Israel’s war on Gaza was never about Hamas

After more than 500 days of Israeli mass bombardment, starvation, destruction of civilian infrastructure and thousands of housing units, and after two weeks of its most recent renewed assault following the breakdown of the ceasefire, Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip witnessed the first protest by Palestinians demanding Hamas to unconditionally release the remaining Israeli captives and give up control of Gaza.

The Palestinian protesters’ cries that they “want to live” has become the center of attention of Israeli and U.S. media. The New York Times titled its report as Palestinians being “frustrated with Hamas,” while the BBC chose to place the protest’s timing as “a day after Islamic Jihad militants launched rockets from the area.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. envoy to the Middle East repeated once more last week that Hamas must play no role in the future of Gaza for the war to end, in line with Israel’s official position of wanting to dismantle Hamas’s civil and political control of the Strip. On Wednesday, the U.S. State Department’s spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, repeatedly replied to journalists’ questions about the killing of Palestinian journalists that the fault for all the suffering of Gaza’s people lies solely with Hamas, and that Hamas should accept to disarm, give up control of Gaza, and release the remaining Israeli captives before there is an end of the war.

But behind the protest and its motives is a reality that most of the U.S. and western media either underreported, misreported, or failed to report completely during the months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Beit Lahia is located in the north Gaza governorate, which suffered the bulk of the cruelest assault of the war, aiming to completely depopulate it in the last two months before the ceasefire deal was reached as part of what became known as the “Generals’ Plan.”

For weeks, Palestinians in Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia, were subjected to artillery shelling, airstrikes, a complete siege that dried out food, medicine, and water, and were chased in the streets by armed Israeli quadcopter drones. The last remaining functional hospital in the besieged region, the Kamal Adwan Hospital, was attacked by drones that dropped bombs on its premises multiple times, cut off its electricity, and made it inaccessible for wounded Palestinians after Israeli forces destroyed or blocked the roads leading to it. It was forcibly evacuated twice, with Israeli forces abducting dozens of its medical staff, including its director, Dr. Husam Abu Safiyeh, who continues to be detained by Israeli forces in “inhumane conditions” according to his lawyer’s statements to Al Jazeera last week. Beit Lahia is where the Kamal Adwan hospital is located, and along with Jabalia and Beit Hanoun, it was made, by Israel, to be as uninhabitable as the surface of Mars, with the exception of having oxygen.

It is strange that the protests demanding Hamas to give up control of the strip came only at this moment. For Israel’s supporters, it is an indication that Palestinians finally dared to speak out against Hamas. For Hamas supporters, it is an indication that Hamas enjoys the support of Palestinians in the strip for most of the time, and in most of Gaza’s geography. But both sides of the argument fall in line with the Israeli narrative about the entire question of Gaza, namely by placing Hamas at the center of analysis.

If Gazans haven’t protested against Hamas earlier, and if these protests aren’t larger or more widespread, it is because Gazans understand that the goal of Israel’s campaign to destroy their lives, kill them in large numbers, and displace them is not to topple Hamas. Although it is one of the goals, it is not the primary motive.

On Tuesday, following the Israeli Knesset’s approval of the largest state budget in Israel’s history, which came two days after the Israeli cabinet approved a plan to establish a special bureau to drive Palestinians out of the strip, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that every shekel spent in encouraging “voluntary migration” from Gaza saves Israel from continuing the war. This logic is a new attempt by Israel to implement the same model of mass displacing Palestinians from Gaza. In 1971, a full 16 years before Hamas was created, Israel laid down plans to drive Palestinians out of Gaza. That included home demolitions, secret transfer locations in the Egyptian Sinai desert, then occupied by Israel, and threatening Palestinians with 48-hour ultimatums before their homes were demolished.

Israel’s conflict with Gaza isn’t with a group or an organization, but with its population. The reason is that Gaza is a mass concentration of 1948 refugees and their descendants, who never forgot who they are, where they come from, and why. The tiny strip has always been a reminder of the unsolved complex of Israel as a colonial project, and of the fact that the Palestinian cause has never been solved. Israel’s goal regarding Gaza has always been to submit its population into passivity, or to ensure their removal altogether. Its strategy has always been Israel’s only strategy towards Palestinians since Israel’s creation: force. Disproportionately painful, brutal force.

While Israel was destroying Beit Lahia, last December, Israeli settler groups were rallying at Gaza’s fence, joined by Israeli ministers and lawmakers, demanding to be allowed to go into Gaza and begin to build settlements, on the rubble of Palestinian homes, worship places, and kindergartens. One of the ministers present at these rallies was Smotrich, the loudest voice calling for displacing Palestinians from the strip. 

These Israeli settlement fanatics aren’t willing to give up their plans for Gaza if Hamas gave up its control, just as they aren’t willing to stop the same plans in the West Bank, where Hamas is not in control.

In the West Bank, Israel has been doing to the refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarem, Nur Shams, and Al-Faraa the same thing it has been doing to Gaza since October 2023, displacing at least 40,000 Palestinians and making them homeless. In the absence of international outrage, Israel hasn’t needed to blame its assault on the West Bank camps on any Palestinian organization.

In Gaza, on the contrary, the October 7 attacks provided the opportunity for Israel to give a political justification to its plans. The ceasefire period succeeded in releasing more than 30 Israeli captives, while Egypt and the Arab league provided a plan to rebuild Gaza without displacing Palestinians, and run the strip by a technocratic body not controlled by Hamas. But for Israel’s far right leaders, this was a painful concession, because it was and still is an alternative to their vision of Gaza. An alternative where Palestinians don’t necessarily get an independent state or any political gain that they can call a victory, but at least gives them the chance of continuing to exist as a society in their own land. Something that shouldn’t be a political issue in the first place.

When displaced Palestinians returned by the hundreds of thousands to the north of Gaza, including Beit Lahia, last February, they were spontaneously, but consciously producing the largest demonstration in the history of Gaza, voicing the most powerful and clearest political message in the history of Palestine. It was an affirmation of their refusal to be removed, destroyed, ethnically cleansed, and dehumanized. It was an exposure of the real issue at the heart of Gaza’s question, and of the Palestinian cause as a whole.

The voices of Palestinians who protested on Tuesday against Hamas in Beit Lahia, who were probably among those who marched back to the north last February, are an important reminder of the unbearable suffering that has been inflicted upon them with the approval and support of western countries. It is also a reminder of the fact that those subjected to that suffering are an entire people, and not Hamas. But the fact that their suffering began before October 2023, and before Hamas was even founded, and the explicit rhetoric, decisions, and actions of Israeli leaders regarding their plans for Gaza all indicate that the tragedy of Gaza’s people won’t end if Hamas gave up its control of Gaza, and that this man-made tragedy is not, and was never about Hamas.