The World Shouldn't Ignore that Hamas Terrorizes Innocents in Gaza, Too
Lumping every Gazan with this brutal outfit is morally wrong and is leading to catastrophe
Even as President Donald Trump welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House yesterday to discuss the war in Gaza, something extraordinary has been happening amid the rubble, fear, and suffocating despair in the conflict-ravaged Palestinian territory: Gazans are beginning to speak out, not just against Israel, as one might expect, but also against Hamas, the armed group that governs them with an iron fist. In one of the most dangerous places in the world to dissent, Gazans are risking everything to say: Not in our name.
Last week, in what The New York Times has called “a rare and perilous public show of anger against Hamas,” disaffected Palestinians took to the streets in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, to demand “that the militant group relinquish control of the territory and end the war with Israel.” The Times report has more on the public outcry against Hamas that has been unfolding in Gaza:
The march [last] Wednesday appeared to be the latest of a handful of such protests that have broken out in the last two weeks, despite Hamas’s efforts to suppress dissent with threats and shows of force. … [T]he demonstrations, while small and scattered, represent the most serious challenge to Hamas’s iron-fisted 18-year rule of the Gaza Strip since the war began when Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023. The overwhelming Israeli response that followed has ripped apart the territory and residents’ lives, killing tens of thousands. The bloodshed resumed after Israel ended a two-month-old cease-fire agreement in mid-March, citing Hamas’s refusal to accept Israeli demands.
Palestinians began marching about a week later in Beit Lahia, a farming community in the northernmost part of Gaza, and then in other parts of the enclave. The protests lasted for three days before appearing to fade.
Activists posted on social media … calling for new rallies. Demonstrators assembled in Beit Lahia’s main square and marched toward another square. … “We have lost our homes, our loved ones, our hope and our future. Enough is enough,” said Abeer al-Radeea, 34, a homemaker who said she went to [last] Wednesday’s demonstration with her husband and children. “We call on Hamas to stop this and leave us. We don’t know when this will end, but we want peace and democracy.”
The march went forward despite widespread fear in Gaza of Hamas, which in the past has cracked down violently on challenges to its rule.
This is not the image many people have of Gaza. To much of the outside world, the territory is viewed in binary terms: either as a victim of Israeli bombardment or a breeding ground for terrorism. Lost in this oversimplification are the voices of ordinary people—those who reject Hamas’s extremism, yet are given no exit, no platform, no safety. For years, civilians in Gaza have been held hostage by Hamas, just as Hamas has taken Israeli civilians hostage. The group has repeatedly used the people of Gaza as human shields, putting them in harm’s way to protect its own interests.
These are the people we should be paying attention to right now. The emergence of these protesters signals that moderation is not dead—it’s just buried under rubble and fear. And now more than ever, it needs our solidarity.
To criticize Hamas from within Gaza is to flirt with death. The group has long ruled through fear, routinely labeling dissenters as traitors or collaborators and silencing them with violence. Public executions, imprisonment, and torture are not relics of the past—they remain tactics of control. And yet, despite this climate of terror, people are beginning to protest. Hamas has issued a statement since the protests began, accusing the protesters of being agents of Israel. Knowing what we know about Hamas, this statement is a direct threat.
The outcry against Hamas is not happening in a vacuum. Israel’s ongoing response to the Oct. 7 attacks, including the devastating measures it says it’s taking to avoid a similar episode in the future, is actively inhibiting the reconstruction of war-torn Gaza. The situation is so grim that a U.N. report from last fall concluded that it would take 350 years just for Gaza to return to its pre-war economic level. Despite not even being half the size of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, research cited by the Associated Press found that, after just one year, “Almost as many buildings have been destroyed or damaged in Gaza as in all of Ukraine after its first two years of war with Russia.” Just yesterday, Reuters reported:
Israeli troops flattened farmland and cleared entire residential districts in Gaza to open a “kill zone” around the enclave. … In the early expansion of the zone, soldiers said troops using bulldozers and heavy excavators along with thousands of mines and explosives destroyed around 3,500 buildings as well as agricultural and industrial areas that could have been vital in postwar reconstruction. Around 35% of the farmland in Gaza, much of which is around the edges of the territory, was destroyed.
Gazans want Israel to stop. But the protests also suggest Gazans want Hamas to stop waging war in their name. That is, the protests represent not just political resistance, but a moral refusal to be defined by the violence carried out in their name. These protesters are saying, in essence: We are not Hamas. We are not terrorists. We are people who want to live in dignity.
One particularly powerful voice is that of Dr. Adnan Ibrahim, a respected Islamic scholar originally from Gaza. In recent weeks, he has publicly criticized Hamas for dragging civilians into war without warning or consent. He called for transparency and accountability, and demanded that Hamas apologize to the very people it claims to protect. Coming from someone with deep roots in the region, his words struck a chord—both as a condemnation of power and as a plea for sanity.
Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, continues to impose its rule through force and fear. But while Gazans risk their lives to resist the regime, many in the West have begun to erase them entirely. A growing number of voices argue that the distinction between civilian and combatant in Gaza no longer matters. That if people live under Hamas rule, they must be complicit; that any fighting-age male is fair game; that there is no one left to mourn.
This narrative is not just false—it’s deeply dangerous. It empowers extremists on all sides and allows Hamas to claim victimhood while silencing internal dissent. And it allows hardliners in the West to justify abandoning empathy altogether. The result is a chilling consensus: that Gaza is a place without innocence.
These protesters disrupt the false consensus, upending the narratives of extremists on both sides. They remind us that moral clarity can exist even in the fog of war. Offering a third way—neither passive victimhood nor violent extremism—they embody a fragile, deeply human yearning for a better life. For extremists, they are bad news, defying the notion that Gaza must choose between nihilism and fanaticism. Instead, they assert a path of life, dignity, and peaceful resistance.
In a world increasingly defined by absolutes, these voices are inconvenient. They don’t fit the script. They demand that we care in a more nuanced, uncomfortable way. But they also offer something rare: hope rooted in courage, not fantasy.
This isn’t about taking sides in a war. It’s about recognizing the humanity of people caught in a merciless crossfire—people who are trying, against impossible odds, to reclaim their futures from those who’ve stolen them.
The moderates in Gaza are not naïve. They know that peace won’t come easily, or soon. But they also know that silence is its own kind of surrender. Their bravery challenges all of us—not just to pay attention, but to resist the temptation to dehumanize, simplify, or look away.
In the end, the measure of a society is not how it treats its allies, but how it sees those who are inconvenient to defend. The protesters in Gaza are inconvenient. And they are right.
One last thing from the editors…
In late February, after floating a plan to turn the war-ravaged Gaza Strip into “the Rivera of the Middle East,” Donald Trump shared a bizarre AI-generated video titled “Trump Gaza.” It depicted Elon Musk eating pita and hummus, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lounging by a pool, towering condos, and dollar bills raining from the sky—all capped by a massive golden statue of Trump himself. But this is not harmless fun. As The UnPopulist Senior Producer Landry Ayres explains in the following video, in the end, Trump’s idea reveals a commitment to exploitation and a complete disregard for the rights and suffering of others in favor of creating a paradise for the powerful.
Watch it below or on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.
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It's good to read a piece that attempts to add a little narrative to the extreme positions that are consistently posted and protested. I am no fan of Netanyahu. He's the Trump of Israel and the West Bank settlements are plain wrong. Netanyahu had to respond to the attack but there's a point to stop and Israel is way past it. And using it to move, like the USA, to totalitarianism.
Hamas is a terrorist organization who killed 1500 people, took hostages and raped Israelis. But it is also the government of Gaza. It has been given billions of dollars in aid and has not used a dime to help Gazans. And the actual terrorists in Hamas hid within its citizens. Makes for difficult to not kill civilians.
I concur with the author, but ask the pragmatic question of how to respect, even protect and defend, these “Gazan dissidents,” while rooting out Hamas for good. That Hamas is a terrorist organization, which mistreats its “own people,” does not strike me as a reason to pursue their destruction less diligently. I agree it should be done as efficiently as possible with the least possible collateral damage. But their amoral approach to their own civilians will ensure miserable collateral damage. Hamas will not go gently into that good night. How does the author propose to achieve their removal and destruction? We also cannot be blind to the fact that many Gazans do support Hamas, and getting rid of the “Hamas structure” may simply set Israel up for another Oct 7.
I agree this is not a binary issue, but let’s not trade one false binary for another. If anything, the growth of an anti-Hamas element in Gaza highlights the need to get rid of Hamas.