Brief: How Hamas’s Degradation Opened Space for Protests

Executive Summary:

• The March 2025 anti-Hamas protests in Gaza reflected a moment enabled by Hamas’s temporary inability to suppress opposition due to wartime losses. The degradation of its Qassam Brigades, many of whom also serve in internal policing roles, weakened the group’s control over the territory and created an opportunity for public anger over wartime mistreatment to surface.
• The protests showcased Hamas’s reliance on coercion and force to maintain power rather than popular legitimacy. The group’s return to targeted repression underscores that future unrest will depend less on public sentiment than on Hamas’s fluctuating capacity to suppress it.

On March 25, thousands of residents across the Gaza Strip took to the streets, demonstrating against Hamas, the Islamist militant group that has governed Gaza since 2007. The scale and intensity of the protests were unheard of, with slogans like “Hamas are terrorists” and “Hamas, get out!” echoing from Beit Lahia in the north to Rafah in the south (Asharq al-Awsat, March 27; YouTube/واقفين مع جيشنا, March 29). Notably, the protestors were not necessarily calling for peace or rejecting Hamas’s strategy of “resistance,” understood to mean violent confrontation with Israel, including acts of terrorism. Rather, Gazans rallied to condemn Hamas’s failure to shield the territory’s population from the catastrophic consequences of the war it launched on October 7, 2023.

The protests primarily reflect changing internal conditions in Gaza. In the past, Hamas has employed force to suppress dissent. With thousands of its fighters—some of whom very likely doubled as internal security agents—killed in the war, Hamas looks to have temporarily lacked the capacity to suppress dissent. This offered protestors a brief window in which they have been able to publicly demonstrate their opposition of the group and its policies. Hamas has selectively applied force to prevent the protests from escalating into an effective revolutionary movement, reflecting the central role fear of violence and reprisal play in ensuring Hamas’s continued rule over Gaza.

Hamas’s Model of Rule: External Resistance and Internal Repression

Hamas grew out of a group of Muslim Brotherhood-related charities as the dominant Islamist actor among Palestinian political movements. These organizations offered extensive social services, while championing an unapologetically militant ideology. After Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005 following the Second Intifada, Hamas seized power in 2007 from Fatah—the dominant Palestinian political movement, which had pursued peace talks with Israel. Since then, Hamas has acted as Gaza’s de facto government (National Counterterrorism Center, updated January 2014).

Hamas claims to provide stability, but its legitimacy flows from militancy rather than the provision of services. This can be clearly seen in its long-standing practice of commandeering useful civilian infrastructure and resources for military purposes (Jerusalem Post, October 13, 2013; Arab News, June 8). Hamas has made it clear that the organization’s political and social functions operate toward the same goal, with the latter providing services to the local population in order to create a society that can materially and ideologically sustain an insurgency well into the future. [1] The movement itself is split into two unequal halves: a military wing, the ‘Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (or simply Qassam Brigades), and a political wing, the Hamas Political Bureau (or Hamas Politburo). While the organizations are technically separate, fighters in the Qassam Brigades frequently serve in internal policing roles, where their military experience can also be used to aid in domestic repression (X/@JoeTruzman, April 9; X/@sabra_the, June 2).

The Qassam Brigades also include the Majd. The Majd are a secret police force and Hamas’s primary tool for suppressing internal dissent, about which little is known due to tight operational security (Arabi21, October 18, 2024). The Qassam Brigades, and especially the Majd, are assumed to recruit only the most ideologically loyal (and experienced, where possible) individuals to avoid Israeli infiltration. Due to wartime casualties, Hamas must work with an increasingly small pool of military-age male recruits. Based on this, it would be reasonable to assume that individuals flow somewhat freely between being active militants or members of the secret or civil police forces. If this were true, the degradation of the organization and/or the death of many of its fighters would reduce Hamas’s ability to suppress protests, precisely what has been seen since late March.

Taken together, the rise of protests should reinforce the view that Hamas operates with a high degree of operational and organizational flexibility. In other words, the organization is struggling to balance its resources between its war against Israel and internal repression. While Hamas has historically utilized ceasefires with Israel as a chance to recoup its losses, it denied Israeli–American terms to extend the first phase of the existing ceasefire in early March. The group was unwilling to release additional hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners if discussions over Israel retreating from Gaza completely failed to begin according to the previously established timeline (Al Jazeera, March 1). Israel resumed airstrikes on March 18, and the protests began to break out on March 25. This sequence of events suggests that Hamas’s refusal to extend the existing ceasefire—which had been used as a window to provide aid to the local population—and the subsequent resumption of hostilities angered many ordinary Gazans, providing an impetus to demonstrate against the group.

The Qassam Brigades’ Degradation

Since October 7, 2023, Hamas’s Qassam Brigades have suffered devastating losses. While figures are politically sensitive and frequently contested, Israel claimed to have degraded 22 of Hamas’s 24 brigades as of August 2024. Around the same time, U.S. analysts from the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, the Institute for the Study of War, and CNN assessed that 16 of these brigades had reduced to little more than low-level insurgency, with three more rendered completely combat-ineffective (CNN, August 5, 2024).

Before the war, the Qassam Brigades likely numbered between 25,000 and 30,000 fighters (ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data), October 6, 2024). As of May 21, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 53,655 individuals had been killed (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, May 21). After revisions that removed over 3,000 previously listed women and children, researchers found that 72 percent of the remaining fatalities in the dataset were males aged 13–55, totaling approximately 38,600 individuals (EuroNews, April 3).

