Muhammad Shehada
+972 Magazine / June 25, 2026
The ‘June 26 movement’ may bring thousands to the streets. But threats and manipulations are distorting its message — as has happened before.
In the worn-out tents and overcrowded shelters of the besieged Gaza Strip, a call has crystallized in recent weeks for a mass mobilization to demand residents’ fundamental rights to “life, dignity, and freedom.” The protests, which organizers are planning in more than a dozen locations across Gaza on June 26, will likely attract thousands, if not more, given the deep anguish and despair that grips the entire population.
Egypt-based Palestinian journalist and activist Abdul Hamid Abdul Ati was reportedly the first to call for a “June 26 revolution.” “[This campaign] is for the public interest and to save what can be saved from a reality that weighs heavily on the people of Gaza,” Abdul Ati, a known Hamas critic, wrote. “We are one people, bound by pain and a shared fate … and unity remains the shortest path to protecting everyone.”
It is difficult to estimate the size of what is being termed the “June 26 movement” on the ground, since Abdul Ati and other prominent activists advocating for the protests are based outside Gaza, having been displaced by Israel’s genocide or having left some years before. Some are affiliated with the Fatah party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, while others are politically independent.
But public messaging has been carefully articulated to appeal to a broad audience. There is clear resentment expressed by some activists toward Hamas’ political leadership. In the words of Gazan activist and vocal Hamas critic Amjad Abu Kush, “The June 26 revolution is [about] the right of Gazans to end Hamas’ rule … Holding those running Gaza accountable is not a crime.”
Similarly, Gazan journalist Hamza al-Masri argued that “Hamas should have supported this [June 26] movement. This movement should be joined by the entire population to say we don’t want to die. We’re sick of tents. We’re sick of pain. We’re tired. We want to shout. We want people to hear our cries.”
At the same time, the June 26 movement’s public statements emphasize that “the occupation is our sole enemy,” reject the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and demand a dignified life, democratic rule, and “restoring a social contract [where] the people’s will is the intrinsic and sole source of political legitimacy.”
Despite this clear messaging, Israeli media is already portraying this movement as solely “anti-Hamas.” The state’s official Arabic language account on X posted in support of the protest, calling on Gazans to “revolt against the oppressors.” Israel’s proxy gang leaders in the depopulated areas of eastern Gaza are also trying to hijack and take credit for this movement, especially after Israeli media slammed those gangs for “talking big but making little headway against Hamas” and having “almost no impact.”
Israel’s distortion and exploitation of Palestinian demonstrations in Gaza is again making it easier for Hamas supporters to denounce the June 26 movement as “suspicious” and “inciteful,” although Hamas itself has not officially commented on the planned demonstrations.
But the calls for a mobilization and the reactions to those calls are evoking a strong sense of déjà vu. Gazans have been here several times before in recent years, with each such demonstration failing to achieve its goals. And tragically, there is little to suggest that this time will be any different.
Weaponized suffering
To be a Palestinian in Gaza is an impossible position. It means being forced not only to live in what Israel has turned into an apocalyptic wasteland, but also to conform to specific stereotypes to earn sympathy or else fall from grace — like a performance on a reality TV show.
In many circles, Gazans are heroized and romanticized for exceptional resilience and steadfastness on the land. If a Palestinian in Gaza breaks down and decides to leave the enclave, he is criticized by some as “weak” or “abandoning the homeland.” The prominent Gazan photographer Motaz Azaiza recently noted that during a tour in the United States, an older Palestinian-American woman rebuked him for not staying in Gaza and dying there as a “martyr.”
In other circles, Gazans are diminished as “poor miserable victims.” If they dare to seek basic material comforts, it could spark international controversy — like the recent New York Post article that sought to portray the pro-Palestine movement as hypocritical because of the existence of a “luxurious” makeshift café in a worn-out tent.
Palestinians in Gaza who support the right to armed resistance or protest Fatah and the Palestinian Authority are instantly smeared as “Hamas.” Those who protest Hamas’ political leadership or its government are meanwhile smeared as “collaborators,” “sell-outs,” or “agents of Ramallah.”
