The attack on October 7, 2023, by Hamas on Israeli communities in the areas known as the Gaza envelope turned my life upside down and changed it forever, not to mention the lives of 2.3 million Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip.
The homes in which I grew up, surrounded by citrus, fig, guava and olive trees, where I fed my grandmother’s chickens and ducks, where I flew homemade bamboo and paper kites, and where my cousins and I played PC video games that improved our English, were destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. The Gaza that I knew as a child was gone; yet it was already gone long before October 7.
Hamas has been in control of the coastal enclave for almost two decades. Roughly two-thirds of Gaza’s residents are under the age of 30 and few would have any real memory of life before Hamas.
I remember. I was born in 1990 and am old enough to have experienced a glimpse of hope for my people. Hamas squandered that hope. During its reign, which continues, it destroyed the potential for the Palestinian people to pursue self-determination and self-fulfilment, to develop and to turn Gaza into a compelling case for Palestinian statehood.
I left the Gaza Strip in 2005 as a 15-year-old high school student on a US cultural exchange program designed to build bridges between the Arab and Muslim worlds and the American public after the 9/11 attacks. I was supposed to return a year later after finishing 11th grade while living with an American host family. However, six months after I arrived, Hamas won the Palestinian elections.
Soon afterwards, while I was in Egypt preparing to cross back in, the group abducted Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza, triggering a mini war and intensifying a blockade against the Strip that prevented me from returning home. A year later, a nervous 17-year-old, I interviewed for political asylum in the US. It was June 14, 2007, the day that Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip and violently ejected the Palestinian Authority. The Hamas takeover launched numerous cycles of violence that ultimately led to the horrendous massacre on October 7 and the ensuing war that annihilated Gaza.
I became the first Palestinian from Gaza to receive US asylum as a consequence of Hamas’s control of the Strip. This represented a tragic milestone, but seeking asylum regularly became the recourse of Palestinians forced to flee their homeland in Gaza and the Islamist menace that has championed violence and terror under the guise of resistance and fighting Israel and Zionism.
Sadly, my entire immediate family remained behind in Gaza. I have not been able to visit the Strip since Hamas took over and I received asylum, though I stood at its border on the Egyptian side in 2012 and flew over it in 2025, when I joined an airdrop of food led by Jordan and the United Arab Emirates and saw my home for the first time in 20 years.
Throughout my time in the US I have been active in the cause of Palestine. I have engaged in Jewish/Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and in “pro-Palestine” activist groups and in humanitarian projects. After October 7, I became known for two reasons.
First, I lost dozens of family members during the destruction of my two childhood homes: the house I grew up in with my family on one floor plus my father’s on the four floors above ours in the family building, and my mother’s family home, which was like a second home; both of these were central to my upbringing in Gaza.
To this day, the Israeli military has not explained why the airstrikes occurred.
Second, I have been ferociously anti-Hamas, and so I have firmly opposed vocal elements of the Western-based pro-Palestine camp that often justifies violence, promotes hate and refuses to endorse any rational discourse or pragmatic solution that could actually help the people of Gaza.
These advocates claim to speak for me, my family and my people, but they know nothing about us, our history, our differences, our interests and our hopes.
I have chosen to engage in work that advocates for reconciliation, tolerance and common ground as the only way forward for Palestinians and Israelis. My approach has drawn support but also suspicion, hate and threats of violence. A Palestinian who challenges the “conventional wisdom” and speaks out against Hamas, who renounces its narrative of armed resistance and promotes views that other Palestinians hold but are afraid to voice, is perceived as a heretic.
But the truth is that my experience, and that of most Palestinians, does not fit the simplistic, black-and-white understanding of the Israel and Palestine conflict held by many of those who speak on our behalf. Since October 7 it has been horrifying to see Hamas apologists, presenting themselves as pro-Palestine, celebrate the group as a legitimate entity that supposedly represents the Palestinian people’s best interests and is somehow an organic expression of resistance on behalf of Palestinian grievances. Since its inception, Hamas has been deeply detrimental to Palestinian interests.
Indeed, the group carefully timed the attacks of October 7 against the backdrop of its unpopularity in the Gaza Strip – mere months after yet another round of protests opposed to its rule. The attack was also part of a geopolitical chess game in which Hamas’s chief backer, supplier and instigator – the Islamic Republic of Iran – was seeking to block the normalisation of Israel’s relations with Arab and Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia.
Hamas’s 18 years of repressive governance in Gaza had hit a dead end. The terror group was able to be neither a successful government nor an effective force of armed resistance; the October 7 attack was a form of suicidal nihilism that the group hoped to use to shake up the status quo, ultimately choosing to sacrifice Gaza and its people in the process.
