Hamas Versus Palestine, by Ihab Hassan – 30 June 2026

From Liberties Journal

For many of Palestine’s supporters in the world, Hamas is a “resistance movement.” It is the armed faction that fires rockets at Israel, that refuses to bow to a siege (the same siege to which it contributed) and bombardment, that speaks the loudest in the name of Palestinian liberation. For millions of people across the Arab world and beyond, this heroic conception of the organization carries genuine emotional weight. Palestine is occupied. Gaza has been blockaded and bombed. And Hamas, whatever its methods, has refused to surrender. In certain circles, Hamas’ stamina alone is enough to confer legitimacy, even glory.

Yet how a power acts towards its enemies does not necessarily reflect how it feels about its own people. And the portrait of Hamas as the protector of Palestinians, as the defiant shield of Palestinian resistance — however powerful it may be for the purposes of propaganda — collapses the moment you look closely at what Hamas has actually done to the Palestinians whom it governs.

Hamas is not a national liberation movement. It is an Islamist faction that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1980s, with a founding charter that called for the destruction of Israel on religious grounds and made no pretense of representing a pluralistic Palestinian nation. It won parliamentary elections in 2006 — a democratic mandate it then used not to govern, but to amass and consolidate absolute power. In 2007, it launched a bloody coup against the Palestinian Authority, throwing PA officers from rooftops, executing rivals in the streets, and killing more than 700 people in a matter of days. It has governed the people of Gaza ever since by means of fear, repression, religious enforcement, and political monopoly: suppressing and jailing critics and treating organized dissent as an act of treason, torturing Palestinians who dare to speak out.

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Ihab Hassan is a Palestinian writer, researcher and activist. His research focuses on human rights violations by Hamas.

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