Palestinians Are Hostages of the Ayatollahs
Hamas' loyalty to Iran has shattered Gaza and hijacked its future
In January 2020, I was still living in Gaza when Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, was killed in a U.S. drone strike. Within hours, Hamas declared a period of public mourning. Black banners adorned with Soleimani’s face appeared across Gaza City, and one of the largest mourning tents was raised in Al-Saraya Square, not far from my home in the Al-Remal neighborhood.
I remember watching Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s speech, in which he called Soleimani Shaheed al-Quds—“the martyr of Jerusalem”—not once, but three times. This was no mere eulogy; it was a pledge of loyalty to Tehran.
To many of us in Gaza, the display was as offensive as it was clarifying. Soleimani was no Palestinian hero. He was a foreign general, the architect of Iran’s transnational militia empire, and a man directly responsible for empowering the police-state tactics that govern Gaza today. When one young man tore down a banner in protest, Hamas arrested him within hours. His action was branded as treason.
This pattern endures today. In May 2024, when Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian died in a helicopter crash, Hamas’ response in Gaza was again intimidation. Even as civilians starved, languished in displacement camps, and faced relentless bombardment, Hamas still managed to find the time to arrest people for distributing sweets or posting jokes. Iran’s dignity came first.
I know this system intimately. I was imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured twice by Hamas for the “crime” of speaking out against their authoritarian rule. My family has paid a heavy price, too. After Hamas launched the brutal attacks of October 7—an act of ideological fanaticism, devoid of any national strategy—my relatives fled to Egypt. Our home was destroyed in the war that followed. That war, like the attack that provoked it, had nothing to do with protecting Palestinian lives. It was another chapter in a broader ideological agenda, one that views our suffering as a means of regional leverage.
The alliance between Hamas and Iran is not a “marriage of convenience” as many in the West claim. It’s an intentional command structure. Over the last decade, Hamas leaders have traveled more often to Tehran than to Gaza. During this latest war, ceasefire proposals were stalled while Hamas officials flew from Doha to Iran for consultations. The lives of Palestinians didn’t weigh as heavily as Tehran’s geopolitical calculus.
No one elected the Ayatollah. Yet he decides our fate.
Iran’s manipulation of Palestinian politics goes back decades. Since the 1980s, the Islamic Republic has systematically supported Islamist factions opposed to peace with Israel. When the Madrid Conference began in 1991 and the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Iran funneled money and weapons to terrorist groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and assassinations were strategic attempts to sabotage diplomacy.
Peace has never interested Tehran.
The 2007 coup in Gaza, when Hamas violently ousted the Palestinian Authority, was a strategic victory for Iran. Backed financially, ideologically, and militarily by the Islamic Republic, Hamas erected a parallel regime in Gaza not to govern, but to suppress. It became a theocratic proxy state, mirroring the repressive models of Iran’s own security services.
Under Yahya Sinwar’s command, Hamas developed a surveillance apparatus modeled after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Thousands of civilians were monitored for “ideological deviation.” The group’s General Security Service embedded informants into neighborhoods. Phones were tapped, and this repression was one of Iran’s most successful exports.
The result? Gaza is governed not by consensus, but by brute force, and political pluralism has vanished. Elections haven’t been held in more than 15 years. Attempts at reconciliation with the Palestinian Authority have been repeatedly undermined, and civil society has been crushed with the same rhetoric Hamas once hurled at Israel.
Even humanitarian aid is filtered through this lens, with aid being distributed based on allegiance rather than need.
The consequences extend beyond Gaza as the broader Palestinian cause has lost credibility on the world stage. Governments that once engaged with us now look away—not because our suffering is any less urgent, but because the political leadership has become unserious, compromised, and incoherent.
No nation will negotiate with a faction that rejects peace, pledges allegiance to a foreign theocracy, and bets its future on perpetual war. Palestinian diplomacy has become a casualty of regional geopolitics, a hollowed-out husk caught between rival regimes. Our statelessness is no longer seen as a solvable injustice, but as collateral damage in Iran’s war with the West.
The international community must stop treating Hamas as a legitimate representative of our people. Hamas speaks not on behalf of Gazans, but on behalf of its foreign patrons. Rather than offering protection, the group has entrenched repression and deepened our suffering. Its primary allegiance is to a regional bloc that views Palestinian lives as a tool in a larger ideological struggle.
I lost my home to this system. I lost friends to its prisons. My family is displaced because of its wars.
Gaza desperately needs political space to breathe free from Hamas. Governance must be grounded in service, not surveillance, and leadership must answer to the Palestinian people, not to foreign capitals. The future of Palestine cannot be dictated from Qom or Doha. It must be reclaimed by those in Gaza, in Ramallah, and across the diaspora who still believe in a politics of dignity rather than ideological subservience.
As long as decision-making is outsourced to Tehran, Palestinians will remain captive to a foreign agenda. Only when Palestinians can choose their leaders without coercion—free from the shadow of Iranian influence and unburdened by the authoritarianism of Hamas—can a just peace take root. The path forward requires reclaiming political agency, rebuilding civic institutions, and renewing a politics rooted in accountability and hope. The future of Gaza, and of Palestine more broadly, cannot be secured by outside forces, but only by the will of a people determined to govern themselves with dignity, vision, and sovereignty.
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