It was not because the Palestinian people were out of options that Hamas carried out the attack. It was in its own interests, and in those of its master in the Middle East, to stage a dramatic and bloody act to inflame the region.
The so-called pro-Palestine movement did not recognise this, which is disturbing and demonstrative of the hopeless ignorance of many of the Palestinian people’s supposed allies. Hamas is a moral stain on the Palestinian cause; those who genuinely support our national aspirations should have found it entirely unproblematic to condemn the group’s murders and rapes, its firing of rockets at civilians, and its Islamist ideology.
I was furious that a once-in-a-generation opportunity to drum up support for the Palestinian people was squandered on sloganeering and hollow activism. I heard nothing constructive, no desire or attempt to produce pragmatic policies and results for the Palestinian people.
Instead of doubling down on the two-state solution and acknowledging that the Palestinian people do not want the annihilation of Israel but, rather, seek dignity, freedom and independence, activists in the Western world became drunk on the worst possible combination of extremism, oversimplification and maximalism.
This toxic mix has been harmful to the lives and liberty of Palestinians and to the cause of the Palestinian people.
When I spoke out against these trends, I was attacked viciously. I realised many in the so-called pro-Palestine movement are deeply anti-Palestinian, for they are interested only in platforming and embracing views and experiences that conform to their beliefs.
That a Gazan like me – who lost family members in the war, who is largely deaf in his left ear following an Israeli bombing in 2001 and who has been on the front lines of providing humanitarian support for Palestinians in Gaza – could be dismissed for sharing the “wrong views” was an alarming sign of the degradation of this Western-based activism. Furthermore, large segments of the Arab and Palestinian communities in the diaspora became their own worst enemies, enforcing conformity and promulgating extreme positions.
They remained silent lest they be called traitors, sellouts or Zionists. Speaking out against Hamas was somehow viewed as supporting Israel’s war on Gaza, endorsing the horrors experienced by Palestinian civilians or adopting Benjamin Netanyahu’s and Israeli talking points, or as a betrayal of the Palestinian right to resist Israeli injustices.
This simplistic reductionism was picked up by Hamas, which immediately registered the support for its actions in diaspora communities, particularly in the West and in the US, where political leverage matters most.
The failure to call out Hamas weakened genuine pro-Palestine advocacy, which by default became associated with celebrations of October 7, finding excuses for Hamas’s heinous acts of terror, refusal to humanise Israeli victims of the attack (including hostages) and the abandonment of political aims that are actually achievable.
Instead, a form of mass psychosis took hold of activists, academics, journalists, advocates, politicians and average individuals, all blinded to Hamas’s criminality against Gazans and Israelis.
Undeterred, I have decided to proceed with sharing my truth. I saw and experienced Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza and witnessed its tactics, strategies and manipulation of an entire people. For nearly two decades, a fascist Islamist terror organisation has been holding more than two million Palestinians as hostages to its suicidal, nihilistic project.
I do not speak and have never claimed to speak on behalf of Palestinians or Gazans. No one can make this claim, for there is no single voice or entity that can capture or represent the diversity of Palestinian communities across the Middle East and the world. My account and my analysis are steeped in experience, connection to the land and extensive relationships with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Still, the cautionary lessons and observations that I discuss will be acknowledged by many in the Gaza Strip, and by Palestinians elsewhere, who often keep quiet.
I share my story in the spirit of seeking justice for my people. This story details Hamas’s horrendous impact on the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to freedom and independence. I experienced the tragedy of seeing my native homeland descend into chaos and disarray, a collapse that occurred in large part because of a group of Jihadi fascists who destroyed the Palestinian national project. This is why I focus on speaking out against Hamas.
In 1999, I was at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where my father had been working as a doctor for the Ministry of Education, when a voice came over the terminal’s loudspeakers.
It was a routine announcement about boarding a flight, but I remember it now with unimaginable emotion and vividness: “Passengers headed to Gaza International Airport aboard Palestinian Airlines, please proceed to the assigned gate to begin boarding the aircraft.”
My father, Fouad Mohammed Alkhatib, held in his hands seven green passports belonging to him, my mother, my siblings and me. These were brand-new Palestinian Authority passports, replacing the Egyptian travel documents that Palestinians from Gaza had used for decades.
The opportunity to use the international airport in Gaza did not merely mark the end of an era of difficult, roundabout travel; it was a symbol of Palestinian autonomy, self-rule and fledgling sovereignty.
