In Gaza, Demonstrations Against Hamas

In late July, Palestinians throughout the Gaza Strip held a number of rallies denouncing the Hamas terror group ruling over the coastal enclave, and demanding improvements to their quality of life. More on this explosion of popular fury – that had nothing to do with Israel, so has received little attention in the international media — can be found here: “Rare Outcry Against Hamas in Gaza,” i24 News, July 30, 2023:

The long-brewing discontent among Gazans living under the yoke of the Islamist terrorist group was magnified in recent weeks by power shortages that left residents with only a few hours of electricity a day.

“Where is the electricity and where is the gas?” the protesters chanted at a refugee camp, repeating the refrain of “for shame. For shame.”

Electricity in the Strip is intermittent, and recently has been limited to four hours a day. And the natural gas that could be coming from offshore fields has been held up for years by Hamas’ mismanagement. Instead of appointing technocrats to manage the economy, Hamas continues to appoint people on the basis of whom they know, and whom they are related to, in the upper echelon of the terror group’s leaders.

Footage showed protesters torching Hamas flags and denouncing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh.

The protest in Khan Yunis was apparently sparked by a deadly incident where a bulldozer belonging to the municipality caused the death of a local resident in the process of demolishing an allegedly illegal structure.

The accident in Khan Yunis was all that was needed to set off the welled-up fury of the people, who saw this bulldozer driver’s carelessness as just another manifestation of a general callousness exhibited by Hamas toward the population.

Subsequently, Khan Yunis mayor Alaa al-Batta stepped down, followed by the resignation of the entire municipal council.

The tensions in the Hamas-ruled territory came amid efforts to effect a reconciliation between the terrorist group and the Palestinian Authority, the body in control of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank. Abbas and Haniyeh met in Cairo earlier in the day as part of a summit brokered by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.

That attempt at a reconciliation between the PA and Hamas, brokered by Egyptian President El-Sisi, has come and gone. It was a total failure. El-Sisi had hoped to persuade Hamas to accept a unified government of all Palestinian factions, with the PA’s Mahmoud Abbas as its head, but Hamas, unsurprisingly, turned down flat that idea. After all, both Hamas and the PIJ have been successfully recruiting in the West Bank, at the expense of Fatah, the armed wing of the PA. Furthermore, 80% of Palestinians now say they want Mahmoud Abbas to resign. Why, with such favorable conditions, would Hamas want to accept being subservient to Abbas? As for the most violent and uncompromising Palestinian terror groups, the PIJ and PFLP, they refused even to take part in the Cairo reconciliation attempt.

Last week the two [the PA and Hamas] met in Ankara, in a summit arranged by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Both occasions were boycotted by the Islamic Jihad and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, two of the most extremist of all Palestinian terror factions..

While Hamas has been making inroads in the West Bank in its recruitment of would-be terrorists, it is a different story in Gaza, where Hamas has ruled with an iron fist since 2007, the year it expelled or killed hundreds of Fatah members. The corruption and mismanagement by Hamas has led to popular fury, just expressed with large protests all over the Strip, with the terror group. The mismanagement is a result of Hamas’ nepotism, appointing not technocrats to manage the economy, but Hamas leaders, their relatives, and friends.

The corruption, too, has been catastrophic. Just two Hamas leaders, Khaled Meshaal and Mousa abu Marzouk, managed to amass fortunes of $2.5 billion each. Prudently, neither has remained in Gaza; Meshaal lives in Doha, Qatar, and Marzouk lives in New Cairo, Egypt. While the people of Gaza are still unaware of the magnitude of the theft of aid money that was meant for them, they are nonetheless aware that a great deal has been siphoned off. And they can see for themselves the villas inhabited by the “600 Hamas millionaires” living in the Strip, with their swimming pools, gardens, and private generators. Meanwhile, more than half the population in Gaza lives below the poverty line.

These protests show that even Hamas cannot forever suppress through fear the people of Gaza, once they realize that they have nothing left to lose. And with many thousands now marching in protest through the streets of Gaza, at long last Hamas can feel its grip slipping in the Strip.