Mick Hartley

Moumen al-Natour at the JC – If a ceasefire leaves Hamas in power, they’ll kill Gazans like me:

The prospects of a permanent ceasefire drift through the shattered windows of my home in Gaza City. But for tens of thousands of Gazans like me – who have long protested against Hamas and called for their removal from power – the chance of a fragile peace comes with a sense of looming danger.

I was 11 when Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. At 23, I co-organised my first protest under the slogan “We Want to Live”. For that “crime”, I was imprisoned and tortured multiple times. Today, at 29, after speaking out once again during Hamas’s war with Israel, I know there will be no leniency if the ceasefire takes effect.

Hamas’s crackdown on dissent is intensifying. Over a dozen people have been killed in recent weeks – one of them a dear friend. Others have had their limbs broken in brutal acts of intimidation. As soon as the ceasefire is announced, Hamas militants will rise from their tunnels, hungry for revenge. Hit lists are already circulating on Telegram.

This is not a cry for pity – it is a warning. If Hamas is allowed to keep paying its fighters and civil servants in Gaza from the comfort of Doha, then the countdown to another October 7 has already begun. The only way to truly defeat Hamas is to build a civil alternative – a government for and by the people of Gaza, firmly opposed to Hamas’s rule. In the shadow of Yahya Sinwar’s suicidal war, a growing number of us believe this tragic cycle can finally be broken.

Our grassroots movement wants a real and lasting peace with Israel, not just a ceasefire. We want the Israeli hostages to go home to their families. We want to end the corruption and repression of Hamas, just as we want freedom from Israeli control. We want jobs. We want education. We want to live.

Not if Palestine Action and all the associated Hamas fan boys have their way. 

The urgency of addressing Gaza’s aid problem relates, in turn, to the reason the GHF was established to begin with: the bitter legacy of Hamas’s theft and exploitation of humanitarian aid. Since the war began, I have been forced to purchase on the black market, at exorbitant prices, food from donor nations in boxes marked explicitly “not for sale”. Hamas bears responsibility for this tragedy: it diverted aid to fuel its war machine and feed its loyalists, such that it did not reach the people who needed it most. Hamas is desperate to regain control over aid distribution in order to maintain this unjust system which perpetuates Gazan suffering….

After the war, in a “safe zone”, we must begin to rebuild a society that believes in peace. We need a new curriculum, one that eliminates extremist ideologies. We need a new intellectual revolution before we can even begin to talk about long-term political solutions.

So that's goodbye to all those UNRWA schools, then. Goodbye to UNRWA altogether.

Well, good luck. It's not just Hamas you have to overcome, it's much of world opinion – from the UN on down.