This was not just my reaction or my family’s – it reflected the feelings of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the coastal enclave who had never been outside the Strip, let alone on an aeroplane. The late 1990s were one of the most promising periods in modern Palestinian history. In addition to passports, an airline and an international airport, Palestinians had landlines and mobile phone services supplied by new Palestinian telecommunications companies, Paltel and Jawwal, and an industrial zone in the northern part of the Strip, near the Erez crossing with Israel.
My family purchased our first mobile phone, a device I remember as particularly big and bulky, and obtained a landline whose number I still remember.
There were ministries and new civil society organisations; there was health infrastructure; negotiations were under way for a new seaport on the southern shore of Gaza City; hydrocarbon explorations had revealed a gas field off the coast; opportunities were arising to build the pillars of something new.
During the 90s, our family moved back and forth between the Gaza Strip and western Saudi Arabia, where my father worked. In the late 90s, we moved back to Gaza to capitalise on the opportunities that had emerged after the Oslo Accords, the agreements signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993. The accords ushered in a new chapter of the Israel and Palestine conflict, promising to end decades of violence and present the Palestinian people with hope and opportunities for self-determination, statehood and freedom from Israeli military occupation and control. The Palestinians would embrace the inevitable existence of Israel and cease their decades-long acts of war and terrorism against the Jewish state.
But Hamas wanted to present an Islamist alternative to the secular nationalism of the PLO. Following the Oslo Accords, Hamas attempted to sabotage the process that established a pathway towards Palestinian statehood.
In the 90s, the Gaza Strip became the launching pad for many of the suicide bombings and armed attacks against Israeli civilian and military targets that became synonymous with Hamas.
This, perhaps even more than Hamas’s actual attacks, may have been the group’s most damaging achievement of the 90s: normalising behaviour that was inhumane, sick and un-Islamic, and undermining the Oslo peace process – which, however imperfect and fragile, was the closest the Palestinians and Israelis have ever come to a resolution of the conflict.
After Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007 it began viewing the entire territory as a playground for its jihadi activities and used any area, space, structure or community to engage in resistance against Israel, even if such operations posed a grave risk to Gazans’ safety and wellbeing. Hamas began to exploit Gaza’s extreme population density in its efforts to provoke international outrage towards Israel.
As early as 2008, Hamas leader Fathi Hamad said the group would encourage Israeli strikes on civilian areas to promote “empathy towards us”.
Residents would complain that Hamas was firing rockets near their homes, digging tunnels under their homes and mosques or hiding weapons near their houses and businesses, but there was little they could do. The streets of Gaza, and the increasingly elaborate network of tunnels beneath, became launching pads and hiding places, whether the people of Gaza wanted it or not.
In the days following the October 7 attack, I was truly horrified by the widespread reaction among the supposed pro-Palestine movement throughout the world, particularly when the attacks received direct or indirect praise and support in Western countries.
I was puzzled by the way people could support the killing of defenceless civilians in their homes and the abduction of hostages – including children and the elderly – just because the victims were Israelis. I figured that, once the initial clamour over the attack wore off, basic morality, Muslim values, faith-based principles and cultural norms would cause people – including Arab, Muslim and Palestinian elements of the “pro-Palestine” movement – to denounce what Hamas had done as immoral and harmful to the Palestinian cause.
At a minimum, I thought living hostages such as the Bibas family would be afforded the most basic empathy and humanity. Horrifically, it turned out that I was sorely mistaken. Israeli hostages were immediately labelled as prisoners and compared to Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. No interest was shown in acknowledging that what had happened to them was wrong.
Later, it was hard even to get people to support a ceasefire that included the release of hostages. Some “pro-Palestine” university protesters at encampments told me that a call for the release of hostages amounted to “centring Zionist narratives when the focus should be on the Palestinian people”.
Within days of the attack, massive demonstrations worldwide declared support for the “resistance” and praised the ingenuity and capability of Hamas. There was a strange sanitising of the terror group, which was referred to as the “resistance in Gaza” or simply “the resistance”.
Hamas succeeded in turning its fortunes around: instead of dealing with the issues of governance, unemployment, its low popularity in Gaza and its grim political prospects, it carried out a stunningly effective attack that achieved the goals of its masters in Tehran while goading Israel into an overwhelming overreaction.
In so doing, Hamas gained the support of hundreds of millions of people around the world in the guise of a supposedly legitimate resistance movement. Never mind that Hamas was effectively engaged in a sick form of human sacrifice that resulted in the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, described by the group’s senior leader Khaled Mashal as “tactical losses”. Hamas proceeded with its plan to turn Israel into a worldwide villain, and Israel’s atrocious government and failed strategy played into this trap. As The Wall Street Journal reported, Yahya Sinwar remarked several months before he was killed that he had the Israelis right where he wanted them. Hamas may be evil, but it is far from stupid.
