Muhammad Shehada · ‘I would never release him’: Marwan Barghouti and Palestine’s future

‘You made a serious mistake by leaving Gaza,’ my friend Ibrahim used to say. ‘Come back!’ Ibrahim was one of the lucky few. Despite Israel’s blockade – which created the ‘worst economic depression in modern history’, as a World Bank report put it – Ibrahim had found a way to earn a decent living. We studied computer engineering together at Gaza’s Islamic University, and afterwards Ibrahim and a few other friends set up a programming team, with customers in the Gulf, Europe and the US.Ibrahim got a small apartment in Jabalia, bought an old car, married and had a child. His daily routine was simple: work, the mosque, seeing friends in a café. There wasn’t much to do in tiny, overcrowded Gaza City even if you had money, but he was always upbeat. His main concern was his son, Mohammed, who was showing signs of PTSD. Mohammed didn’t talk until he was three; he had nightmares, wet the bed and had tantrums. By the age of four he had lived through a war, in 2021, and two Israeli assaults – Operation Breaking Dawn in 2022 and Operation Shield and Arrow in 2023. In between bombing campaigns, Israeli drones were always buzzing overhead.On the morning of 7 October 2023 I tried to call Ibrahim, but the electricity was down. I got hold of him a few days later. ‘I’m sorry I told you to come back,’ he said. ‘You were right not to listen. Please remember us.’ He had to hang up: he and his family were gathering their things because Israel had ordered 1.1 million people to move to the south of Gaza. That’s when Ibrahim realised he had been living precariously all along. In the months that followed, the family were forcibly displaced more than ten times. Each time they followed Israel’s ‘evacuation orders’ and walked under fire to a designated ‘safe area’, before that too was bombed or overrun with soldiers.The first programmer I know who was murdered in a targeted strike was Haitham. His two children had already been killed by a bomb in Rafah. He and his wife, who had been injured in that attack, fled to the Bureij refugee camp, only to be killed in a direct strike there. Abdul Rahman, the top student in our class, was next.

He was killed as he walked into his apartment with his father to collect food; his family were sheltering nearby. Musab, another member of the programming team, was killed soon after in a strike on a UN school.After Ibrahim and his family left Jabalia, the Israeli army burned his apartment to the ground and bombed his parents’ home; a few months later they flattened the entire city. His life savings evaporated within months as some prices increased more than 6000 per cent. He’s been unable to work because there has been no electricity in Gaza, except for emergency generators, since October 2023 and Israel doesn’t allow computers to be brought into the Strip. Living in a heavily damaged apartment in a bombed-out building is now a luxury. Ibrahim sleeps in an old tent, waking in the night to protect his son from rats and snakes, whose numbers have grown hugely in the rubble and waste. Israel doesn’t allow in the equipment needed to clear and repair the damage, which is not only to buildings and roads but to pipes and sewage systems. These have become breeding grounds for rodents and insects. Around a thousand Gazans have been killed since Trump’s ‘ceasefire’ came into force last autumn. For Ibrahim, it feels as though the world has fallen silent since then.Ibrahim describes the Hamas-led operation of 7 October as a ‘disaster’, even though he supports the right to armed resistance. Arab mediators have told me that Hamas’s leader in exile, Khaled Meshal, has been using the same word in private. Ahmed Yousef – a former adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, the chair of Hamas’s political bureau until his assassination in 2024 – has been using the word in public. He has also said that Hamas ‘didn’t factor in the consequences’ of the operation. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, kept the plan secret from the leadership abroad and made the decision with a small number of militant leaders ‘who lack sufficient political maturity’. I have been told that Meshal, too, describes the architects of 7 October as ‘politically inexperienced’. Sinwar, for his part, accused Meshal of running Hamas like an NGO, and refusing to take risks. But even he reportedly admitted, before his assassination in 2024, that ‘things went out of control’ on that day.