Based on Gazan child casualty data and recent demographic data, [2] around 8,650 of those killed were likely boys under 18, suggesting that roughly 30,000 adult men have died (CIA World Factbook, accessed May 28; UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, May 21). If only half of the men killed were militants, this would mean that around 15,000 fighters have been killed—close to the IDF’s estimate of 17,000. Assuming two-thirds belonged to Hamas, at least 10,000 Qassam fighters—about one-third of its pre-war strength—may have been lost. [3]

This level of attrition likely crippled Hamas’s apparatus for internal repression. Whether through death in battle or redeployment to the front lines, the depletion of manpower appears to have temporarily weakened Hamas’s ability to police dissent on the home front, allowing the protests to erupt.

The Protests                    

Thousands of Gazans appeared to have taken to the streets to protest Hamas. As previously mentioned, the protests coincided with the resumption of hostilities following the end of a ceasefire—amid a sharply deteriorating humanitarian situation, especially regarding food access (X/@AlHadath, May 19). The proximate cause for the protests was the Israeli evacuation order of Beit Lahia, one of the hardest hit towns of the war, but demonstrations quickly spread through the rest of the Strip (Facebook/i24NEWS in Arabic, March 25). Slogans included “Hamas, out!” “Hamas are terrorists!” and “we want to live!” (X/@ahmadGazapal, March 25; Facebook/إذاعة صوت الغد, March 26). In sum, the protestors appeared to be demanding leadership that cares about civilian welfare as much as militancy, and placed much of the blame for their continued struggles on the Hamas government. In response, Hamas’s Politburo called the protestors Israeli plants (YouTube/AlArabiya, March 27).

Instead of shooting into crowds and risking confrontation, as it has done in the past, Hamas’s internal security services (likely Majd) detained and killed youth activists. This included one individual, Uday Raba’i, who was kidnapped, tortured, and killed, with his body subsequently dumped in public in order to intimidate other would-be protestors (Amnesty International, March 18, 2019; Facebook/People of the Book أهل الكتاب, September 15, 2024; Al-Ain, March 30). Hamas has historically opted for a mix of quiet and open repression to keep the population silent while maintaining an aura of strength and the impression of universal support (Human Rights Watch, October 23, 2018; Al Jazeera, March 19, 2019). The absence of crowd-scale repression, then, represents a departure from Hamas’s typical modus operandi.

This has not been the only such example. In a separate but related incident, the family of Abdulrahman Abu Samra, a young man killed by Hamas police in line for flour aid, filmed themselves carrying out an act of “blood vengeance” or qiṣāṣ, performing a vigilante execution of the accused police officer (X/@5llit, April 1). This would suggest that Hamas’s grip on the monopoly of force in Gaza is weakening, as is residents’ fear of the group’s reprisals. Sa’di Kuhail, the man believed to have been the primary killer of Uday Raba’i and others, was doxxed by anti-Hamas activists, leading to his summary elimination by Israel, which viewed him as a likely combatant with the Qassam Brigades (Shahed, April 3).

Notably, the protests did not escalate into a full-scale revolt. Since late March, Hamas has largely regained control, though the protests appear to continue in pockets (Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, May 22; X/@MyPalestine0, May 25). This is believed to have been accomplished by the employment of selective brutality (in reprisals such as what was suffered by Uday Raba’i), increased surveillance, and general psychological fatigue stemming from the war. This reinforces the notion that Hamas’s control over Gaza is being maintained through violence, as dissent seems to be inversely linked to the group’s strength. Such a trend would suggest that the appearance of future anti-Hamas unrest is less dependent on public desire than on the regime’s capacity to suppress it.

Conclusion

Thus far, the protesters are not believed to have organized into a coherent movement with clear demands or leadership. Hamas has shown itself to be uninterested in reconciliation with the protestors, unwilling to address their concerns, and ultimately unafraid of employing further brutality to suppress them. The fact that the protests have subsided seemingly reflects a willingness to dedicate more resources toward internal policing rather than any sort of rise in Hamas’s popularity. As previously stated, however, one should not assume that the protestors’ anti-Hamas sentiment means that they view Israel neutrally or oppose Hamas’s efforts at “armed resistance.” From what can be observed, the Gazan population is more precisely opposed to the impact of the war, preferring leadership that prioritizes stability and economic development over continued violence at their expense. While protests may not topple Hamas, the group will have to continue dedicating increasingly scarce resources to suppress public dissent and maintain their control over Gaza as the war goes on.

Notes:

[1] Matthew Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, 2006.

[2] Gaza’s Ministry of Health identifies 15,613 children (under the age of 18) to have been killed in the fighting (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, May 21). Assuming that 2024 estimates of the age ratio of males to females aged 1–14 is a sufficient approximation for the whole 1–18 age range (roughly 5.4 percent more males than females; CIA World Factbook, accessed May 28) and that the death rates among boys and girls have been roughly proportionate to their share of the total population, one gets a figure of 8,650 male children having died in Gaza since the conflict begun.

[3] While Hamas has the most fighters among anti-Israel forces in the Gaza Strip, it is not the only militant group conducting operations against the IDF. Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades likely represent most of the remaining Islamist fighters in Gaza, but there are also additional groups actively engaged in combat, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.