In 2019, protests under the slogan "We want to live" against the cost of living and tax hikes were broken up by Hamas security forces with batons and gunfire in the air, followed by raids on private homes and arrests in Gaza City, Jabaliya, Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis and Rafah.
The UN Middle East envoy condemned the brutal beatings of journalists and human rights workers - dozens were assaulted, four hospitalised.
The wave in March 2025 was worse. The family of 22-year-old Odai Al-Rubai said he was abducted, tortured for hours, and his body dumped outside the family home. Another man who had spoken against Hamas was kidnapped in Nuseirat, shot in the legs and left wounded in a public square. Other demonstrators vanished without a trace.
Amnesty documented a pattern of threats, intimidation, interrogations and beatings against people exercising the right to peaceful protest.
Most recently, the planned "June 26 Revolution" this summer never happened. Demonstrations had been called in 18 locations, demanding that Hamas disarm and hand civil administration to a transitional authority. The streets lay empty.
Arrests, beatings and death threats in the preceding days shut it down, and residents said they had been warned explicitly by al-Qassam operatives, Hamas police and intelligence officers that if they wrote anything at all in support of the protests, they would be executed.
Security forces rounded people up at four hospitals, and from the mosques came fatwas calling for the killing of participants.
No Israeli was involved. And so nothing happened.
No streets. No encampments. No boycott.
That exposes the whole movement. It is not about Gaza. It is about Israel and about the Jews, and it gets wrapped in concern for the people of Gaza because that wrapping is the only one that can be carried in public.
Take Israel out of the equation and the engagement vanishes on the spot. The same people who counted bodies for months had nothing to say when the bodies were delivered by Hamas. Not because they missed it. Because it was of no use.
It is a pathetic performance. The ‘Palestinians’ are not the cause. They are the prop.
That is why Gaza's own slogan - "we want to live" - was never translated, never printed, never shouted in a Western capital. It pointed the wrong way.