In April 2025, at Yale University, I met separately with two mediators involved in negotiations between Hamas and Israel in Doha. I asked each of them the same question: How does Hamas view the people of Gaza? Their answers were identical: “As martyrs for the cause”. One added a comparison: “much as Netanyahu views the Israeli hostages in Gaza”.
The exchange crystallized something I had understood for years but never heard so plainly from people at the negotiating table. For both Hamas and the Israeli government, Gaza’s civilians had been converted from human beings into instruments of a larger political and military calculations. Martyrs for one side’s cause, leverage for another’s. In neither framework did the people themselves possess a future that mattered.
This is the context consistently missing when outsiders pose what has become the defining question about Gaza since October 7, 2023: If Hamas has brought such destruction upon Gaza, why have the people not risen against it?
Before attempting an answer, it is worth asking a prior question: How do those asking this question imagine a rebellion in Gaza would look and who would protect the rebels?
Sustained collective action requires time, communication, mobility, social networks and leadership structures, organizational resources, a degree of personal security, and some expectation for success
Rebellion and the Legacy of Survival
In modern history, Gaza has been governed by the Turks (1517-1917), the British (1917-1948), the Egyptians (1948–1967), the Israelis (1967–1994), the Palestinian Authority (1994-2007), and Hamas ever since. These periods shared one thing in common: Gaza’s people repeatedly had to organize ordinary life under authorities they did not choose and could not remove.
This must not be taken to mean that Gazans are habituated to oppression, but rather that Gaza’s society has developed survival strategies across generations. What outsiders sometimes mistake for political passivity is more accurately understood as the accumulated knowledge of a population that has learned the difference between what it can change and what it must endure.
Consider what daily life demands in Gaza today. Nine months after a ceasefire was announced in October 2025, over one thousand Palestinians have been killed. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has described Palestinians across Gaza as unsafe.
The economy has contracted by approximately 84% since the outbreak of the war. Recovery and reconstruction needs are estimated at $71.4 billion over the next decade. Every university has been destroyed. More than 90 percent of school buildings lie in ruins. Over 371,000 housing units have been damaged or destroyed. An estimated 1.9 million people have been displaced.
Sustained collective action requires time, communication, mobility, social networks and leadership structures, organizational resources, a degree of personal security, and some expectation for success. Nearly all of those preconditions are simply not there. Today, Gazans spend most of their waking hours surviving. As political scientists have long observed, extreme deprivation more often fragments social bonds into isolated acts of individual survival than it produces coordinated political mobilization.
A UN report found that Hamas internal security bodies killed at least sixty civilians in 2024 and 2025, suspected of collaboration or dissent
Previous Protests: Crushed by Hamas, Exploited by Israel
Still, the premise that Gazans have never stood up for their rights is wrong. In March 2019, the “We Want to Live” movement brought thousands of people into Gaza’s streets to protest economic conditions and Hamas’s governance. Hamas responded by beating, arresting, and torturing hundreds of demonstrators and dozens of journalists. Amnesty International documented the crackdown. These were the most significant anti-regime demonstrations in Gaza since Hamas’s 2007 takeover—and it crushed them.
Anti-Hamas protests erupted again during the war. Beginning in March 2025, demonstrations spread across the strip. Demonstrators called for Hamas to step down, for an end to the war, and for access to food. Again, Hamas responded with force, executing six Gazans and publicly flogging or kidnapped others. A UN report found that Hamas internal security bodies killed at least sixty civilians in 2024 and 2025, suspected of collaboration or dissent. The Committee to Protect Journalists documented systematic intimidation of reporters covering the protests.
Perhaps most revealingly, when Gazans did take to the streets, Israel’s leaders did not treat the protests as evidence of a civilian population deserving of protection. Netanyahu praised the demonstrations, declaring that “this shows our policy is working”. Pro-Israel advocacy organizations quickly co-opted the protests for PR purposes, amplifying footage of anti-Hamas chants while continuing to support the military campaign that had created the conditions for the protests in the first place.
The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) documented a sustained drop in popular support for Hamas and the October 7 attack since early 2024
This instrumentalization unfolded against the backdrop of a broader rhetorical pattern in which senior Israeli officials denied the very existence of innocent civilians in Gaza. President Isaac Herzog declared days after October 7 that Gazans are “an entire nation out there that is responsible”, and that the claim that there are uninvolved civilians is “absolutely untrue”. Other Israeli leaders carried this message throughout the war: even when you revolt against Hamas, you remain collectively guilty and unworthy of protection.
Hamas – More Than a Political Party
The premise that Gazans should have revolted reduces two million people to a single actor with a unified political will. They are not. Gaza’s inhabitants hold divergent political views, argue about their leadership, criticize Hamas and the Palestinian Authority alike, and disagree about the future. Some have supported Hamas at various points; many have not. Some have endorsed armed resistance while opposing Hamas’s governance; others have rejected both.
