What I’ve Heard From Gaza

For the first time in more than a month, I recently had the chance to talk with my 11-year-old niece, who is sheltering with my surviving family members in the southern Gazan city of Rafah. She described her daily routine, which consists of little more than playing boring games on her mom’s cellphone—which has no cell reception or internet access—and eating whatever food is sent through the Rafah crossing.

“It’s all so salty from the cans, or really dry,” she told me. A few days before, they had bought a frozen chicken for about $20, their first protein in months that hadn’t come out of a can. “But at least Dad can afford aid food, which is sold to people instead of being for free.” She sounded painfully adult, fully aware of the inequities of aid distribution among desperate Gazans.

Hundreds of thousands of Gazans are struggling each day to secure the calories that they need to stay alive. Greedy merchants, corrupt Hamas officials, and criminal enterprises regularly seize aid meant to be distributed for free and resell it at highly inflated prices. And the food that makes it through, saturated with sodium and other preservatives to keep it shelf-stable, is seldom palatable.

The horrendous humanitarian situation facing the Gaza Strip’s civilian population has been worsened by a string of deadly incidents: the deaths of desperate civilians awaiting the arrival of an aid convoy in northern Gaza; the devastating Israel Defense Forces killing of seven World Central Kitchen staff in central Gaza; and strikes on aid sites, including an UNRWA distribution center in southern Gaza. The IDF’s combat operations and its negligent and reckless behavior; the breakdown of law and order, leading to looting, theft, and gang activity; and the problems that aid agencies face with their logistics and their access to parts of Gaza are combining to worsen matters.

When the war started, and Israel stopped commercial and humanitarian deliveries to Gaza through the port of Ashdod and the Kerem Shalom crossing, the international community had to quickly figure out how to deliver aid through the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, which was formerly used for passenger transit and not the transportation of bulky goods. The effort suffered from complicated procedural and logistical challenges, as organizations struggled to comply with Israel’s elaborate inspection regime. Israeli authorities insist that the bottlenecks are a result of failures by the United Nations and NGOs, while critics accuse Israel of using food as a tool to pressure Gaza’s population and Hamas. Either way, the result is that large segments of the population in the besieged Strip struggle daily to sustain themselves. The crisis is particularly acute in northern Gaza, which faces famine-like conditions. A newly constructed IDF roadway bisects the Strip, restricting access to the north and making it difficult to deliver aid that comes in from Rafah in the south.

[David A. Graham: A deadly strike in Gaza]

Food airdrops, a measure I have long advocated for, have attempted to put essential items directly into the hands of civilians, bypassing distribution by NGOs and others and reducing interference by Hamas and criminal gangs. World Central Kitchen established a small jetty that was used to open a maritime corridor for delivering food from Cyprus. Additionally, the UN’s World Food Programme sent several trucks into northern Gaza in coordination with the Israeli military and used locals to provide security and assist with distribution. These efforts were cumulatively helpful, though their efficacy was hindered by safety issues, inconsistency, unpredictability, and the lack of any entity that could fill the gap caused by Hamas’s disappearance as a governing body throughout most of the Gaza Strip. After the killing of the WCK staff and pressure from the Biden administration, the Israeli government announced its intention to open the Erez crossing at the top of the Strip and to resume shipments through Ashdod, which sits just above it, in order to facilitate the entry of aid directly into the north. These are positive steps. But that will take time to yield results. The same is true of the U.S. effort to build a jetty in Gaza that can accept the delivery of aid through an Israeli-approved maritime corridor to Cyprus.

Unfortunately for Gazans, Hamas continues to display ruthless disregard for its own people’s well-being. The Islamist terror group appears solely focused on its operational and tactical survival, regardless of the strategic consequences of its actions or the damage it inflicts on the Palestinian cause. Until Gaza can find a viable alternative to Hamas’s rule, it will struggle to distribute humanitarian aid, reestablish public safety, and repair its battered infrastructure.

The arrogant intransigence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has refused to accept pragmatic proposals such as the reintroduction of a reformed and improved Palestinian Authority, presents a significant obstacle. Furthermore, despite a ferocious military campaign that has destroyed most of Gaza, which Hamas’s Health Ministry estimates has killed more than 33,000 people, Hamas has demonstrated an uncanny resilience and ability to persevere. As the IDF withdrew its troops from different parts of Gaza in recent months, remnants of Hamas reconstituted and recongregated in vacated spaces, even firing a few rockets toward Israel. The group’s negotiating position on a cease-fire deal has only hardened in recent months.

On a recent trip to the Middle East, I met people who had left the Gaza Strip, and others whose family remains there. They told me about the hardships they had experienced since October 7, in horrifying detail.

