Muhammad Shehada
SOURCE / July 23, 2025
Mahmoud Khalil is being viciously criticized for saying “I condemn the killing of civilians” instead of “I condemn Hamas”. His answer is the same some of Hamas’ strongest critics give. Here’s why:
“Do you condemn Hamas?” It’s a question that masquerades as moral inquiry but functions as a political weapon — a loaded demand hurled at Palestinians not to seek truth, but to trap them in a false binary: denounce your oppressors in the precise language of your occupier, or be painted as complicit in violence. It is never asked in good faith. It is asked to shift blame away from a state committing crimes against humanity, to coerce the oppressed into legitimizing their own slaughter, and to whitewash the rubble, the starvation, the mass graves. This question is not about peace. It is about power — and how language is used to uphold it.
Mahmoud Khalil was hosted on CNN on Tuesday and asked with that question repeatedly. His answer was “I condemn the killing of civilians… it’s disingenuous to ask about condemning Hamas while Palestinians are the ones being starved by Israel… I hate this selective outrage of condemnation.” The Trump administration is now using Mahmoud’s answer to paint him as a “Hamas supporter.”
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But many of Hamas’ strongest Palestinian critics would always answer like Mahmoud did “I condemn the killing of civilians.” For instance, This is the same answer the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, has repeatedly given to interviewers, although Husam and the PA are Hamas’ rivals. Why?
Because we know this question aims to:
1- Distract from genocide
2- Whitewash genocide
3- Blame Palestinians for Israel’s genocide
Israel eagerly weaponizes any Palestinian criticism of Hamas to say “look, Palestinians agree with us. Hamas is THE problem. Hamas is to blame for Palestinian suffering”.
A Gazan activist whom Hamas had once detained arbitrarily told me he refused to condemn them in the midst of genocide because the blood of his family & friends would be on his hands when Israel uses his condemnation to manufacture consent for genocide.
The very same mainstream media interviewers asking this question would always follow it with two more if the interviewee condemns Hamas:
1- “Doesn’t Israel then have the right to destroy the very Hamas you just condemned and admitted to be THE problem?”
Israel isn’t even trying to “destroy Hamas,” they’ve been using this as a pretext to wipe out and starve Gaza itself (over 90% of all homes destroyed), while Hamas is still intact, per Israel’s own admission.
2- “Do you blame Hamas at all for bringing the onslaught onto [your family]?” as one journalist literally asked a Gazan whose entire family Israel massacred.
I’ve personally criticized Hamas for over a decade. Then when the genocide unfolded, I immediately understood that any such criticism would be a gift to Israel to weaponize to buy time & support for their killing of my family, friends, colleagues, neighbours and loved ones.
To ask “Do you condemn Hamas?” in the midst of an unfolding genocide is not a search for moral clarity — it is a weaponized litmus test designed to dehumanize, to silence, and to shift culpability from the colonizer to the colonized.
It is a trap laid by those who feign concern for civilian life only when it serves the machinery of the oppressor, never when Palestinian blood floods the streets. It is a demand that Palestinians participate in their own erasure, that they indict themselves so Israel’s atrocities can proceed with a cleaner conscience in Western eyes.
But no oppressed people owe their occupiers — or the global spectators cheering them on — a performance of “balanced grief” while their children are buried under rubble. The true obscenity is not whether Palestinians condemn Hamas, but that the world continues to ask this, while remaining deafeningly silent as Gaza is turned to ash.
Muhammad Shehada is a Gazan writer and analyst
