Palestinians took to the streets this week in various parts of the Gaza Strip calling for Hamas to step down from power and bring an end to the war. Some of the demonstrators in places like al-Shuja’iyya in Gaza City called on Hamas to step down and leave ceasefire negotiations to the Palestinian Authority and other Arab states.
The protests were called for by family and clan leaders in Gaza and a statement issued by family leaders in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood called on people to “take part in a popular march of anger to reject the ongoing war and demand that Hamas lifts its hands off Gaza so that life can return to its people and our ongoing suffering can end.”
A video circulating online of one of the marches in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahia shows a prominent figure and clan leader in the area, Hussein Hamouda, standing at the forefront of a crowd and speaking of his pride at being a large landowner and businessman in Beit Lahia.
“Hamas gave the Zionists a golden opportunity to kill us, and they left no tree, no stone, and no one alive,” Hamouda says in the video. “The Zionists destroyed the health and education sectors and displaced our families.”
As a crowd of people gathers around him, Hamouda points to a child standing to his side. “Look at this child. He hasn’t studied a letter in two years because of the war. Our children are in the streets as a result of this war. What do Hamas leaders think? Do they want to stay and rule from the rubble? Why are they so stubborn?”
During the war, Hamouda lost three homes in Beit Lahia, facilities belonging to his family members, and a large almond farm that was bulldozed by the Israeli army.
“I lost everything. I lost an almond farm like no other in the Middle East. We are proud of our land, and we own it. But I tell you, if Hamas remains in Gaza, I will leave it.”
Hamouda called on Hamas to hand the negotiations regarding Gaza’s fate over to Egypt, which “has extensive experience in international politics.”
“They know the Zionists well and are aware of their deceit,” he says.
Popular Frustration Amid “Unprecedented Pressure“
Anger and discontent have prevailed in Gaza over the harsh reality that people have been living through since the beginning of the genocide.
Many factors since the beginning of the war led parts of the public to blame Hamas for not providing adequate conditions to protect civilians during the war, as well as for bringing on the massive destruction inflicted on the Gaza Strip.
Ahmad al-Hajj, a participant in the Beit Lahia protest, told Mondoweiss that the time has come for the people to have their word and for the genocide to stop, “no matter the price Hamas must pay to accept a ceasefire.” He believes that the blood of children and women being shed by the Israeli army in Gaza every day is more precious than any bargaining or political price.
“When we reject Hamas, it doesn’t mean we reject resistance,” al-Hajj emphasizes. “The Palestinian people are born as resistors. But we are now in a dangerous phase of losing our homeland, and we see no concern from Hamas for the lives of the victims. Hamas leaders outside the Gaza Strip are declaring that they will fight until the last child in Gaza. We tell them that we want our children to grow up in peace before us, and we don’t want them to die.”
When asked about his factional affiliation, al-Hajj said he does not belong to any political faction. He says that the circumstances he lives in with his family pushed him to take to the streets to call for change.
Not everyone in Gaza supports the calls of the protesters. Hamas supporters have leveled harsh accusations against the clans calling for marches at a sensitive and dangerous time when people are desperate to cling to any glimmer of hope for ending the war at any cost.
“Is this the reward for a movement that sacrificed everything it had for the freedom of the people?” Abdullah Abu Salama, a 51-year-old Hamas supporter in Khan Younis, tells Mondoweiss. “When I saw and heard people telling Hamas to leave, I felt sadder than at anything else we have experienced since during the war.”
“This movement has given everything it has, starting with its leaders and sons,” Abu Salama says. “It has said it is not interested in ruling. But Israel wants a white flag from Hamas, and it has been unable to wrest it through war or negotiations. Now it is trying to turn the people against Hamas.”
Abu Salama believes that people should have taken to the streets to reject the continuation of the genocide and war, not to reject the existence of Hamas. “Our enemy is Israel, and whether Hamas remains or disappears, it will not stop the killing and annihilation of Palestinians.”
“These marches could be the beginning of a civil war overseen by Israel and some external parties that do not want a normal life for Gaza,” Abu Salama warns.
Some Hamas members have voiced a degree of support for the protests, believing that there is nothing wrong with withdrawing if a faction cannot continue on its path.
