Hamas Crushed Gaza’s Protest Movement. But Palestinians Are Still Angry.

A planned anti-Hamas uprising fizzled in public, but beneath the surface lies growing frustration with a leadership many blame for years of war, repression, and hardship.

On June 26, Gazans were supposed to take to the streets. The call had circulated for weeks under the banner of the “June 26 Revolution” and was intended to be a day of protest against Hamas’s rule, government corruption, and the devastation of war.

The message was simple: the people of Gaza wanted the right to decide their own future, free from the leadership that had once again dragged them into a devastating war with Israel.

In the end, however, the uprising failed to generate the mass mobilization its organizers had hoped for. Small demonstrations broke out in parts of Gaza, with protesters chanting slogans such as “God willing, Hamas out,” “We are not pawns,” and “We want to live.” But across much of the Strip, there was little or no visible protest.

According to Gazans and outside activists who supported the demonstrations, that silence was the result of fear.

Reports from inside Gaza described masked Hamas operatives deployed near possible gathering points, restrictions on movement around displacement camps, and phones confiscated from many residents. A resident of central Gaza told The Times of Israel that Hamas-affiliated masked men were present in Deir al-Balah to prevent people from assembling. Ynetnews quoted a local source who described the atmosphere as one of “clear pressure,” saying that every attempt at public organization was met immediately by security forces.

Hamas supporters presented the crackdown as a necessary effort to maintain public order and prevent chaos. But effectively, this amounts to crushing dissent.

Kareem Jouda, a Palestinian peace advocate from Gaza whom I interviewed earlier this year for The Dispatch, told me that Hamas’s suppression of the June 26 protests was a coordinated effort to stop the movement before it could gather momentum.

“The intimidation campaign was a two-pronged strategy,” Jouda told me. “It was executed both online and on the ground.”

On the ground, he said, Hamas relied on direct threats and pressure on the families of activists. Online, the movement was smeared as suspicious, foreign-backed, or part of an Israeli effort to weaken Gaza from within.

This accusation is one of Hamas’s most effective tools. Hamas does not need to prove that a dissident is a “collaborator.” It only needs to be frightening enough that others think twice before joining him.

In Gaza, to be accused of collaboration is a way of painting political dissenters as treasonous. This creates an immediate risk of violence.

Jouda argues that Hamas has long weaponized the fear of “external exploitation” and “civil war” to discredit any grassroots movement that challenges its rule.

“This fear is largely a manufactured narrative pushed by Hamas itself,” he said. “They consistently weaponize the threat of external exploitation or civil war to delegitimize any popular movement and cast doubt on the loyalty of the protesters.”

The June 26 movement was especially vulnerable to these tactics because some of its most visible supporters were outside Gaza. Several organizers and amplifiers had left the strip during the war or in previous years. This included activists who had previously clashed with Hamas or participated in anti-Hamas movements. Hamas-linked voices argued that those abroad had no right to speak for people who had suffered bombardment, displacement, and hunger inside Gaza.

But that argument also obscures the fact that not everyone inside Gaza can safely say what they think.

Jouda says the information environment itself is part of the repression. “There is no real, independent journalism inside Gaza,” he said. Journalists operate under severe pressure, he argued, and cannot freely report the reality on the ground without risking consequences.

That claim was echoed in reporting around the June 26 protests. Gaza-based journalists were reportedly warned not to cover the planned demonstrations. Major outlets did not prominently feature the scattered anti-Hamas protests; some instead highlighted empty intersections and declared the “failure” of the June 26 Revolution.

But the grievances driving the June 26 movement have not disappeared. Gazans are exhausted by war, Israeli military devastation, living in tents, corruption, the collapse of basic services, and Hamas’s determination to hold onto power regardless of the cost to ordinary people.

“The people are desperate to protest and make their voices heard,” Jouda said. Their outrage, he argued, is driven by all of it at once: the catastrophic reality of the war, Hamas’s insistence on holding onto power, the gambling with civilian lives, and rampant corruption inside the strip.

Even small protests are a significant step forward. Inside Gaza, to step into the street is to risk being filmed, identified, accused, beaten, detained, or having one’s family pressured afterward.

Jouda believes the intimidation might be working, but he also believes there has been a shift.

“There is naturally a degree of fear that creates a gap between private and public speech,” he said. “But the reality today is that the threshold of fear has shifted.”

The anger, he said, has grown too overwhelming to remain fully private. People are expressing fury and resentment toward Hamas more openly than before—in conversations, online, and sometimes in the streets.

The June 26 protests may have been quashed this time. They may have been smaller than organizers hoped. Hamas may have succeeded, for now, in preventing a broader eruption. But a crushed protest does not mean the end of the struggle against Hamas is forever defeated.

The more interesting question is whether this anger can become a sustained political movement.

Gaza has seen protest waves before. In 2019, the “We Want to Live” movement challenged Hamas over economic misery and repression. In March 2025, rare public demonstrations again broke out, with some Gazans chanting against Hamas and demanding an end to war.

Jouda believes the next movement will have to be broader and more coordinated if it is to survive.

“For a future movement to succeed and endure, it requires absolute, unified coordination among all segments and structures of Gazan society simultaneously,” he said.

The message, in his view, must be firm: “Hamas—or whatever remains of it—must leave.”

This asserts a basic principle Hamas has spent years denying: that the people of Gaza are not the property of the armed faction that rules them.

The June 26 movement showed that beneath the surface of fear there is a genuine, growing hunger for another future. Hamas still has enough force to intimidate people, but not enough legitimacy to force them to love their rulers. The current silence should not be mistaken for consent.

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