A year after Oct. 7, Hamas faces dissent in Gaza as war takes toll

Samira describes Israel as “our prime enemy…the source of all our ills” but she also blames Hamas' leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attacks, for what she sees as a huge miscalculation.

Cairo/Ramallah: Samira, a mother of two, yearns for her old life when she was an Arabic teacher and had a comfortable home - before the attack by Hamas on Israel a year ago plunged Gaza into suffering and chaos.

She has joined a growing number of Gazans asking whether they have paid too high a price for Hamas' assault on Oct. 7 last year. The Israeli offensive that followed has flattened Gaza, killed tens of thousands, and driven more than a million Palestinians from their homes.

“Despite all the hardships, our life was going well. We had jobs, houses and a city,” said Samira, 52, who declined to give her family name for fear of retaliation.

"What was he thinking? Didn't he expect that Israel would destroy Gaza?" she said.

Reuters spoke to dozens of residents of Gaza, all of whom asked not to be identified by their full name to avoid retribution. For some, Hamas are heroes for the Oct. 7 attack, when Palestinian militants mounted an unprecedented raid into Israel, something they'd never thought they'd see.

But several said that the Iranian-backed militant group – which has ruled Gaza since 2007 – had given little thought to their suffering, and some suggested the attack had been a terrible mistake.

Sinwar, 62, has not been seen publicly since the Oct. 7 raid, in which gunmen killed 1,200 people and abducted another 251, including women and children, according to Israeli tallies. He has run Hamas from the shadows of a network of labyrinthine tunnels under Gaza and, according to people in contact with him, remains convinced that armed struggle is the only way to force the creation of a Palestinian state.

Hamas says the Oct. 7 attack – the deadliest in Israel's 75-year history – marked a turning point in the decades-long struggle for Palestinian nationhood, which had drifted off the international agenda. Officials say the group is winning the battle against Israel, which has failed to achieve its war aims of destroying Hamas as a fighting force, eliminating its leaders or retrieving their hostages.

Yet about 42,000 Palestinians have died been killed in Israel’s offensive, according to tallies from Gazan health authorities, and hunger stalks displacement camps where more than a million people have sought shelter.

An opinion poll published in mid-September by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), a think tank based in Ramallah and funded by Western donors, showed for the first time the majority of Gazans opposed the decision to attack. The poll, conducted in early September, found that 57% of people surveyed in the Gaza Strip said the decision to launch the offensive was incorrect, while just 39% said it was correct – down sharply from the previous poll in June.

Hamas has long been accused of crushing dissent in Gaza with beatings or worse. But recent months have seen some rare public displays of dissent.

Former Hamas official Ahmed Youssef Saleh took to Facebook in July to ask whether anybody in Hamas “studied and thought of the consequences” before launching an attack that invited Israel’s uncompromising invasion.

Saleh’s post has since drawn hundreds of comments, many adding their own criticism of the Islamist group. Saleh, who continues to post regularly, did not respond to requests for comment.

In July, Palestinian activist Ameen Abed, who had criticized the Oct. 7 attack, was beaten by masked men and hospitalized. His father walked through the streets of Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp using a loudspeaker to accuse Hamas of the attack.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, dismissed such criticism of the group as "limited remarks". "Those remarks result from the pain and nothing more," he told Reuters, adding that the spirit of the Palestinian people was far from breaking.

“We had no choice but to launch this major battle, regardless of the cost, because the Palestinian cause was about to end amid the growing aggression and the Israeli crimes against our people and our sacred sites," he said.

Signs of dissent matter to Hamas, which aims to maintain its sway in Gaza once the war ends, despite the insistence of Israel and the United States that it can play no part in governing the enclave after the war.

Ashraf , managing editor of the Egyptian state-owned paper Al-Ahram and a specialist on Palestinian issues, said the nature of any role for Hamas in a post-war Gaza would depend on how the conflict ended.

"Inside Gaza, the situation will be different and when people realize that Gaza has become unliveable, the support for Hamas will become less," he said. However, he added that Iran could demand a future role for the militant group as part of a settlement of a broader regional conflict.

Act of Defiance

Palestinians blame Israel for their economic miseries, the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, and for blocking their political aspirations for a Palestinian state with the occupied East Jerusalem as its capital. Many see the Oct. 7 attack as a response to decades-long Israeli occupation and not a response to specific Israeli offensive or policies.

Mahmoud, 29, a resident of Gaza City now displaced in the Zawayda area in the centre of the Gaza Strip, criticized the United Nations and Western powers for allowing Israel to ignore repeated calls for the creation of a Palestinian state. He said the attack had put the neglected issue at the centre of the international agenda.

"The whole world was awakened by Oct. 7: they realized that there were people still under occupation; people who will not settle before the Israeli occupation is ended," said Mahmoud, who asked not to be identified by his full name.

Many advocates of a two-state solution, however, recognize that in the wake of Oct. 7, the possibility seems as remote as ever, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government staunchly rejecting the idea and escalating the tempo of settlement construction in the West Bank.

The PSR opinion poll, published on Sept. 17, showed that the proportion of Gazans who said they want Hamas to run a post-war Gaza had dropped to 36%, from 46% in its June poll.

"For the first time, we see more Gazans wanting the PA, not Hamas, to control Gaza after the war. This is probably the most decisive indicator," Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, told Reuters, referring to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas.

Even in the West Bank, where support for Hamas remained stronger, support for the attack has declined, the poll showed, though almost two-thirds of respondents there still thought it was the correct decision. PSR said it surveyed 1,200 people face-to-face, 790 of them in the West Bank and 410 in Gaza, with a 3.5% margin of error.

In August, the Israeli military accused Hamas of mounting an effort to falsify the results of PSR polls to show false support for Hamas and Oct. 7, though the military said there was no evidence of PSR cooperating with Hamas. PSR said it had investigated the allegation but found no proof of data being manipulated.

The Egyptian newspaper editor said it would be very hard to measure the popularity of Hamas in Gaza comprehensively until the war was over. He said the Palestinian Authority, controlled by Hamas’ rival party Fatah, needed to reform itself if it were to play a role in post-war Gaza.

"What is important is that Palestinians must agree on a new government, with new faces, that will be tasked with administering people's affairs and reconstructing Gaza," he said.