Listen to Gazan voices - they're telling you they want an end to the war, and to Hamas tyranny

In what is being dubbed “the flood of life” movement, tens of thousands of Palestinians throughout Gaza have been demonstrating against Hamas’s regime. These protests have broken through the wall of fear and shroud of silence around the entire Gaza Strip. They are demanding the removal of Hamas, an end to the war and the freedom of Gazans from tyranny.

The demonstrations reflect the population’s complete hopelessness with Hamas’s failures and deadly rule. And there is no evidence to support claims that the demonstrations are affiliated with rival Palestinian factions like the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the Palestinian Authority administration in the West Bank or its ruling party Fatah. They have erupted entirely organically.

Hamas’s leaders were seemingly caught off guard by the protests, which have made them appear weak and not fully in control of Gaza. They were not able to register the magnitude of what was brewing. Furthermore, they have been unable to deploy the kind of massive security responses they have used towards popular demonstrations by Gazans in the past. Instead, Hamas’s leadership and mouthpieces have begun making public statements to incite violence against the protestors, accusing them of treason and branding them “Israeli agents”.

Hamas has also attempted to pretend that it understands why people are protesting, attributing their frustrations to the pressure and suffering they are experiencing, rather than actual anti-Hamas sentiments. It has said that those who chant against them are not representative of public opinion.

Needless to say, these despicable and out-of-touch statements show the real crisis Hamas faces. It will suffer a public relations nightmare if it starts punishing the tens of thousands of protestors in Gaza. It doesn’t have the mass prison infrastructure to jail a large number of opponents, and it lacks the co-ordinated manpower and command and control structures to systematically suppress large scale protests during an active war. Its only hope for containing these demonstrations is to taint them by invoking a sense of shame and fear of aiding the “enemy”.

It is critical that the world pay attention to Hamas’s response in the coming days and weeks, ensuring that Hamas does not engage in the brutal suppression of these voices.

The whole Arab world should make it clear that any violence against Palestinian protesters seeking political change and demanding an end to a war that Hamas started will not be tolerated, and would entail severe consequences to Hamas’s credibility, access and ability to move and operate in the region. Crucially, these protests give Arab countries significant latitude to call on Hamas to step down and leave the Gaza Strip. The protest movement demonstrates that Hamas has it lost legitimacy and credibility in Gaza and cannot afford to continue holding the people there hostage to a nefarious and failed armed resistance narrative.

Throughout the war, the people of Gaza have bravely spoken against Hamas and its deadly, tyrannical control over the Strip. Several of the brave individuals who have done so the loudest were later killed or tortured as a result. Even now, during the protests, it is apparent to the people in Gaza that those in the West are not paying attention to them; many videos have featured people crying out, demanding to know where the western media are in this critical moment.

These demonstrations are a watershed moment. Despite the moral clarity they offer, what we are seeing, especially on social media, is a polarised discourse, with each “side” sticking to their entrenched narratives and each seeking to delegitimise the protests.

Those who are supposedly “pro-Palestine” and insistent on one-dimensional thinking that sees only Israel as the problem are ignoring the actual voices of Gazans; to them, Gazans only matter when they are killed and harmed by Israel. On the other hand, many who are “pro-Israel” still doubt that the people of Gaza can demonstrate against Hamas in earnest. They insist that all Gazans support the terror group, and all Gazans somehow took part in the October 7 massacre and only oppose Hamas because it is losing. For them, nothing Palestinians ever do will humanise them. Both sides should humbly listen to the people of Gaza, who have the most skin in the game and are defying all odds to speak their mind even when it is most dangerous and risky to do so.

For far too long, there's been an inadequate and insufficient understanding of public attitudes in Gaza towards Hamas due to skewed and outright inaccurate surveys, not to mention the polarised nature of this discourse. The anti-Hamas demonstrations ought to provide the world with a more nuanced picture.

To the majority of the Palestinian people in Gaza, Hamas is synonymous with war. Its disappearance and exit from the scene would end one of the most destructive and deadly chapter in modern Palestinian history.