Resentment of Hamas among ordinary Gazans is widespread, even if the rage against Israel is much greater. Many people have lost everything since 7 October. Tens of thousands have died. At the same time, many would also say that the situation on 6 October wasn’t much better. The operations Israel liked to call ‘mowing the lawn’ meant that Palestinians were steadily being killed. Two weeks before 7 October, Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza for three days in a row. On 4 October, it was reported that Gazan protesters near the separation fence had come under fire from Israeli snipers. Reflecting on 7 October, some Palestinians in Gaza say: ‘Well, we tried everything else and it didn’t work.’ Non-violence was pursued as a strategy for decades, most prominently during the Great March of Return in 2018-19, when tens of thousands of people, most of them young, would assemble every Friday near the separation fence, making speeches and waving Palestinian flags. Over eighteen months of demonstrations, Israel killed more than two hundred protesters, as well as paramedics, journalists and children, and injured at least 34,000 people. Israeli snipers boasted about how many people they could kneecap in one day – the record was 42. ‘Palestinian non-violence relies on global non-silence,’ as the Palestinian American political analyst Yousef Munayyar put it. But stories in the international press didn’t persuade Israel to change course.Hamas also tried diplomacy, albeit cautiously. In 1997, Meshal offered Israel a thirty-year truce on the condition that it withdrew from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israel responded by attempting to assassinate him in Jordan. Ahmed Yassin, Hamas’s founder, offered a ten-year truce in 2003 and was assassinated four months later. Zvi Sela, a senior official in the Israeli prison service who interviewed Yassin on multiple occasions, said in 2009 that ‘if we had tried for an agreement with him, we would have succeeded.’ In 2006, after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections and formed a government, Haniyeh, then prime minister, sent a letter to the Bush administration offering peaceful co-existence with Israel based on the two-state solution.

In the same year, Yousef put forward a peace proposal premised on establishing a Palestinian state with temporary borders over a third of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with the intention that the boundaries of the state would slowly expand through trust-building, negotiation and diplomacy.From 2008 onwards, Hamas tried to make progress by acting as Israel’s security ‘subcontractor’ in Gaza, as the editor of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, put it. Hamas fighters policed other armed factions and took action against anyone who tried to attack Israel while a ceasefire held. Israel responded by assassinating Hamas’s military second-in-command, Ahmad al-Jabari, in 2012. According to the Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, al-Jabari was looking over a draft proposal for a permanent ceasefire on the morning he was killed. Despite this, Hamas continued in its subcontractor role and stood by as Israel conducted airstrikes against Palestinian Islamic Jihad in 2019, 2022 and early 2023. In 2021, there was a surreal event in northern Gaza. Israeli tanks and bulldozers destroyed a strawberry farm a few hundred metres from the separation fence, while armed Hamas militants prevented people from coming near.Diplomacy, ceasefires, security assistance and non-violent protests achieved little for Gaza. In 2019 Israel temporarily expanded the zone in which Gaza’s fishing boats were allowed (usually three miles from shore, briefly five), permitted a few thousand labourers to work in the West Bank and Israel, eased restrictions on food imports and allowed Qatar to pay the salaries of Hamas civil servants and to give monthly handouts of $100 to 100,000 poor families. These measures would be revoked, it stipulated, if a single rocket was fired from Gaza or protesters approached the fence.Whenever Gaza went quiet, it disappeared from international news bulletins and Israel escalated its violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. ‘They’re right,’ the veteran Israeli columnist Gideon Levy wrote. ‘If Palestinians in Gaza don’t shoot, no one listens.’ Some Palestinians argue that 7 October – and the genocide – put Gaza back on the map and reminded the world of its cause. I’ve heard this sentiment from people within and outside Gaza.

One of them was Abu Suhaib, a senior Hamas member I interviewed in Doha in August 2024. ‘We tried everything else,’ he said. But then: ‘If I could go back in time and prevent 7 October from happening, I would.’ Mousa Abu Marzouk, another senior figure in Hamas, was quoted saying much the same in the Washington Post.Putting the cause back on the map is not on its own a goal or strategy. Gaza becomes temporarily more prominent with each Israeli onslaught. Israel has suffered reputational damage on multiple occasions, most notably during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. But its image improves each time a ceasefire is signed. We are seeing this now. Despite the continued bombardment and the blocking of any attempt at rebuilding or recovery, Gaza has disappeared from the headlines. Every Western diplomat I’ve spoken to this year has told me that Gaza is a subject no one wants to discuss.What was Sinwar trying to achieve with Operation al-Aqsa Flood? To break the siege on Gaza? To deter Israel’s pogroms and rampages in the West Bank? To free Palestinian prisoners? To block Israeli-Saudi normalisation? Or to ignite a multi-front war on Israel? Yezid Sayigh at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes that in the documents Hamas issued after 7 October outlining its ‘motivations and contexts’, the authors struggled to articulate what they were seeking ‘in terms of tangible gains – both material and political’. But it is possible to imagine what motivated or triggered the plan. Sinwar warned in 2021 of an all-out regional war unless the humanitarian situation in Gaza improved substantially. His son’s first words, he said, were ‘father’, ‘mother’ and ‘drone’. In 2022, he said that there would be a major war that would change the face of the Middle East if Israel continued its colonisation of East Jerusalem and restrictions on the use of the al-Aqsa mosque, Palestine’s holiest shrine.Prisoners were one of the most important issues for Sinwar. He campaigned on this in Hamas’s 2021 internal elections, which he won in the fourth round. Sinwar himself had spent 22 years in Israeli prisons. Palestinians like him, who have been released in prisoner swaps, often feel survivor’s guilt.