By LifeSiteNews (Politics) | Created at 2025-03-27 22:25:39 | Updated at 2025-04-05 01:44:45
1 week ago
Thu Mar 27, 2025 - 3:57 pm EDTThu Mar 27, 2025 - 4:47 pm EDT
(LifeSiteNews) — Following a renewed starvation blockade, continual bombardments and formal threats of “utter destruction” from Israel’s defense minister, throngs of Palestinians have taken to the streets in the Gaza Strip demanding an end to Hamas rule and calling for the release of Israeli hostages.
According to information retweeted on social media by Khalil Sayegh, an Orthodox Christian from Gaza and friend of LifeSiteNews, the crowds are chanting “For God’s sake, we want Hamas out… We want to live.”
“Gaza is not all Hamas, and Hamas is not the entirety of the armed resistance. For 18 years, Hamas has governed and controlled Gaza, yet the people have seen little good come from it. It’s time for Hamas to step aside and for the people of Gaza to choose who will lead them,” stated a verified member on “X” self-identified as Alaa From Gaza.
This is a protest happening right now in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood of Gaza City. People are chanting, “For God’s sake, we want Hamas out.” ” We want to live.”
Gaza is not all Hamas, and Hamas is not the entirety of the armed resistance. For 18 years, Hamas has governed and… pic.twitter.com/4bk6tPcbyB
— Alaa From Gaza (@alaaradwan92) March 26, 2025
The people are “calling to end the genocide,” she explained in a second tweet. “They are calling Hamas to leave the Gaza strip: ‘Hamas out. Hamas out.’”
She sharply repudiated a statement by a political analyst on Al Jazeera who apparently said the people of Gaza had to fight with “the flesh of their children.”
“This statement was widely and strongly condemned by all Palestinians in Gaza,” Alaa tweeted. “During the protest today, people wrote: ‘our children’s blood isn’t cheap.’”
Besieged by Israeli starvation blockade, continued bombing and deadly threats
These protests have emerged as the two million besieged civilians of the enclave, one million of who are children, endure their fourth week of Israel’s total blockade of all humanitarian aid, including food, water, medical supplies, electricity and temporary housing structures.
Additionally, with the large-scale increase of IDF military attacks resuming following Israel’s decisive breach of the Trump-brokered ceasefire agreement in early March, reliable accounts from the Gaza Health Ministry report that at least 830 Palestinians, including 322 children, have been killed. Additionally, 1,787 Palestinians, including 609 children, have been injured during this time.
READ: Gaza releases names of 15,000+ children killed by Israel since October 2023
Last week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz issued a public message to the unarmed civilian population of Gaza demanding they must “return the hostages and expel Hamas” or “the alternative is utter destruction.” He warned the IDF’s genocidal assaults which had recently resumed would soon severely intensify.
READ: Israel’s defense minister threatens ‘utter destruction’ of Gaza if civilians don’t expel Hamas
On Wednesday, he reiterated this message adding “Hamas is putting your lives at risk, causing you to lose your homes and more and more territory that will be integrated into Israel’s defense formation.” Additionally, he said members of Hamas “sit safely with their families in tunnels or luxury hotels, with billions in foreign bank accounts—while using you as hostages.”
“Demand the removal of Hamas from Gaza and the immediate release of all Israeli hostages—this is the only way to stop the war,” he concluded.
Netanyahu’s government supported Hamas to thwart two-state solution
In a personal commentary, Sayegh clarified the broad belief among Palestinians that, ironically, Hamas has thrived with years of support from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party to serve the interests of the Greater Israel Project and to thwart the two-state solution demanded by an overwhelming majority of national governments from around the world.
“Palestinians who oppose Hamas are doing it not only because of Hamas’s brutality towards them but also due to a deep belief that they are aiding Israel in its crimes,” the Christian Gazan wrote.
“No, Palestinians are not rising against Hamas only because of this war, but because of the forever wars and because Hamas was used by Israel to deny Palestinians their right to statehood,” Sayegh affirmed.
READ: Did the Israeli government help establish Hamas to undermine a two-state solution?
With the Likud Party platform stating the organization “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river,” commentators in the local Israeli press have for years complained about Netanyahu’s majority government treating Hamas “as a partner.” This tactic was meant to divide Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and its diplomatic pursuit—with the international community—of a two-state solution.
Palestinians support resistance to Israeli occupation, ‘don’t see Hamas’ as authentically serving this objective
In 2019 reports emerged in the Israeli press quoting Netanyahu’s explicit support for fund transfers to Hamas as a means to scuttle a Palestinian state.
As reported by the Israeli publication Haaretz, the prime minister said the following during a Likud party caucus meeting: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. … This is part of our strategy.”
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy”https://t.co/7lTQs9E5Zf
— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) October 9, 2023
Sayegh, who still has family in Gaza but has lost his sister and father in the current conflict, affirmed that Palestinians remain committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of what the Catholic and Orthodox bishops in the region have recently referred to as the land of their ancestors and forefathers.
“The Palestinians are not against resistance,” the Gazan Christian confirmed, “they don’t see Hamas as a resistance movement.”
READ: How do Christians in the Holy Land understand the Israeli occupation of Palestine?
Israel ‘wants to erase Gaza,’ still responsible for genocidal crimes
Also endorsed by Sayegh, is a “must read thread” by a self-identified Palestinian researcher named Ghada Majadli where the latter emphasizes, “The protests against Hamas in Gaza, or the calls to end the war, do not lift the onus of responsibility from Israel for the slaughter of over 50,000 Palestinians.”
“Whether or not Gazans protest them (Hamas) does nothing to alter Israel’s course—it remains committed to a project of removal and elimination. Israel no longer wants to manage Gaza through siege; it wants to erase Gaza as a space of Palestinian life altogether,” she continued.
Both the words and actions of Israeli government officials and the nation’s army appear to reaffirm the long-standing goal of the heresy of religious Zionism, even from its earliest conception in the 19th century, to forcibly expel the Palestinian people from the land of their forefathers with “brutal compulsion” and create an exclusive Jewish ethno-state in its place.
As early as November 2023, only a month into the current genocidal attacks upon the enclave, Colonel Douglas Macgregor affirmed these hostilities were only “the first stage in a multistage operation designed to create ‘greater Israel’ from the Jordan River all the way to the Mediterranean.” The Israelis have made this goal “abundantly clear off-and-on for many years. This is not a secret. Now it’s happening.”
In December, advocacy groups Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released extensive reports concluding Israeli authorities were deliberately seeking to bring about the destruction of the people of Gaza by various means, including the deprivation of necessities like water, food, energy and medical care, amounting to crimes of genocide.
READ Genocide ‘only reasonable conclusion’ to Israel’s crimes in Gaza: Amnesty International
Additionally, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice delivered a preliminary ruling. finding the charge of genocide against Israel to be “plausible,” and last November the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant “for crimes against humanity and war crimes,” including “starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
According to a rationale presented in a July Lancet study, one can conservatively estimate total deaths, including indirect fatalities due to causes like starvation, lack of medicine or proper medical care, by multiplying reliable reports of direct deaths (50,082) by five to arrive at 250,410 total fatalities. And with a November UN Human Rights Office report identifying fatalities in Gaza comprising approximately 44% children, it is reasonable to estimate 110,180 total deaths of children.
BREAKING: Palestinians protest in Gaza, chanting ‘Down with Hamas!’ amid rising tensions. Demonstrators demand change as unrest grows. pic.twitter.com/yQhX5vGKeu
— LifeSiteNews (@LifeSite) March 26, 2025
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