Hamas’s power does not rest on popularity alone. After its 2007 takeover, Hamas built an authoritarian apparatus. It maintained armed forces and internal security agencies, managed ministries and municipal functions, distributed patronage and employment, collected taxes, and regulated religious and social institutions. It pressured journalists, activists, and civil society actors. And it weaponized accusations of collaboration with Israel to silence critics.
The war degraded significant parts of this apparatus. Command networks were disrupted, territorial control contracted, and public legitimacy declined. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) documented a sustained drop in popular support for Hamas and the October 7 attack since early 2024.
But even weakened, Hamas retains institutional memory, coercive capacity, and something no political adversary currently possesses organizational presence on the ground. PCPSR Director Khalil Shikaki noted that Gazans are aware that even if Hamas were to leave governance immediately, nobody would be able to prevent total anarchy.
War Can Preserve What It Intends to Destroy
There is a paradox at the heart of the strategy that seeks to eliminate Hamas militarily: these efforts may weaken it materially while strengthening the political mechanisms on which it depends.
When universities, professional associations, media organizations, municipal authorities, and civil society groups disappear, so does the possibility of any alternative political order. More than 260 media workers have been killed since October 7. When access to food, shelter, and security depends on armed or informal networks, civilian dependence on those networks increases. When the distinction between civilian survival and factional control becomes blurred, criticism of the controlling faction becomes harder to express.
Hamas has also proven adept at exploiting the perception that Gaza had been abandoned. When Arab governments, the international community, and the Palestinian Authority itself appear unable or unwilling to offer protection, Hamas can present itself as the last organized Palestinian force standing. In this distorted environment, criticism of Hamas has become a concession to the same powers seen as aiding and abetting Gaza’s destruction.
Military force can kill commanders and destroy tunnels. It cannot create the legitimate institutions, physical security, social trust, and political horizon that allow civilians to challenge an armed movement. The scale of destruction has not eliminated Hamas’s political model. In important respects, it is reproducing the conditions for its survival.
Gaza’s political landscape includes Hamas members and fighters, but also civil servants employed by Hamas, people economically dependent on it regardless of ideology, apolitical survivors, and active opponents
The Moral Failure of Collective Blaming
The widespread assertion that Gaza’s population is collectively responsible for Hamas, that every Gazan is a supporter if not a potential militant, is both morally wrong and strategically self-defeating.
Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative election with 44.45 percent of the popular vote. It ultimately gained 74 of 132 seats largely because of a mixed electoral system that amplified its vote in winner-take-all district races. No national election has been held since. Hamas then seized Gaza by force in 2007. Most of Gaza’s inhabitants today were either too young to vote in 2006 or had not yet been born. No child is born Hamas. Treating that child as an future enemy by definition helps create the very political future such thinking claims merely to predict.
This does not mean that evidence of public support for Hamas or for the October 7 attack should be dismissed. PCPSR polling showed significant, though declining, support. But wartime polling faces severe methodological constraints. Moreover, the crucial difference between supporting Hamas as a political party, supporting armed resistance as a concept, opposing Israel, and retrospectively endorsing October 7 are often reduced to a single number.
Gaza’s political landscape is genuinely diverse. It includes Hamas members and fighters, but also civil servants employed by Hamas, people economically dependent on it regardless of ideology, apolitical survivors, and active opponents. Replacing the myth of unanimous support with a serious engagement with this complexity is essential to any policy that genuinely aims to weaken Hamas.
Civilians should not have to overthrow tyranny while under bombardment, displacement, hunger, and territorial confinement in order to prove that they deserve protection. No civilian population anywhere has ever been told that its safety depends on first accomplishing what regional armies, intelligence services, diplomats, and international institutions have collectively failed to accomplish.
The question is what conditions would enable them to challenge armed authoritarian rule with some hope of success… They include a credible Palestinian governing framework not simply installed by Israel
Other populations have revolted under dangerous conditions, and the question why Gazans have not done so more successfully deserves a serious answer. But the political science of revolution is clear: uprisings succeed thanks to specific combinations of elite fragmentation, organizational infrastructure, security-force defections, and external support. Extreme suffering does not automatically produce rebellion. More often, it produces the contraction of political life into private coping.
A Recipe for Political Change
If the goal is to weaken Hamas politically rather than to punish Gaza’s population, the question is not why Gazans have failed to revolt. The question is what conditions would enable them to challenge armed authoritarian rule with some hope of success.
These conditions include a genuine end to hostilities, protection of civilians and political organizers by credible international or regional mechanisms, restoration of freedom of movement and communication, reconstruction tied to legitimate Palestinian institutions rather than permanent external administration, and support for independent civil society as the infrastructure of political alternatives.
They include a credible Palestinian governing framework not simply installed by Israel. They include also a legitimate security arrangement that protects civilians from Hamas coercion, criminal violence, factional revenge, and Israeli military action.
Finally, Gaza needs a political horizon that connects it to the West Bank and to Palestinian self-determination. An alternative political order can emerge only when civilians have reason to believe that challenging armed rule will lead to life rather than another form of abandonment.
