Hamas Is To Blame For the Suffering in Gaza

Newsweek

3 days ago

This week we exceeded 6,600 days of Hamas' rule over the Gaza Strip. Hamas seized control of Gaza on June 14, 2007, after winning the 2006 elections and violently ousting its rivals. In the ensuing 18-plus years, Hamas has entrenched itself as an authoritarian regime in Gaza that many observers label as one of the worst governments ever to rise to power through elections. Gaza's 2 million residents have endured systemic oppression, human rights abuses, economic devastation, and repeated wars as a result of Hamas' "leadership." Hamas has systematically stolen from its people in every possible way, and explicitly makes the deaths of those under its rule a central facet of its military strategy. Hamas has waged a campaign of terror against Israel and Jews worldwide, but it does so by first reigning with terror over the people of Gaza.
People are struggling with how to understand what has happened to Palestinians in Gaza. The poverty, violence, death, and hopelessness in Gaza is absolutely horrendous. Someone must be to blame, because there is no reason anyone should have to live in such conditions. But who? Many Westerners, especially young people, have latched onto a flagrantly false accusation: Gaza is in dire straits because Israel is in the process of perpetrating a genocide. Clearly, most who use that term don't know what it means. Some ought to know better: The false and horrific accusation before the highly politicized International Criminal Court is a total sham.
When I speak to groups, I'm sometimes asked what I think of Israel's "genocide." I reply by asking them what "genocide" means. Their typical reply to me? A blank look. A squirm. They don't know what it means, or if they do, they don't know how to apply it to Israel's war on Hamas. Why? Because it's a completely false accusation against Israel. Israel is not trying to wipe a people off the Earth, and the evidence for that fact is all around—from Israeli troops' presence on the ground in Gaza (why would that be if they were trying to wipe Palestinians out?), to Israel's conduct in Judea and Samaria (where there is no active war against the Palestinians, much less something more dramatic), to the international freak-out that ensues whenever anyone discusses allowing Palestinians to leave Gaza in the search for better lives, even if only on a temporary basis. The narrative of Israeli genocide is outrageously false. But that doesn't mean there isn't a tragedy in Gaza, that no one is to blame, or that there is no coherent story we can tell about what has befallen innocent Palestinians there.
A Palestinian woman mourns over the covered body of a relative, killed in overnight Israeli strikes, during the funeral procession at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on July 15, 2025.
A Palestinian woman mourns over the covered body of a relative, killed in overnight Israeli strikes, during the funeral procession at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on July 15, 2025.
Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP/Getty Images
We should—indeed we must—define the tragedy of what has happened to Palestinians in Gaza. I humbly suggest we use this word: "dehumanicide." As in, Hamas and its terrorist partners in crime, including the Iranian regime, have committed dehumanicide against the Palestinians in Gaza for over 6,600 days and counting.
I define "dehumanicide" as when a people's leadership condemns its population to death by treating them not as humans but as props. By camouflaging among civilians—placing weapons, tunnels, and command posts in and under hospitals, schools, mosques, and apartment buildings—Hamas has committed an act of dehumanicide. Hamas transformed civilian lives into strategic assets for international outrage. Hamas instrumentalized Gazans not as people to be protected, but as tools of their horrific, twisted, evil warfare. Hamas accepts these civilian deaths as the "cost of doing business." Indeed, Hamas welcomes the deaths because it knows the world will use them as cudgels against Israel so that Hamas can prolong its long war against the Jewish state.
Hamas' crime of dehumanicide against Palestinians in Gaza differs from mere disregard for human life. It is a structural inversion of human value, where vulnerability is weaponized, and death is prized and monetized politically.
How does dehumanicide differ from other "cides?" Unlike genocide, which seeks to exterminate a people from without, and unlike suicide, which targets the self, dehumanicide is a vicious betrayal from within—a leadership or organization reducing people it purports to lead to human sacrifices in service of its ideology and propaganda.
Hamas and its related groups have committed dehumanicide against Gazans, aided by Islamic Jihad, Houthis, Hezbollah, and other terror groups that are part of this evil axis, along with the Iranian regime and its useful foot soldiers in the West who either sympathize with Hamas, or merely do its bidding because they fail or don't want to recognize this reality.
Let's finally speak the truth about what has happened in Gaza. The real tragedy is not an imaginary genocide by Israel, but the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians by their own supposed leaders. May the day soon come when we stop the count of Hamas' rule and begin counting the days of Gaza's freedom from Hamas' oppression. And maybe after that, we can figure out whether there might be a realistic, implementable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and what that might look like, so there is no more suffering of Palestinians or Israelis as a result of this seemingly unsolvable conflict.
Jason D. Greenblatt was President Donald Trump's Middle East envoy between 2017 and 2019. He is the author of In the Path of Abraham and the founder of Abraham Venture LLC. Follow him on X: @GreenblattJD
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.