Palestinian struggle for liberation starts with confronting Hamas

The haunting cries of “Hamas out!” echoing through Gaza’s rubble-strewn streets demands our moral attention, transcending geopolitical allegiances and piercing the heart of humanity’s collective conscience.

I find this moment of Palestinian defiance against Hamas both revolutionary and devastatingly familiar. The scenes of protesters dodging gunfire from their own purported protectors while Israeli drones hum overhead reveals a population trapped in a double bind – rejecting both the catastrophic repercussions of Hamas’s actions and the group’s stranglehold on their society.

This isn’t merely a conflict between occupier and occupied, but a struggle for the soul of Palestinian self-determination.

Hamas’s atrocities on 7 October 2023, meticulously documented by survivors and international investigators as including the burning of infants, systematic sexual violence, and the abduction of the elderly, represented a grotesque betrayal of the very people the group claims to represent.

These acts weren’t resistance but ritualised cruelty, deliberately designed to provoke overwhelming Israeli retaliation against Gaza’s civilian population. While tens of thousands of Gazans have perished under Israeli bombardment, Hamas commanders operate from a labyrinth of air-conditioned tunnels reportedly stocked with Iranian-supplied provisions, their fighters commandeering schools and hospitals as military bases.

The group’s leadership has turned Gaza into a dystopian theatre of suffering, where United Nations (UN) food aid disappears into underground armouries and children’s textbooks glorify martyrdom. For 17 years, Hamas has ruled through fear, disappearing critics into makeshift prisons, diverting international aid to rocket factories, and indoctrinating youth in summer camps. Although we cannot dictate how people should resist their oppression, these activities are a blueprint for perpetual states of war and death.

The current protests, larger than any since Hamas’s 2007 coup, expose a population recognising its leadership’s complicity in perpetuating misery. When nurses at Al-Shifa Hospital report Hamas fighters stealing anaesthesia supplies, or when fathers digging through rubble find rockets stored in elementary schools, it becomes impossible to ignore the dual nature of their oppression.

The response to internal dissent has revealed Hamas’s moral bankruptcy. Peaceful demonstrators in Jabalia refugee camp faced live fire last month, with 22-year-old engineering student Oday Nasser Al Rabay executed for holding a sign reading, “No to starvation policies.” His mutilated body, paraded through streets as a warning, symbolises the group’s descent into warlordism.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s military wing openly boasts about using civilian infrastructure for combat operations – a strategy that transforms apartment blocks into targets and turns hospitals into staging grounds. This macabre asymmetry of sacrifice – leaders dining on smuggled delicacies in subterranean redoubts while civilians subsist on animal feed – exposes the hollowness of their “resistance” narrative. Their propaganda machine reached its nadir when social media channels celebrated the destruction of a UN food warehouse, struck by Israeli shells after militants fired rockets from its roof, as a “symbol of steadfastness”. Such tactics sacrifice not just buildings, but the very idea of Gaza as a society worthy of protection.

To critique Hamas’s governance isn’t to absolve Israel of responsibility for military actions that have killed countless civilians. The bombing of designated safe zones and restrictions on aid convoys demand rigorous international scrutiny. However, conflating all Palestinian interests with Hamas’s agenda does profound disservice to Gaza’s doctors risking their lives to document war crimes, teachers shielding students from militant recruitment, and mothers organising underground schools in bomb shelters. True solidarity requires rejecting the fatalism that reduces Palestinians to perpetual victims. When protesters chant, “No to occupation, no to Hamas,” they articulate a vision of self-determination that transcends the narrow agendas imposed upon them. Their courage mirrors that of dissidents worldwide who resist external aggression and internal repression.

At its core, Gaza’s uprising represents a revolutionary claim to normalcy. The teenager scrawling, “We deserve parks, not tunnels” on a bullet-pocked wall channels a universal aspiration: to study, work, and raise families free from both the trauma of bombardment and the suffocation of authoritarian rule. This demand terrifies extremists on all sides for it undermines Hamas’s narrative of eternal war and challenges those who view Palestinians solely through the lens of victimhood. The international community’s failure to recognise this complexity has perpetuated the cycle of violence. Arab states’ silence on Hamas’s corruption, the West’s reflexive polarisation, and Iran’s arming of proxy forces all treat Gaza as a geopolitical chessboard rather than a living, breathing society.

Solutions must begin by amplifying Gaza’s grassroots voices. Neutral humanitarian corridors could empower civil society groups to document abuses by all factions without fear of reprisal. Conditional aid agreements might pressure Hamas to demilitarise schools and hospitals, while global scholarship programmes could help Gaza’s youth break the isolation that fuels radicalisation. These steps require confronting uncomfortable truths: that some self-proclaimed “resistance” movements exploit the very people they claim to liberate, and that liberation cannot be achieved through tactics guaranteeing generational trauma. The teachers converting bombed-out mosques into classrooms, the engineers jury-rigging solar panels amid ruins, and the mothers replanting olive trees in craters left by missiles embody a different kind of resistance, one rooted in the radical insistence on life’s sanctity.

When a father in Deir al-Balah whispers, “We aren’t cannon fodder,” his words carry the weight of generations. Palestinians’ right to self-defence cannot become a license for armed groups to invite collective punishment, just as their right to sovereignty cannot be held hostage by leaders who conflate governance with gangsterism. The path forward lies in trusting Gaza’s civilians to articulate their own needs, whether protesting Hamas’s rocket stockpiles or demanding an end to blockade policies. Their resilience deserves more than pity; it demands humility in recognising that dignity cannot be imposed through barrel bombs or suicide vests, but grows from the unyielding belief that every life carries equal worth.

As the world debates ceasefires and statehood, we must listen to the quiet defiance in Gaza’s tent cities. The mother stitching protest banners from torn aid sacks; the medic cataloguing casualties with a cellphone taped to an IV pole; the child asking why no-one hears their screams, these are the voices that chart a third way beyond the false choice between perpetual war and silent submission. Their struggle reminds us that true liberation begins not with the rhetoric of martyrs, but with the basic conviction that a people’s worth is measured not by their capacity to endure suffering, but by their right to imagine a future. In this, Gaza’s civilians offer a lesson to the world: the most profound act of resistance is to choose life when death surrounds you, to plant seeds in scorched earth, and to believe, against all evidence, in dawn.

• Nkateko Muloiwa is a political researcher with an interest in international and local affairs. He provides political commentary on issues ranging from the Middle East to rural South Africa. He recently completed his Masters in Political Studies and is pursuing an MSc in Science Communication at the University of the Witwatersrand. He also has interests in the geopolitical significance of Israel in the Middle East.