What I am most interested in is trying to fill a huge gap, which is the absence of legitimate Palestinian voices who are genuinely pro-Palestine and care about their own people. It is not in the interests of my people or our cause to wish away the crimes, methods and beliefs of the terror group that has led in Gaza for almost two decades. In truth begins responsibility.
It is for this reason that I believe in making an honest, critical assessment of Hamas, which has been a destructive and cancerous disease that has plagued the Palestinian people and their just and urgent aspirations for statehood and independence.
The massive power imbalance between Palestinians and Israelis does not entail the abandonment of Palestinian agency and accountability. This is not blaming the victim, as some may try to argue; it is the first step to empowering the Palestinian people.
It is easy for our supposed supporters to cry “By any means necessary!” and endorse actions that they and we know are barbaric, wrong and ultimately self-defeating – but it is our cause and our dignity that suffer, not theirs. We cannot control what Israel does; the little bit of control we exercise is over our own actions.
Launching the most brutal single-day attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and knowing the kind of devastating and deadly retaliation that this was going to elicit, was a deliberate, reckless endangerment of the Palestinian people: a betrayal.
The decision to launch the October 7 attack destroyed Palestinian lives and aspirations, but it was not the first such terrible choice.
It was a choice to reject the Oslo peace process and the 2000 Camp David proposal; it was a choice to squander the opportunity opened in 2005 by Israel’s withdrawal of settlements on a vanity resistance project that went nowhere for two decades; it was a choice after the 2006 elections to Islamise Palestinian society and waste opportunities to establish new civic and democratic life; it was a choice to antagonise moderates in Israel with suicide bombings, turning many of them against the peace process and helping the rise of the Israeli far right.
It was a choice to align the Palestinian people of Gaza with the likes of Hezbollah, Qatar, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood – failed ideologies and regional projects – just as previous generations of Palestinians aligned themselves with Saddam Hussein, the Soviet Union and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism; it was a choice to keep Israeli hostages in Gaza for two years rather than surrendering them earlier to avert large-scale death and destruction and to save what could be saved of Gaza’s people and infrastructure.
The short and medium-term prospects for Gaza are bleak. Hamas is still in power after the US brokered a ceasefire that ended Israel’s large-scale military operations in October 2025. When it comes to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, discourse is in disarray; violence, hatred and one-sided viewpoints are staples of both sides. The likelihood of more war and perpetual suffering in Gaza remains high as long as Hamas remains in the Strip.
Yet what gives me hope are the thousands of people in Gaza who think as I do, including an increasing number who are speaking out against the terror group. A combination of the consequences of October 7 and Hamas’s two decades of prominence in the Strip has revealed the fraudulence of the armed resistance narrative.
The courage of Gazans who survived the horrors of war and still take extraordinary risks to speak out against Hamas is a major part of why I feel a profound responsibility to expose this brutal terrorist enterprise. I have the freedom of speech they do not, and I intend to use it.
What’s revealing – and frankly disturbing – is that, even living in a Western democracy, I’ve faced relentless death threats and serious dangers simply for challenging Hamas and the “pro-Palestine” industrial complex that has grown comfortable excusing or romanticising the group.
But that pales in comparison to the risks many Gazans, including close friends, endure for something as small as a Facebook post supporting peace with Israel, tolerance or anti-Hamas sentiments. I personally know many who have been beaten, tortured and maimed by Hamas’s police, intelligence services and the al-Qassam Brigades for daring to desire a different future for Gaza.
Hamas used two million Gazans as hostages in its nihilistic jihadi adventurism, sacrificing its people as it committed atrocities in the hope of prompting an overwhelming Israeli reaction and turning the world against the Jewish state. The continued suffering and misery of Gazans will write a new chapter in Hamas’s story and renew its long-term hopes of delegitimising, undermining and destroying Israel. Judging by the reactions and actions of many around the world after October 7, Hamas feels its strategy has succeeded despite its military failures.
Only in a Gaza that evolves to be nonviolent and prosperous and ceases to be a platform for terror, while providing opportunities for its people to attain fulfilment, freedom and enlightenment, can there be hope for a permanent defeat of Hamas and a rolling back of the international post-October 7 appeal of its narrative.
Only when Hamas is no longer in control of Gaza can the violence end and the future begin.
This is an edited extract from Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib’s Jewish Quarterly essay, Hamas and Its Two Million Hostages, out on Monday. Alkhatib is a Gazan writer and advocate, founder of Realign for Palestine and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC.