Muhammad Shehada
+972 Magazine / October 7, 2025
Even if Trump’s plan ends the Gaza war, Palestinians will face a deep, enduring void: of language, hope, and politics that proved futile in the face of genocide.
“Words don’t mean anything anymore.” This is one of the most common sentiments I hear from family, friends, and colleagues still in Gaza. Two years into Israel’s relentless genocide, what we are left with is not only a trail of bodies and ruins but also a brutal collapse of meaning itself. Words like “atrocity,” “siege,” “resistance,” and even “genocide” have been emptied through repetition, unable to carry the weight of what Palestinians have endured day after day, night after night.
During the first days after October 7, I would speak with loved ones over the phone as much as possible, knowing that each conversation could be the last time I hear their voices. We would usually talk about their anguish, desperation, and fear that death was closing in on them. Some would send their last wishes or their wills; others even began to yearn for death as respite from this endless apocalypse.
But after 24 months, silence has taken over. Everything has been said, every feeling expressed over and over again to the point of being completely hollowed of meaning. When I speak with those still trapped in Gaza, their silence is coupled with the shame of begging for help — for a tent, food, water, or medicine — and my greater shame as a result of my inability to secure anything for them.
My loved ones have become ghosts of their former selves. They have been broken many times throughout 730 days of non-stop bombardment, starvation, and displacement. They have been reduced to scurrying for food and shelter while being attacked wherever they run. Every single aspect of their lives has become an excruciating struggle for survival.
Those who manage to escape this concentration camp are physically transformed. I recently ran into my cousin on the streets of Cairo, and I didn’t recognize her. Once a tall and healthy woman in her late 40s, she was now shrunken to skin and bone, her face wrinkled and darkened, her eyes sunken and pale. My 77-year-old grandmother also came out a skeleton, and has been bedridden ever since.
For those still trapped inside, the physical toll is almost impossible to describe in words. My cousin, Hani, is currently besieged in Gaza City, having been unable to afford the exorbitant cost of fleeing south before Israeli tanks encircled his neighbourhood. Despite only being in his late 40s, the emaciation caused by Israel’s starvation campaign has left him looking how my grandfather looked right before he died at the age of 107.
And that is before even considering the psychological toll of the genocide on the people of Gaza. The full scale of this will only become clear once the bombing stops, and survivors regain the mental energy required to process the memories and emotions their brains have long suppressed while in survival mode.
Gaza has become a place where death is so constant and survival so compromised that even silence now speaks louder than any appeal for justice. And the legacy of this genocide will be with us for generations, because Israel has given every single Gazan a personal vendetta.
“In the afterlife, I’ll ask God for one thing: to force the Israelis to go on the same hunt for water and food under airstrikes all day every day,” my late friend Ali used to say, before he was killed in an airstrike last year while walking next to Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah.
Shifting support for Hamas
It is hard to predict how the collective trauma resulting from the annihilation of Gaza will shape Palestinians’ convictions in the long term. But recently, two predominant trends have emerged, which appear somewhat contradictory.
On the one hand, there is growing resentment toward Hamas for launching the October 7 attacks, even among the organization’s own members and senior leadership. Multiple Arab officials told me that Khaled Meshaal — one of the founders of Hamas and a longtime leader of its political bureau — and other likeminded figures on the moderate wing of the organization have described the assault behind closed doors as “reckless” and a “disaster,” while also criticizing how Hamas has handled the war.
This spring also witnessed several days of spontaneous popular protests against Hamas throughout the Gaza Strip, demanding that the group end the war at any cost before stepping down from power. But these demonstrations were ultimately short-lived, particularly after the Israeli government began to exploit them both to justify their ongoing military campaign and to distract from the atrocities on the ground.
Yet at the same time, Israel’s genocide and the existential threat of mass expulsion from Gaza has turned some of Hamas’ most adamant detractors into its strongest supporters. There is a widespread fear, even among those critical of October 7, that if Hamas is crushed, Israel will occupy Gaza indefinitely with minimal opposition from the international community. According to this view, only a continued Hamas military insurgency can prevent Israel’s permanent takeover and complete ethnic cleansing of the enclave.
One case in point is a woman called Asala, who was only 7 when Hamas militants killed her father, a Palestinian Authority (PA) colonel, during the 2007 Hamas-Fatah conflict. This devastating loss left an indelible mark on her, fuelling a deep hatred of Hamas that she carried into adulthood. Before 2023, she would consistently criticize them on social media in the strongest terms possible, even as she remained in Gaza. But as Israel’s onslaught intensified, she began praising Hamas militants for challenging the Israeli army’s presence in Gaza and exacting revenge.
Indeed, the horrors Asala had witnessed throughout 24 months of surviving bombing, displacement, and hunger had transformed her. “The massacres increased our resentment toward Israel,” she told me. “[Palestinians] should put aside our grudges and direct our hatred against the Israeli occupation only.”
Similarly, Mohammed, a Gazan investigative journalist who was once kidnapped and tortured by Hamas, recently became a vocal supporter of the armed resistance factions in Gaza. He told me that Israel’s genocide, fully backed by Western governments, strengthened his belief in armed resistance. “There are people who never sided with Hamas or the resistance, but after their families were killed by Israel, their perspectives changed and now they seek justice,” he said.
This support for armed resistance will persist or even increase so long as the genocide continues, or if the Israeli army remains inside Gaza after a ceasefire, preventing reconstruction. But if a permanent agreement is signed that includes full Israeli withdrawal, the lifting of Israel’s suffocating siege, and a visible political horizon, there would be little reason for Gazans to cling to armed struggle. In fact, many of those supportive of Hamas’ insurgency will be the first to denounce the group as soon as the war ends.
‘Armed resistance failed to create change’
What historically lent the most credence among Palestinians to Hamas’ strategy of armed resistance was not the appeal to violence or sacrifice, but rather the failure of all other alternatives. Diplomacy, negotiations, advocacy in international bodies and courts, moral persuasion, and non-violent resistance have all been met by global silence, while Israel continues to kill Palestinians and drive them off their land.
Before the genocide, whenever I asked a Hamas leader why the organization will not formally recognize Israel and renounce violence, their answer would always be the same. “Abu Mazen [PA President Mahmoud Abbas] did all this and more, he’s collaborating with Israel. Can you name one good thing they gave him in return?” They would go on to describe how Israel not only ignores Abbas’ compromises, but humiliates, defunds, punishes, and demonizes the PA.
Now, however, after the longest war in Palestinian history, Hamas will be asked the same question: What have you achieved from all this?
Indeed, the past two years have undermined the primary rationales that sustained Hamas’ commitment to armed resistance. The first was the belief that only military force could effectively challenge Israel’s blockade and occupation. As veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy argued back in 2018, “If Palestinians in Gaza don’t shoot, no one listens.” Four years later, a member of Knesset told me the same thing: “As soon as Gaza stops firing rockets, it disappears, and nobody bothers to bring it up.”
But after each escalation with Israel since taking power in 2007, the most Hamas got was what Gazans called “painkillers and anaesthetics” — a restoration of the status quo ante, and some verbal promises of easing Israel’s blockade that never materialized. This was Israel’s explicit strategy of containment and pacification at work.
Years before he was assassinated in an Israeli strike on Beirut in January 2024, Hamas’ own Saleh al-Arouri acknowledged the failure of this approach in a leaked phone call. “Frankly, armed resistance failed to create change,” he admitted. “Resistance presented heroic examples and fought honourable wars, but the blockade wasn’t broken, the political reality didn’t change, and none of the land was liberated.”
Hamas also used to defend its approach as a form of deterrence against Israeli escalation in the West Bank or Jerusalem. This was on full display during the “Unity Intifada” of May 2021, when Hamas fired projectiles toward Jerusalem in response to growing settler terrorism and the forced expulsion of Palestinians families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. But as soon as a ceasefire was reached after 11 days, Israel only expanded its assault on the West Bank — and the following two years were the deadliest in the territory since 2005.
It was also in 2021 that Hamas leaders became captivated by the idea of a major escalation on multiple fronts that would force Israel to fulfil Palestinian demands. They envisioned it would include an assault from Gaza and an intifada in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and inside Israel, coupled with attacks from Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, with the Arab street in Jordan and Egypt simultaneously rising up and marching to their borders with Israel — all of which would put the Israeli government in a corner.
After October 7, however, this strategy also crumbled. What began as a limited multifront confrontation ended when Israel managed to reach ceasefires with Hezbollah and Iran, while the PA and Israel suppressed any potential for a popular uprising. It is now only Yemen’s Houthis that remain active as the last front in this erstwhile “Axis of Resistance.”
‘There is nothing Palestinians can do’
There is little chance of Hamas launching another October 7-style attack in the foreseeable future. Many analysts agree that what allowed for the assault to succeed was catching Israel completely off guard — an element of surprise that is long gone, along with the likelihood that Israel would repeat the same tactical and intelligence failures.
Hamas understands this well, which is why in negotiations this week over U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest plan to end the war, it has signalled to mediators its willingness to decommission “offensive weapons” while retaining light “defensive weapons,” such as rifles and anti-tank missiles. The emphasis on the latter stems from a fear of Israel reneging on withdrawing from Gaza or carrying out regular raids unchallenged, as in the West Bank.
Hamas may also need those light arms in order both to enforce the ceasefire and get buy-in from its own members, as well as other smaller but more hardline groups. It may also believe that disarming completely could create a security vacuum in Gaza, one that could be filled by Salafist and jihadist groups or criminal gangs, like the Israeli-backed Abu Shabab militia. And, of course, there is fear of societal retribution, of people attacking Hamas members on the streets.
But even if Hamas manages to reach a deal to end the war that includes full Israeli withdrawal and allows the group to retain “defensive weapons,” armed resistance — once seen as the last card to play after the collapse of negotiations, diplomacy, and moral appeals — now lies in the same graveyard of failed strategies. Two years into the genocide, what remains is not conviction but collapse: of language, hope, politics, and every appeal Palestinians have made in the face of their annihilation.
Last year, I asked a top EU leader what he thinks Palestinians should do differently, and what advice he would give to the PA, Hamas, and the Palestinian public. After giving it some thought, he resigned in his chair in despair. “There is nothing Palestinians can do,” he admitted. “They tried everything.”
At best, Trump’s latest plan will end the war, but what will endure is not a roadmap but a political void. And in that void, Palestinians will be left to grapple with the heaviest truth of all: that no matter which path they choose — quiet submission or armed defiance — the world has already failed to prevent the genocide of their people. This is a fact that cannot be undone.
Muhammad Shehada is a Gazan writer and political analyst, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations
