What the Anti-Hamas Protests in Gaza Mean for Israel

By: Andrew Tobin – The Washington Free Beacon; freebeacon.com

The eruption of anti-Hamas protests across the Gaza Strip last week was a win for Israel, which has called for a popular revolt against the Palestinian terrorist group.

Israel’s renewed military campaign in Gaza appears to have triggered the protests by weakening Hamas’s control of the strip and its credibility with the population, according to Israeli national security analysts. But the analysts said it was too soon to say if the protests would contribute to Israel’s war aims: the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza and Hamas’s removal from power.

“The fact that dozens, sometimes hundreds of people, are going into the streets and demonstrating against Hamas with their faces uncovered indicates a crack in the barrier of fear vis a vis Hamas,” Kobi Michael, a former senior Israeli government official and retired military intelligence officer, told the Washington Free Beacon. “If the demonstrations expand to the point where we see tens of thousands of people in the streets, this will be a tipping point. Then, the demonstrators will go for a lynching, they will slaughter Hamas.”

“The Gazan people share the ideology of Hamas,” added Michael, a researcher at Israel’s Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy and Institute for National Security Strategy. “I am speaking collectively, there are many individuals who are not like this, but the collective psychological infrastructure is exactly Hamas’s psychological infrastructure, which means that they are very brutal and very violent, and they will do to Hamas what Hamas did to the Jews on Oct. 7.”

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