Majed” recalls how the Gaza border protests of 2018-2019 began. “It started with peaceful protest camps,” he says, “but Hamas decided to exploit them.” Gazans were told that they would “break the blockade” if they marched on the border, he remembers, “but the people were broken instead.”

Though the March of Return protests were initiated at first by grassroots activists, Hamas was quick to direct them to its own ends. As Gazan political analyst Reham Owda told CNN, “Nothing happens here without Hamas’s approval and it approves of the demonstrations.” In an interview, Hamas politburo member Salah al-Bardawil boasted that at least 50 of those killed during the protests were Hamas members. Another Hamas stalwart, Khalil Al-Haya, later claimed that Hamas was “at the heart” of the protests.

In co-opting the March of Return, Hamas sought to refashion it as a platform for violent cross-border attacks. Hamas’s takeover of the march troubled its organizer, Gazan activist Ahmed Abu Artema, who told the Financial Times, “The idea was ours, but the real situation is another story.” Hamas, rather than ordinary Gazans, was the biggest beneficiary of the protests. As Al-Azhar University professor Mkhaimar Abusada put it, “They are the number one winners of this march — they didn’t have to come up with the idea, but they were immediately able to appropriate it.” This left regular Gazans to suffer the consequences. As Majed observes, “four hundred people were martyred, and nobody knows for what.”