Adnan, 25, a member of Hamas’s security forces in the Gaza Strip, supports the voices calling for Hamas to step down, noting that Hamas appears to be at a dead end from which it cannot escape.
“If Hamas could achieve anything, it would have done so over the past year and a half. People are suffocating and almost eating each other,” Adnan says. “The conditions we’re living in are unimaginable. There’s daily death and killing, and there’s no deterrent to Israel. We can’t leave it like this forever.”
He points out that Hamas must take into account the public interest of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, who are being publicly exterminated without anyone taking action. It must announce to the people that it is stepping down from power and administration.
“It must take into account the blood of the people who are dying daily, and the movement is no longer capable of protecting them, responding to them, or even deterring Israel. The residents now know that the area from which a rocket is launched at Israel is being completely wiped out, so they want to stop this war,” Adnan says.
Desperation, Political Expediency, or Both?
The fact that the most recent demonstrations demanding that Hamas step down were called for by family and clan leaders has given rise to some accusations from Hamas supporters that the protests are the result of external agitation from Israel and Fatah, Hamas’s rival.
The demonstrations have coincided with the intensification of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza following Israel’s systematic violations of the terms of the ceasefire that had been in effect between mid-January and mid-March. The protests have also taken place as Israel has been carrying out a systematic targeting of members of Hamas’s civil leadership in Gaza, including members of the police force, the security services, and the Ministry of Interior. Israeli media outlets reported that this strategy was part of what they called a new “mode of fighting in Gaza” targeting the Strip’s civil leadership — with the objective of destroying Hamas’s ability to govern and leading to social breakdown and chaos in the hopes that gangs or local clans would emerge as potential alternative rulers.
This would not be the first time that Israel has attempted to impose clan or family rule in Gaza throughout the war. During March and April of 2024, the Israeli army assassinated several leaders of the Gaza civilian government, including the head of the police force Faiq Mabhouh, who had been in charge of delivering humanitarian aid to northern Gaza.
Hamas successfully opposed and prevented this Israeli plan, with some reports suggesting that Mabhouh may have been responsible for the killing of one of the leaders of the Doghmosh clan for allegedly stealing humanitarian aid and being suspected of collaborating with Israel.
In a statement to CNN, the Gaza Government Media Office said that the slogans in this week’s protest opposing Hamas at the demonstrations were “spontaneous,” asserting that such “positions issued by some demonstrators against the resistance’s approach do not express the general national position.”
The Hamas media office also told CNN that the Gazans had a “legitimate right” to engage in protest, which it said was “an essential part of the national values we believe in and defend.” The Media Office said the protests were the result of “the unprecedented pressure our people are experiencing and the occupation’s constant attempts to incite internal strife and divert attention from its ongoing crimes.”
According to Muhammad Shehada, a Gaza political analyst, the protests reflect genuine grievances on the part of the population. “People are tired, desperate for the genocide to end at any cost,” he wrote in a thread on X, adding that the protests quickly “drew the interest & influence of external actors, keen to exploit Gazans’ despair & pain, & this may end up undermining the movement instead of helping.”
“An apparent Fatah influence is detectable in some of today’s protests, with the chant ‘Ya Shia’ being added,” Shehada continued. “This chant, accusing Hamas of being Iranian stooges, was popular in 2007 amongst Fatah partisans during the Fatah-Hamas conflict that saw the latter take over Gaza.”
Shehada stated that Israeli media identified one of the protesters as affiliated with a Fatah faction headed by Muhammad Dahlan, a former leader of Fatah in Gaza who has since split with the mainstream Fatah movement of Mahmoud Abbas and is now based in the UAE.
“Some [protesters] sent reassuring messages like ‘We’re not against Hamas, but against its rule’,” Shehada added, pointing out that Hamas had already agreed to cede over power to a technocratic PA government or an administrative committee. “Israel says no to both,” he wrote.
Earlier during the ceasefire, Hamas had stated that it did not wish to continue ruling over the Gaza Strip. According to senior Hamas leader Ismail Radwan, who spoke to Mondoweiss in February, Hamas was willing to accept any “national consensus” on who gets to rule Gaza after the war.
However, this has not stopped protesters in Gaza from demanding that Hamas step down in order to end the war, believing that Hamas should agree to whatever conditions Israel stipulates in order to end the killing.
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