Gazans return to protesting Hamas
Call for a June 26 “day of rage” tests armed group’s hold on the population
Fifteen months after thousands of Gazans waged street demonstrations demanding Hamas leave Gaza, activists are calling for a new wave of protests June 26 against Hamas’s rule. Abdul Hamid Abdul Ati, an activist with 245,000 followers on Facebook, is touting the planned protests as a “revolution,” a call now taken up by many Palestinians on social media with the “June 26 Revolution” hashtag.
The envisioned demonstrations come amid a renewed wave of sporadic protests over issues of misgovernance and poor services. As an intense Palestinian debate over Gaza’s future and the boundaries of acceptable political discourse takes shape, Hamas has stepped up intimidation tactics to deter opposition.
Water issues are a major driver of public anger, due to the hardship Gazan families face when taps go dry. At one small demonstration over the issue in Khan Younes this week, a frustrated man lent expression to the crowd behind him: “I’ve been awake since 3 AM just to fill jerry-cans with water,” he said. “The most important thing right now is for the mayor or any local official to come and solve this problem … Dig a well, install some sort of pump, do something!” Displaced people from Rafah also held a demonstration in the Al-Mawasi dunes last week to demand easier water access.
Rising summer heat has compounded this crisis. In Nuseirat, central Gaza, the municipality announced June 9 that, from now on, water will be provided to residents only one day per week, blaming shortages of fuel needed to operate water pumps. The announcement met widespread indignation, with some accusing authorities of selling the fuel on the black market. One local wrote, “The diesel coming in every day from Deir al-Balah that you put in your jeep, I could take it and give people water every day. Stop stealing!”
Beyond water issues, small business owners charge that Hamas’s financial impositions, from taxes on trucks importing goods to fees on street vendors, constitute economic predation. “Instead of supporting us and easing the burden on people, they unfortunately increase the burden,” one market stall owner said. “What does the government provide us to justify these taxes?”
The activists planning for June 26 hope to channel widespread frustration into a more focused campaign against Hamas rule. “Any movement from or in Gaza needs to make its first demand … getting rid of Hamas,” Jusoor News contributor Amjad Abu Koush said. “There’s no point to any other demand without that.”
Some Gazans may already be imprisoned on suspicion of involvement in the nascent protest movement. Radi’ (Deterrence), the Telegram channel of a Hamas enforcer unit against political opposition, said yesterday that it had captured “a group of collaborators … engaged in inciting chaos inside the Gaza Strip, to draw out policemen so they can be targeted by the occupation and its agents.” In a parallel effort to discredit protests, the pro-Hamas Telegram channel Imsik ‘Amil (Catch a Spy), which has 45,000 members, called Abdul Ati and other protest activists “espionage tools for penetrating our society and distorting our youth’s conscience.” An accompanying graphic depicted Abdul Ati surrounded by Israeli and American flags.
The planned protests have also sparked a Palestinian debate over what it means to show solidarity with Gaza. Suad Khawaja, a West Bank-based Palestinian journalist, wrote on Facebook, “I support killing anyone who goes out marching, because they are doing it in coordination with the occupation … Any traitor should be killed.” Samah Sweity, another West Bank resident, countered that Khawaja’s call for death to Gazan protesters is irreconcilable with her prior expressions of solidarity. The anti-Hamas Gazan Telegram channel al-Monkhel remarked to its 25,000 subscribers that critics of anti-Hamas protests are “always some son of a bitch in Amman, Istanbul, or the West Bank.”
The call for mass demonstrations suggests a possible sequel to the spring 2025 protests in Gaza, which featured calls to bring down Hamas and free its Israeli hostages to end the war. Following the October ceasefire and release of the hostages, Hamas regained authority in western Gaza, but also pledged to relinquish power so that a new administration with international backing could lead reconstruction. A new wave of protests would test whether Hamas applies brute force to quash them – as it did when Gazans took to the streets in 2019 and 2023 – and, if it does, how the Board of Peace will respond.