The clearest illustration of this predicament was in 2018-19, during the Great March of Return. Young Palestinians protesting non-violently near Israel’s fence that besieges Gaza were systematically killed and maimed by Israeli snipers. Predictably, the Israeli government rushed to frame the protesters as being members of Hamas or merely “terrorists.”
In those same weeks, some of those young protesters took to the streets to decry recent Hamas tax hikes on basic goods, the Palestinian Authority’s punitive sanctions on Gaza, Israel’s blockade, and the intra-Palestinian division — united under the slogan “We want to live.” Israel immediately praised those demonstrations as “anti-Hamas.” Hamas activists propagated the message that the protesters had been “pushed from the outside,” and its security agencies violently dispersed the demonstrations.
The same thing happened just weeks before October 7. Young Palestinians in Gaza filled the streets, chanting “We want to live.” Security agencies dispersed the protests, while Israel exploited them for its own PR. A few days later, when young Gazans went to Israel’s apartheid fence to protest, the Israeli army shot them without a second thought and bombed Gaza to collectively punish the population for the protests.
Similar dynamics have repeated during the genocide, too. In March 2025, a week after Israel shattered a ceasefire that had been in place since January, Palestinians in the northern Gaza city of Beit Lahiya spontaneously took to the street.
With chants of “We want to live,” “We refuse to die,” “End the war,” and “Our children’s blood is not cheap,” the protests took aim at new Israeli forced expulsion orders in northern Gaza, while demanding an end to the genocide and full Israeli withdrawal from the Strip. Participants also called on Hamas to step down from government to end Israel’s main pretext for the genocide, and to allow for free Palestinian elections.
The protests incrementally attracted more people, and calls grew for similar demonstrations in other parts of Gaza. Before long, the movement had become the largest display of popular dissent in Gaza against both Israel and Hamas in many years — until Israel killed the protests by exploiting them for its own propaganda.
As soon as the demonstrations broke out, Israel’s Foreign Ministry immediately labelled them as anti-Hamas and posted footage of protesters along with the caption: “The world must support their struggle to break free from Hamas’ tyranny.” At the same time, Israeli journalists made sure to emphasize to their own audiences that the protests did not render Gazan civilians innocent; the participants, one Israeli journalist insisted, were “not against Hamas — but against its rule.”
Israel’s Channel 12 interviewed an elderly Gazan protester who spoke fluent Hebrew, having learned it from his previous work inside Israel. As soon as he complained that he had not eaten proper food in a month, the Israeli journalist interjected, placing the blame for Israel’s starvation of the Strip on Hamas and scolding him for not “protesting harder.”
Multiple journalists in mainstream U.S. media outlets told me that pro-Israeli lobbying groups suddenly demanded “eyes on the anti-Hamas uprising,” and flooded them with talking points. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz condescendingly ordered more Gazans to show up for the protests to put pressure on Hamas, or else they will “be required to evacuate and lose more and more territory.”
But Israel was not interested in the success of the demonstrations. In fact, it bombed some of the very locations where protests were supposed to happen, and continued to launch airstrikes across Gaza, rendering it dangerous for any Palestinian to venture out to join a demonstration.
Rather, Israel sought to use the spectacle of protests to drown out any coverage of the genocide with headlines critical of Hamas. And it worked: Even for weeks after the protests had faded out, multiple journalists in U.S. outlets told me their editors continued to prioritize coverage of the “anti-Hamas demonstrations” over Israeli atrocities.
All this made it easier for Hamas supporters to brand protesters as “collaborators” or “stooges” aiding a nefarious Israeli agenda. And according to Amnesty International, Hamas’ security forces threatened, harassed, and even assaulted Palestinians who joined the demonstrations. Ultimately, both Hamas supporters and Israel entirely ignored the fact that protesters were also chanting against Israel’s genocide, ethnic cleansing, and starvation campaign.
