Over the past week, Gaza has witnessed unprecedented protests against Hamas, with demonstrators demanding an end to the ongoing war and the group’s governance. In the northern city of Beit Lahia, crowds of Palestinians marched through devastated streets, chanting slogans such as “Hamas out!” and “Hamas are terrorists!” while waving white flags. Some held banners in both Arabic and English, reading “Stop the war,” and “We want to live in peace.”
These protests, the largest since the most recent conflict began, have also spread to other areas, including the Jabalia refugee camp, where participants have burned tires and chanted “We want to eat!”—highlighting the dire humanitarian situation.
Hamas has responded by detaining protest leaders and journalists. In one case, a 22-year-old protester, Oday Nasser Al Rabay, was reportedly kidnapped, tortured, and executed by Hamas operatives for participating in the demonstrations. His body was left at his family’s doorstep, and during his funeral, attendees chanted “Hamas out!”
These demonstrations, ignored by many self-styled “pro-Palestinians,” such as Students for Justice in Palestine—and even described as “traitors” by others such as the prominent British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta—reflect not only frustration over the ongoing war in Gaza but a deep-seated animus among Gaza’s populace that predates the October 7 massacre that launched the war.
Hamas’ position in Gaza and lack of support among Palestinians has looked dire for many months. In recent polling from January 2025, when presented with a range of options for who might rule Gaza in the future, only 20 percent of Gazans supported the idea of Hamas continuing to rule Gaza. This is compared to 75 percent who expressed support for the Palestinian Authority, 60 percent for some kind of special Palestinian government supported by Arab nations and the international community, 29 percent for direct control by the United Nations, 12 percent for Egypt, and 15 percent for a coalition of Arab countries. Direct Israeli rule or American rule—the latter of which was floated by President Donald Trump—were not even presented as options in the poll.
The historical strength of Hamas support in Gaza is a controversial and contested topic. While many polls over the years, including in the wake of October 7, have shown strong support for Hamas, there are credible allegations that these polls—as they so often are under a dictatorship—were rigged. For instance, in late 2023, polls by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research claimed 62 percent of Palestinians were satisfied with Hamas rule, but documents seized by the Israeli Defense Forces during the war showed that this number had been falsified, and the actual underlying polling showed only 31.9 percent satisfaction. As the Times of Israel wrote back in August 2024:
According to the IDF, the documents it recovered in Gaza “prove an extensive effort by the terror organization to falsify the results of [the PCPSR] polls, to create a false representation of the Gazan public’s support for the terror organization, especially after the massacre [in Israel] on October 7.
“These documents are part of a systematic process, the purpose of which is to disguise the collapse of the organization, and the collapse of public support for it,” the IDF claimed.
What Hamas wanted to attain from October 7 and its aftermath was a kind of military victory over Israel. It wanted to destroy the only Jewish state in the world, either by directly conquering the land, or by provoking a regional war in which Israel would be swamped by multiple Muslim nations and non-state actors such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, and by collapsing Western support for Israel. But since its single day of invasion, Hamas has been forced onto the back foot, back down into its tunnel network, forced to fight a guerrilla war in Gaza where it might occasionally be able to snipe an Israeli soldier, or explode an Israeli tank, but not one where it can claim a military victory in any meaningful sense.
How could Hamas expect to maintain support from the wider Palestinian population when its war led to thousands of Palestinian deaths, the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, and hundreds of thousands of Gazans now living in tents? Yahya Sinwar, the former Hamas leader, believed that civilian deaths were “necessary sacrifices” in his war of conquest against the Jews. But it is Yahya Sinwar who is dead, and it is his vision of the end of Zionism that is withering.
At the same time, Hamas’ supporters and militia men in Gaza remain active. Their bizarre hostage handover ceremonies during the most recent ceasefire, where hundreds of Hamas supporters and their families danced and cheered in front of both living and dead hostages, including Israeli children, were an act of trolling aimed both at bolstering Hamas’ standing as a formidable force in Gaza, and enraging and radicalizing as many Israelis as possible. Hamas wants to convince both Palestinians and Israelis that peace and coexistence is impossible, and violent struggle is the only way forward.
So what has changed, and why have Palestinians in Gaza been protesting against Hamas for the last week?
One factor is the recommencement of the war. While Israel agreed in January to a temporary ceasefire to facilitate the release of their hostages in Gaza, both Israel and the United States are still unified in their resolve that Hamas rule in Gaza is over, and that Hamas must be organizationally destroyed. (The Israeli government has even gone as far as to promise to kill each and every Hamas operative.) Hamas perhaps hoped that the war would now be over, and it would be able to rebuild its military strength and maintain control of Gaza over the coming months and years. But rather than relenting, Israel and the United States have sought to increase pressure on Hamas, enforcing a siege on the Gaza Strip, with Trump promoting a plan that would result in permanent American control of Gaza, while either permanently or temporarily displacing the Palestinian inhabitants.
In other words, I think Palestinians in Gaza are scared that they may be driven out wholesale by Israel and the United States and involuntarily resettled to another part of the Islamic world.
To be very clear, I strongly disagree with this approach. I believe that Palestinians have a right to freedom and self-determination in the places they live today, in much the same way that the Israelis do. And I believe that in a potential future with no more jihadist groups like Hamas trying to wage a perpetual holy war against the Jews, it will be possible for Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace across the border from one another.
Displacement would also be deeply politically unpopular. Involuntarily removing more than 2 million Palestinians to Egypt, Jordan, or some other Arab state is unacceptable to the wider Middle Eastern and international community, which tends to favor a peaceful two-state solution, as shown by the Arab League’s institutional endorsement of the Arab Peace Initiative. Many Americans on both sides of the political aisle are also deeply opposed to such proposals.
At the same time, there can be no future whatsoever for Hamas or any other such jihadist group next door to Israel. Nobody can be expected to live side-by-side with radicalized fundamentalist killers. Some Palestinians, such as myself and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib of the Atlantic Council, have long made clear that there is no future for Hamas and its fellow travelers, including ISIS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Muslim Brotherhood. These groups do not believe in a two-state solution; they do not believe in coexistence. Rather, they believe in permanent warfare and false antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews ruling the world or controlling the media, and they are Islamic supremacists who oppose Israel on the basis that the Middle East is an Islamic land where Muslims must reign supreme.
To unlock the possibility of peace and coexistence with Israel, there needs to be a proactive effort to rid Palestinian society of this jihadist leadership, which is exploiting the plight of the Palestinian people and making it impossible to have any kind of coexistence with their neighbours. This is why the anti-Hamas protesters must succeed.
Of course, the majority of Western self-styled “pro-Palestinian” groups do not seem interested in this idea. They continue on with the same path they have pursued since October 7: that there should be only a Palestinian state, and that Israel should be boycotted and sanctioned out of existence. But a lot of this nonsense is not about supporting Palestinians; in fact, it is not even aligned with the interests of Palestinians.
Yes, Palestinians have suffered a huge amount, and their suffering should not be downplayed or minimized. But they have suffered because of what, exactly? One key factor blighting the entire region is jihadism. Jihadist groups, including Hamas, have sought to impose Islamic rule—and violently. This same affliction has affected not only Palestinians, but also Yemenis, Afghanis, Iranians, Yazidis, Kurds, Alawites, and a whole host of countries and groups across the Middle East where we have seen militant uprisings seeking to impose fundamentalist Islam by the sword. There is no Zionism in Yemen, or Afghanistan, or Sudan, or Iran. No, the common thread is jihadism, often violently forced upon those who don’t want it.
Hamas was hungry for conquest, victory, and the destruction of Israel. But after gaining a toehold in Gaza since seizing power there in 2007, it overplayed its hand—both by oppressing the Palestinian population in Gaza, and by starting multiple wars against their neighbor, Israel. It is essential that Gazans and Palestinians more generally move beyond Hamas rule, and ensure a brighter and free future not only for Palestinians, but also for the entire region. Now is not the time for platitudes or procrastination. Now is the time to support the protesters and demand international pressure and maximum diplomatic efforts to achieve the end of Hamas rule in Gaza. As Moumen Al-Natour, a Palestinian lawyer and one of the leaders of the protests, wrote in the Washington Post on Sunday:
If we fail to remove Hamas now, then I fear that I will never know another time without Hamas in charge of my life. Whether I am killed by an Israeli missile or a Hamas bullet, I refuse to die without trying to be free again.
If we miss this opportunity, I fear we risk condemning both Palestinians and Israelis to perpetual conflict. Allowing Hamas to regain its footing would simply give the group a chance to continue its war, sooner or later. But expelling Palestinians from Gaza to somewhere else would also be seen as a terrible, generational grievance and would surely become a rallying cry and recruitment tool for future generations of radicalized jihadists.
Now is our chance to support a genuine Palestinian movement demanding peace. It is a rare moment, fragile yet powerful. Let us seize it together—for the sake of Gaza and Palestinians, for Israel, and for the future stability of the entire region.
