As Hamas Loses Its Grip, Gazans Speak Out against the Terrorist Sect Noah Rothman
The unrest on America’s college campuses took a noticeable turn for the worse shortly after Iran entered the war that erupted with Hamas’s 10/7 massacre, and it got worse still after Israel retaliated in response to that 350-plus missile and drone attack on its territory. But even as the country’s most outspoken college students lean into their conclusion that the problem in the Gaza Strip is Israel, Gazans themselves are growing bolder in their condemnations of the terrorist sect that consigned them to this war.
“Palestinians in Gaza are increasingly willing to voice their anger against Hamas,” the Financial Times reported Thursday. Although “Hamas rules Gaza with a tight grip” and reliably visits retribution on the Gazans who speak out against its misrule, Palestinian civilians are increasingly “speaking out against the Islamist group.”
One Gazan who spoke with FT’s reporters criticized the terrorist outfit for failing to foresee the consequences Israel would mete out in response to the 10/7 massacre — or, if they did, to ignore them. “They [Hamas] should have restricted themselves to military targets,” he said. Another castigated Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. “I pray every day for God to punish the one who brought us to this situation,” that Palestinian civilian exclaimed. “I pray every day for the death of Sinwar.”
According to pollsters with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, these sentiments may be indicative of broader trends in the opinion landscape.
Khalil Shikaki, director of the centre, said that support for Hamas fell by almost a quarter to 34 per cent, according to a poll taken during the first week of March. The movement also lost popularity in the West Bank, where support fell from 44 per cent to 35 per cent. “There is no doubt support for Hamas is declining in Gaza because more and more people feel it has some responsibility for the pain they are enduring,” said Shikaki.
And the liberty Palestinian civilians now feel to voice their hostility toward Hamas’s regime freely is almost certainly a direct result of Israel’s efforts to degrade and, ultimately, disperse the terrorist organization. “Critics have been emboldened because there’s no one now to fear,” said one Gaza analyst. One former resident of the Strip, a professor at the Gaza-based al-Azhar University, put it most succinctly: “People are no longer afraid.”
Gazans are intimately familiar with Hamas’s disregard for their well-being, but uninitiated Westerners got a glimpse of the torment Gazans have endured for years this week when the humanitarian pier Joe Biden announced at his State of the Union address came under Hamas attack. Hamas “terrorists launched mortars at the maritime construction site, damaging several pieces of engineering equipment,” Israel’s i24News reported this week. As a result, “several pieces of American engineering equipment were damaged in the attack,” the report continued. “In addition, one person was slightly injured while running to a protected area.”
And yet, much like the blinkered college students making a spectacle of their hostility toward Israel, Biden officials declined to name the real problem here. “It’s very clear that it’s a very difficult environment for humanitarian workers in Gaza, just given the state of the conflict,” one unnamed administration official told reporters of the mortar attack on the pier. “The broader issue is the safety and security of our partners and just making sure that the deconfliction systems are working well.” If “deconfliction” is the goal, the Israeli Defense Forces providing security to the contractors and U.S. personnel constructing the pier is not the obstacle. The organization firing explosive ordnance at all and sundry only to disrupt the distribution of humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip most certainly is.
Given all this, we can reasonably conclude that the college protesters who see no evil in Hamas are willfully blind to the circumstances against which they are protesting. As one New York University student said recently when asked by a peer, “Why are we protesting here?”: “I wish I was more educated.” Indeed. Don’t we all.
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