In recent years, observes Fadi, Gazans have discovered that “the Palestine which Hamas wants to liberate is not the same Palestine which we as Palestinians were expelled from. … There is now an entire people there — and that, a people, and Israel as a whole, which the Palestinians actually need.” While Hamas makes it “extremely hard to talk about peace,” Fadi believes that “if we could engage the outside world, it would be possible for Palestinians in Gaza to regain their humanity. … [and] in recognizing that life has value, they’d see the humanity in Israelis too.”

Hamas often claims that victory is imminent. Last year, Hamas politician Kanaan Abed declared, “The State of Israel will be history. Palestinians outside Palestine: Prepare your papers. You will return to Palestine after the liberation.” Many Gazans see a different reality. As one young Gazan struggling to provide for his family told the Economist, “My life is like a TV screen with no picture.”

Rather than open up new spaces for Gazans, Hamas hems them in still further. As noted earlier, in 2021, after Gazan activists held a series of Zoom conversations with Israelis to discuss the possibility of peace, Hamas arrested several of them. Hamas’s armed wing declared in a statement, “Normalization in all its forms and activities is treason, a crime, and religiously, nationally, and morally unacceptable.” The group’s leader was imprisoned and tortured, according to the AP. Omar Shakir, Israel-Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, noted that the incident reflects Hamas’s “systematic practice of punishing those whose speech threatens their orthodoxy.”