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| Heroic Gazans pay with lives for opposing Hamas |
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There is a rumour, spoken rather quietly and carefully, that many people in Gaza are tired of Hamas.
Tired of the tunnels built under hospitals and schools instead of the hospitals and schools themselves being rebuilt. Tired of leaders who fly between five-star hotels in Doha while their own population goes without electricity or clean water. Tired of the Gazan elite who have become rich on Palestinian misery. Tired of a leadership that acts knowingly to garner a response from Israel that can help perpetuate their Palestinian “blame culture” lies. The rumour is almost certainly true. However, it is also almost never said out loud, in public, by name. And there is a very specific reason for that. In the years since Hamas seized full control of Gaza in 2005, the organisation has treated criticism as a security threat rather than a political fact of life. Genuine journalists reporting stories unfavourable to the Hamas leadership have been assaulted, detained, and forced to delete their own footage. Activists have been harassed and monitored. The result, documented by outside observers, is a population that has learned to self-censor, not because it agrees but because it has watched what happens terminally to those who don’t. Since 2025, that pattern has escalated into something starker. A UN Human Rights Office investigation covering August, 2024, through January, 2026, documented roughly 249 cases of extrajudicial punishment in Gaza. Beatings, kneecapping and executions, with Hamas-affiliated forces or police implicated in close to a quarter of them, including more than 100 deaths. Some of these killings were filmed and deliberately circulated. There were blindfolded men shot in public squares, accused of “collaboration”, “looting” or simply crossing the wrong armed faction. The UN commission was explicit that these acts amount to war crimes. None of this required an Israeli soldier, an Israeli policy or intervention by the Trump administration. All it required was a camera, and pro-Palestinian activists around the world on social media who are immune to the truth, ostensibly either antisemites or fools, and happy to spread anything without researching or fact-checking the content. Content that disrupts their Israel Derangement Syndrome. What almost never makes it into the public domain is the layer underneath the footage. The people who wanted to say something and didn’t. The ones not allowed to for fear it disrupts the Jew hate narrative pushed out to many pro-Gaza supporters who will believe anything except the truth. Every public execution is also, by design, a message to everyone who watches it. That is the actual mechanism Hamas pushes on Palestinians collectively for their silence, their lack of visible protest, their apparent passivity in the face of leadership that enriches itself while they suffer. But it is not passivity. It is a rational response to an organisation, Hamas, that has made an example, on camera, of people who may think of crossing their line of depravity to report the truth. This is worth separating clearly from a lazier and uglier argument - the idea that Palestinians as a people are somehow collectively responsible for their own condition, too cowardly or too complicit to change it. That argument erases exactly the group it claims to be criticising. The genuine, non-AI doctors, teachers, journalists and the ordinary residents of Gaza who have tried to organise protests against Hamas rule in the past and paid for it. The families of the men executed in public squares for alleged and unproven “collaboration” that was never tried in any court. The genuine journalists beaten for reporting a story Hamas didn’t like. They are not silent because they don’t care. They are silent because Hamas has spent two decades making sure that speaking out has a price. The responsibility for that price sits firmly with Hamas’ leadership, the people who diverted aid meant for reconstruction into tunnel networks and personal wealth, who govern through an internal security apparatus willing to shoot people in a public square. The ones who post the videos, and who have not permitted an election in Gaza in nearly two decades because an election is precisely the mechanism dissent would need. It does not sit with a population that has been given no safe channel through which to object. And it is not helped by the United Nations, an organisation that should be, but is not, in any way bipartisan when it comes to Israel. Demonstrated by UNRWA, exposed for being knee-deep in Hamas operatives and where UN resolutions against only Israel number in excess of the total number of resolutions from other countries combined. That distinction matters, because collapsing it, treating an entire people’s understandable silence as evidence of their moral character, does exactly what Hamas needs it to do. It moves the argument away from the organisation that built the fear and onto the people living inside it. The more useful, and more honest question isn’t why Palestinians in Gaza aren’t speaking out. It’s what it says about Hamas’ rule when speaking out is something people have to weigh against their own lives.
Edward Moss, To read more on this story, subscribe to our new e-edition. Go to E-edition.jewishtelegraph.com.
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