What the Anti-Hamas Protests in Gaza Mean for Israel

The eruption of anti-Hamas protests across the Gaza Strip last week was a win for Israel, which has called for a popular revolt against the Palestinian terrorist group.

Israel’s renewed military campaign in Gaza appears to have triggered the protests by weakening Hamas’s control of the strip and its credibility with the population, according to Israeli national security analysts. But the analysts said it was too soon to say if the protests would contribute to Israel’s war aims: the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza and Hamas’s removal from power.

"The fact that dozens, sometimes hundreds of people, are going into the streets and demonstrating against Hamas with their faces uncovered indicates a crack in the barrier of fear vis a vis Hamas," Kobi Michael, a former senior Israeli government official and retired military intelligence officer, told the Washington Free Beacon. "If the demonstrations expand to the point where we see tens of thousands of people in the streets, this will be a tipping point. Then, the demonstrators will go for a lynching, they will slaughter Hamas."

"The Gazan people share the ideology of Hamas," added Michael, a researcher at Israel’s Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy and Institute for National Security Strategy. "I am speaking collectively, there are many individuals who are not like this, but the collective psychological infrastructure is exactly Hamas’s psychological infrastructure, which means that they are very brutal and very violent, and they will do to Hamas what Hamas did to the Jews on Oct. 7."

The protests were the largest display of opposition to Hamas since its Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and mass abduction in southern Israel, which was widely celebrated by Palestinians. Following the expiration of a ceasefire last month, Israel resumed its war to destroy Hamas with a new decisiveness, cutting humanitarian aid and electricity to Gaza and moving to seize control of the strip.

Israeli defense minister Israel Katz last week urged Gazans to rise up against Hamas or else "lose your homes and more and more territory that will be integrated into Israel’s defense formation."

"Learn from the residents of Beit Lahiya," Katz said, referring to a city in northern Gaza where the largest anti-Hamas protests took place. "Just as they did, demand the removal of Hamas from Gaza and the immediate release of all Israeli hostages—this is the only way to stop the war."

Over the next two to three weeks, Israel plans to occupy a quarter of the strip, a senior Israeli official told reporters in a briefing on Monday.

Michael said that if Israel continues to increase military pressure on Hamas and "signals to the local population that there is an alternative to Hamas governance, I think we will see that these demonstrations grow," and Hamas might agree to Israel’s terms for a ceasefire or even a permanent end to the war.

Yossi Kuperwasser, a former senior Israeli government official and retired brigadier general, said the protests could put additional pressure on Hamas to agree to a temporary hostage-ceasefire deal. But he expressed doubt that Hamas would ever agree to disarm and send its leaders into exile as Israel has demanded.

"At any given point, Hamas can say, ‘OK, let’s have a [hostage-ceasefire] deal, and the demonstrations will die," Kuperwasser, the head of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told the Free Beacon. "So it’s hard to see how the demonstrations will force Hamas from power. I think we will still have to take over Gaza temporarily before we deliver it to more moderate [Palestinian] elements."

Michael Milshtein, a former senior Israeli military intelligence officer and the head of Palestinian studies at Tel Aviv University, said he was not yet convinced that the protests, which appeared to lack organized leadership or a clear agenda, posed a serious enough threat to Hamas to alter the course of the war. Milshtein noted that a fraction of Gaza’s some 2 million residents have so far participated in the protests, "not only because of fear of Hamas but also because many, many Palestinians in Gaza are affiliated with Hamas and consider Hamas their leaders."

"Hamas is not weak, and Hamas is not deterred by the people," Milshtein told the Free Beacon. "If Hamas feels there is an existential threat to the movement, they will not hesitate to drown Gaza with blood."

Over the weekend, Hamas operatives reportedly executed six Gazans who participated in the protests and publicly beat others. Oday Nasser Al Rabay, a 22-year-old resident of Gaza City who had backed the protests and criticized Hamas on social media, was tortured for hours and then left to die outside the home of his family, witnesses said.

During Al Rabay’s funeral procession on Sunday, mourners shouted anti-Hamas slogans and fired rifles into the air. Members of Al Rabay’s family reportedly vowed revenge.

Gazan influencer Mustafa Asfour wrote on X that Al Rabay was "killed because he said aloud: We want to live. These are very sad moments, fueling hatred that could ignite a civil war."

No matter who rules Gaza, the strip will remain a threat to Israel for the foreseeable future, according to the national security analysts. But they agreed an anti-Hamas government would be an improvement on 18 years of Hamas rule.

"If we manage to get rid of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, either by ourselves or through this activity of the population of Gaza, the idea that there are other people in Gaza who may govern there instead of Hamas and make it a more moderate place is not baseless," said Kuperwasser. "Anyway, the Palestinians and everyone else who lives around us learned a lesson from this war: It’s not a good idea to launch an Oct. 7 attack against us."

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