Gazans’ tragic paradox
As the “June 26 revolution” approaches, we are witnessing the same dynamics play out once again: exploitation of the protests by outlets and organizations supportive of Israel, a smear campaign by some Hamas supporters against the protests, and conditions on the ground that make it extremely difficult to mobilize amid continued Israeli fire.
Yet all the official grievances of the June 26 movement are shared by the overwhelming majority of the population. These include the demand that the Palestinian leadership and international community listen to Gazans themselves; refusing the new unliveable status quo Israel is imposing on Gaza; protecting against the rampant diseases spreading in displacement camps; and securing freedom of movement in and out of Gaza, especially for those in critical need of medical treatment.
Gazans are fed up with their continued displacement on the streets and infinitely long queues to get scraps of food or contaminated water. They are fed up with seeing their children left without formal education for the third year in a row, and living without electricity, running water, or functioning bathrooms. And they are fed up with watching their own lives wasting away before their eyes, trapped in a shrinking open-air prison, while Israel determines every aspect of their future.
In the words of prominent Gazan journalist and activist Ahmad Said: “[People] will go out to say, ‘I want my dignity. I don’t want to live the rest of my life in a tent. I want a future for my children.’”
The demand for Hamas to step down from ruling Gaza is also widely shared among the population, as the group’s rule has been Israel’s primary justification for besieging and bombing the Strip. For its part, Hamas had agreed to hand over governance to a new technocratic Palestinian Authority government or an independent Palestinian committee just two months after the October 7 attacks, according to sources within the group. The decision was made against the backdrop of the November 2023 ceasefire, as a compromise to convince Israel to extend the agreement.
One such body emerged this past January, with the establishment of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) under U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. However, Israel is still refusing to even allow the NCAG to enter Gaza, let alone take over governance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is conditioning this on the full disarmament of Hamas and all other factions in Gaza, without Israel’s withdrawal from the enclave or an end to its blockade.
At the same time, the street in Gaza appears divided over the June 26 protests. Several tribal leaders and large families have denounced the movement and refused to take part. Some Palestinians worry Israel and its proxy gangs will exploit the demonstrations to create chaos and further divide Palestinians. Israel could then use the spectacle of unrest to portray Gaza as engulfed in “civil war,” and seek permission from Trump to resume full-scale war in order to “finish off Hamas.”
Mohammed Othman, a Palestinian investigative journalist whom Hamas detained and tortured in 2016, said he had supported a similar movement in 2019 but has grave concerns about the June 26 protests. “For me, [the 2019 protest] was a movement driven by demands and livelihood concerns, a cry from ordinary, struggling people who simply wanted to live with dignity,” he wrote. “It was a way to pressure those in power to pay attention to the people and improve their living conditions.”
What is different this time, Othman suggested, is that Israel is the only one standing in the way of the protesters’ demands — whether facilitating the entry of tents, allowing for reconstruction and the removal of rubble, or empowering a new government to enter Gaza and take over. He added that Israel might kill policemen in Gaza during the protests “to muddy the waters,” or push its proxy gangs to “kill and maim some of the protesters to inflame the situation” — fuelling intercommunal violence that Israel could use to “frame the situation as ‘internal chaos.’”
There is another difficulty protesters face when expressing dissent against Hamas. Popular demonstrations usually succeed by disrupting daily life, shutting down the economy, and making it impossible for the government to function. But Israel has done all this and more already; there is little protesters can do to pressure Hamas amid an ongoing genocide.
This desperate cry from a besieged people is the most tragic of paradoxes: a movement born of unbearable suffering, yet whose every utterance is immediately weaponized by its tormentors to further entrench and cover up the anguish they have been inflicting on the caged Palestinians of Gaza. The world watches, but it watches through a fractured lens — ready to see either heroes, victims, or villains, but never just the exhausted, terrified, and profoundly human faces of those who simply want to exist.
Muhammad Shehada is a Gazan writer and political analyst, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations
