dreams. I believed that if enough Palestinians stood together and said no to corruption, repression, and armed rule over our lives, the world would hear us. Instead, Hamas answered us with bullets, arrests, torture, intimidation, and public defamation. And many of those abroad who claimed to stand with Palestine answered us with suspicion.
“You are doing Hasbara.” “You are not a real Palestinian.” “You are serving Israel.”
This is the tragedy of Palestinians who oppose Hamas: we are crushed by Hamas at home, then dismissed by Western activists abroad.
Since the summer of 2007, when Hamas seized control of Gaza by force of arms, popular opposition to its rule has never disappeared. But every peaceful attempt at change has collided with systematic repression. On November 12, 2007, tens of thousands of Fatah supporters and other Palestinian national forces gathered in al-Katiba Square to commemorate the late president Yasser Arafat and reject the coup. Hamas confronted them with live fire. Nine people were killed and more than 150 were wounded.
That day established a bloody equation. Whenever a popular movement emerged, Hamas responded with excessive force, arbitrary detention, and the moral assassination of branding opponents as “spies”. I experienced this myself in March 2019 when I helped launch the “We Want to Live” movement with a group of unemployed young people suffering under Hamas’s discriminatory policies on jobs and public services. As a lawyer and human rights defender, I believed the movement’s civic and legal character should have opened the door to dialogue.
Instead, Hamas opened interrogation centres belonging to its military wing, the Qassam sites, to investigate protesters. When the detention centres became overcrowded, schools and educational institutions were turned into detention and interrogation centres for thousands. My own brother was arrested and held as a hostage to pressure me to surrender myself. Eventually, that pressure worked.
Hamas also used its media machine and social media tools to smear me and many other activists as collaborators and spies. This was not random. It came from a doctrine that sees anyone who is not with Hamas as a spy against it. The result was a double fear in society: fear of physical punishment moral assassination.
After October 7, Gaza was pushed into an unprecedented catastrophe and into forced silence under the weight of Hamas’s losing gamble. Many people in Gaza were angry about the operation and the practices that accompanied it, which violated the ethics of the Palestinian national struggle and the international laws meant to protect civilians, women, and children. But people imposed silence on themselves because they already knew of Hamas’s violence.
When Israel announced that the goal of the war was to topple Hamas’s authority, Hamas became convinced that any internal movement against it must be serving Israeli objectives. From that point on, nearly two million displaced people living in tents became, in Hamas’s eyes, potential spies.
When calls for protests on June 26 failed, I contacted people inside Gaza to understand why so many stayed away. The reasons were clear. The calls had come from abroad, from Cairo and Europe, without leadership on the ground. There was no local alternative ready to guide society. There was no force to protect unarmed protesters from Hamas’s militias. Hamas summoned anyone who wrote about the protests on social media. It set up interrogation centres inside hospitals, including al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, al-Shifa, Shuhada al-Aqsa, and Nasser. Security forces spread across the streets and interrogated people simply for walking toward gathering points.
People were also exhausted by survival itself: repairing tents, searching for firewood, buying food, and carrying water from long distances. Everyone knew the punishment for standing against Hamas could be broken limbs or immediate death. This is the reality many Western activists refuse to see.
During the war after October 7, I followed the demonstrations across Western countries. Many were beautiful. They raised the Palestinian flag and showed real sympathy for civilians in Gaza killed during the war. But too often, their leaders adopted Hamas’s vision and Hamas’s wish to remain in control of Gaza.
I wanted demonstrators to demand protection for civilians from the war, but also protection for Palestinians from Hamas. I wanted them to call on Hamas to give up power. I wanted them to adopt the demands of Gaza’s political opponents, people victimised by Hamas and then ignored by the world. Instead, when Palestinians like us asked for support, we were often told we were doing Hasbara. That word has become a wall. Behind it, people hide from Palestinian voices that complicate their slogans.
I have always wanted to tell them: live in Gaza for one day under Hamas. Come and see what it means to be a young person who refuses Hamas’s system. Come and see what happens when you criticise the men with guns. Come and see what it means to be a woman living under Hamas’s social control, intimidation, and claim to own society in the name of resistance.
But many do not want to see the Palestinian person. They want Palestine as an abstract idea.
I came to Italy after being tracked by Hamas and placed on its assassination list. I arrived in Europe expecting that people who constantly speak about Palestine would want to hear from Palestinians like me. Instead, I found that many support Palestine as an idea more than they support the Palestinian people.
They see the flag, the map, the slogan, and the poster. But they do not see the Palestinians tortured by Hamas, the family pressured by Hamas, the woman controlled by Hamas, the activist smeared by Hamas, or the young person who wants a normal future without armed men. They say they support Palestine. But when a Palestinian says, “I want to be free from Hamas,” they turn away. This is not solidarity.
Civilians in Gaza are not Hamas’s popular base. They are hostages of a radical movement that monopolised power by force. Hamas did not consult Palestinians on war and peace. It did not consult them on October 7. It did not consult them on the negotiations that followed. Hamas will not accept any political settlement that does not guarantee its survival, even if that survival comes at the expense of Gaza’s civilians.
That is why I have argued that the only way out is to strip Hamas of its human shields. The international community must stop watching the hostages, the people of Gaza, and waiting for the hostages to liberate themselves. Peaceful protest in Gaza has reached a dead end because the two sides are not equal: unarmed civilians facing ideological gunmen.
Since January 2024, I have called in international forums for a safe-zone plan as the only practical solution. This requires Israel and the international community to bring international forces into areas inside the “yellow line”, which currently covers around 70 per cent of the Gaza Strip. A Palestinian governmental administration should manage that area, with funding to provide relief and develop an alternative governing system. Civilians would then be transferred there after identity screening to prevent Hamas members or other armed elements from entering.
Hamas’s strongest and final weapon is the weapon of human shields. If the world succeeds in taking this weapon away and protecting civilians in a safe area in Gaza, in accordance with international humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions, and the powers of the Security Council, Hamas will be weakened quickly and forced back toward political solutions.
To oppose Hamas is not to betray Palestine. It is to defend Palestinians from those who have hijacked their name. So if you truly stand with Palestine, stand with Palestinians when they speak against tyranny from inside Gaza, at great personal risk. Stand with civilians against war. Stand with political opponents against Hamas. Stand with the people, not the slogan.
And do not call us traitors because our truth makes your slogans uncomfortable.
Moumen al-Natour is a Palestinian lawyer, co-founder of Gaza’s We Want to Live movement, a former political prisoner held by Hamas, president of Palestinian Youth for Development, and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Peace Communications
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