At the beginning of the war, the IDF ordered civilians to evacuate northern Gaza. Hamas, though, wanted to keep the population in place to serve as human shields and to complicate the Israeli military’s operations. Some Hamas fighters took this to an extreme, killing several civilians on the Al-Rashid coastal highway using small arms and machine guns. Roadside bombs along the Salah al-Din highway were meant to scare people off so that others would stop fleeing south but ended up hitting a convoy of vehicles carrying civilians, and killing more than 70 people.

Disturbingly, members of Hamas and sympathetic clerics kept citing an Islamic war-fighting doctrine from Surat Al Anfal in the Quran, Ayah 15 and 16, that prohibits turning one’s back to the enemy when facing them on the battlefield. One man told me that his brother was pressured by his Hamas neighbors to stay in Gaza with his family and children. They referenced these Quranic verses over and over and threatened severe consequences now and “on Judgment Day” if he were to flee the incoming IDF invasion. Imagine how many more lives could have been saved had Hamas not used its Islamist ideology to force Gaza’s population into an untenable situation.

I hesitated to share this account, because I don’t want it to obscure the fact that the IDF has also killed fleeing civilians. My brother and his family were fired at by IDF tanks in the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City as they were fleeing southward. Some of Israel’s supporters have been unwilling to acknowledge that IDF field troops and commanders have committed horrendous acts against civilians, whether due to indifference, recklessness, or vengefulness. However, I am most terrified that if Israel launches an incursion into Rafah, Hamas will again use force and intimidation to prevent civilians from fleeing. I feel obligated to warn of the risk that Hamas will attempt to drag a million and a half civilians in Rafah down with it, in the final chapter of its suicidal adventure.

During my trip to the Middle East, I was discouraged to witness the way that many Palestinians, and their supporters in the Arab world, obtain information about the war in Gaza. A sizable segment of the population gets its news through social-media platforms such as TikTok and Facebook, as well as WhatsApp—all rife with misinformation, disinformation, inaccuracies, conjecture, rumors, and propaganda.

When I tried to convince the people I met that Hamas had committed atrocities on October 7, they responded with open disbelief. Almost everyone denied it, claiming that these were false allegations or that the Israelis had killed their own people. I offered to show them videos of the atrocities, including ones that I’d privately obtained, showing beheadings and executions, and was told the footage must have been fabricated. Approximately half of those I spoke with eventually conceded that Hamas had, in fact, committed terrible atrocities against Israeli civilians, something that is unethical and inconsistent with the Muslim faith and warfare rules. The other half, however, seemed shocked and confused, unable to make sense of what I was telling them, which was entirely at odds with their understanding of the war.

Unfortunately, a large number of Palestinians and their allies in the Middle East and the diaspora do not regularly read news stories or analyses about the conflict from mainstream outlets. In the Middle East, Al-Jazeera Arabic continues to be a substantial source of information, and it spreads Hamas’s resistance narrative and its propaganda. People who form their views from TikTok videos, rumors, misinformation-laden social-media posts, and Al-Jazeera Arabic’s pro-Hamas coverage will have a skewed understanding of October 7 and the war. They’re also unlikely to understand the history of the region, of Hamas, of the peace process, and of the Palestinian leadership’s failures and mistakes.

[Andrew Exum: Is the destruction of Gaza making Israel any safer? ]

My conversations gave me hope that it is possible to challenge preconceived notions through persistent engagement. However, revising deeply held beliefs that undermine healing, coexistence, reconciliation, and peace will be an immense and difficult undertaking. This war has made it abundantly clear that Palestinians and Arabs on one side, and Israelis on the other, live in parallel worlds that are informed by entirely disconnected sets of facts, reducing their ability to find common ground or pragmatic solutions. Even people who dislike and despise Hamas struggle, for a variety of reasons, to reconcile their own sense of historical injustice with what a resolution to the conflict would entail.

The war in Gaza has worsened already deep fissures between the Palestinians and the Israelis and their respective allies. We need to stop the war, free all the Israeli hostages, address the humanitarian crisis, and initiate political transformation in Gaza to prevent Hamas from remaining in power. That will require both sides to recognize their mutual humanity and commit to building a shared future, because the Palestinians and the Israelis are both here to stay. They must abandon their zero-sum thinking, and instead pursue partnership and cooperation.

For the Palestinians, this will require abandoning unrealistic goals, violent resistance, and incendiary rhetoric, all of which have failed them for 75 years. For the Israelis, it will require acknowledging that they cannot achieve lasting safety and security through military force, occupation, settlement expansion, separation walls, or denial of the historic injustices inflicted upon the Palestinian people.

For every loud, hateful, and violent voice in this toxic and divisive discourse, a dozen unheard ones are calling to stop the bloodshed and dehumanization. The people of Gaza are desperately ready for a change, and eager to end the dominion of both Israel and Hamas over their lives.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a U.S. citizen from Gaza, is a Middle East political analyst who writes extensively on Gaza’s political and strategic affairs. He is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.