While a group of Columbia alumni were busy creating a media show by ripping up their diplomas to protest the detention of an anti-Israel protest leader, over in Gaza, demonstrators who had called for the end to the Hamas regime were fleeing into hiding.
And for good reason. The regime had just summarily executed at least six anti-Hamas protesters and publicly beaten others.
According to eyewitnesses, one resident, Hussam al-Majdalawi, was kidnapped, shot in the legs and left wounded in a public square.
Another casualty of the Hamas crackdown was 22-year-old Uday Nasser Saadi al-Rabbay, a resident of Gaza City who had criticized Hamas on social media. The young man was abducted by Hamas operatives, witnesses reported, and then, one bystander reported, “dragged by a rope around his neck, beaten with clubs and metal rods in front of passersby.” The bystander, understandably, asked not to be identified.
After being tortured for several hours, Mr. Rabbay was reportedly thrown off a building and returned, dying, to his family with a note pinned to his clothes reading, “This is the price for all who criticize Hamas.”
The violent retaliations came in the wake of last month’s anti-Hamas demonstrations, in which thousands of Palestinians demanded an end to the ongoing war and the removal of Hamas from power. Social media showed hundreds of defiant Gazans chanting “Hamas are terrorists,” in what seemed to be an organized demonstration. After Hamas’ tour of revenge—Messrs. Majdalawi and Rabbay, along with the others who were reportedly beaten or killed, likely constituted only the tip of a bloody iceberg—the demonstrations subsided.
Reports of the protests and Hamas’ violent reaction have appeared here and there in the media, but they have not been treated with the same large-pt. headlines and bandwidth as the toll that has been taken on Gazans by the now-intensified Israeli push against Hamas.
Part of that media brownout is due to the fact that journalists in the region fear, and reasonably so, that Hamas’ viciousness might be turned against them, too, were they to report accurately, or at all, about the protests.
“There isn’t a single journalist in Gaza who can speak about the crimes being committed [in Gaza],” said Hamza al-Masri, a Gazan social activist now living in Turkey, who lost an eye after being tortured by Hamas. Reports of the protests and resultant attacks emerged largely on social media, posted by intrepid witnesses.
One Gazan who filmed a protest posted on X said that BBC and Al Jazeera refused to air his video because it showed Gazans “furious at Hamas terrorists using their hospitals as shields.”
Hamas risibly characterized the demonstrations as protests against “Israeli aggression,” acknowledging only that there were also “parties with suspicious agendas” involved. That is to say, civilians wishing to throw off the yoke of Hamas, which they know is ultimately responsible for the obliteration of much of Gaza, not to mention the interception of foreign aid intended for residents. For months, Hamas has commandeered trucks filled with humanitarian supplies and positioned themselves atop them with machine guns.
One protest leader, Moumen Al-Natour, who was arrested repeatedly and tortured by Hamas, recently penned an op-ed in The Washington Post in which he wrote: “We are protesting against the group that has dictated every aspect of our lives for 18 years. Our message is clear: The people of Gaza want to live—so Hamas must go, the hostages released, and this war must finally end.”
“Some in the West,” he continued, “will be confused to see Palestinians openly calling Hamas terrorists—after 18 months of many protesters in Western cities openly supporting Hamas. To support Hamas is to be for Palestinian death, not Palestinian freedom. Hamas is killing us—through war, poverty and extortion—not liberating us.”
One hopes that the grassroots protests against Hamas in Gaza will reassert themselves, even more intensely, in the future. For now, though, let’s at least hope that Hamas supporters in our own country, and people like Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib—who posts regularly about happenings in Gaza but somehow seems to have overlooked the recent protests, beatings and murders—will take Mr. Natour’s words to heart.
If hearts they have.
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