We’ve all seen videos from last week’s demonstrations in Gaza against Hamas, with protestors chanting, “Hamas, out, out” and “In the name of Allah, Hamas must go”. Doubtless you will have had the same reaction that I had: a sense of awe at their bravery, along with fear of what might befall those who dared take on the terrorists that have held the people of Gaza in thrall since 2007.
Then, sure enough, news emerged that Hamas had murdered at least six of the demonstrators, including 22-year-old Odai Naser Saadi. According to his family, who recorded a statement on video after his funeral – bravery appears to be in the family’s DNA – members of Hamas’s Al-Qassam wing kidnapped him, tortured him for hours on end and then murdered him. His body was dumped in front of his family’s home, with the message: “This is the price for those who criticise Hamas.” In response, the family have demanded justice, vowing that they will not be cowed into silence by Hamas.
This weekend his brother released a video recorded by Odai just before his death in which he said he was being hunted down by Hamas, that they were trying to shoot him and that he knew he now had nowhere to hide after they had ransacked his home looking for him. (See what I mean about the family’s DNA: the brother was surely placing a target on his own back by releasing the video.)
Overnight, footage has been posted on social media of a family injured in an Israeli airstrike yelling as they leave an ambulance at the entrance to a hospital that Hamas terrorists were to blame for the strike because they were hiding among them. Gazans know this, because it is Hamas’ most successful strategy for having their fellow Palestinians killed. Gazans know they are simply fodder to Hamas, and that their status as human shields is not a tactic to prevent Israeli strikes but the means by which Hamas can ensure higher civilian casualties as Israel targets the terrorists.
It's been well remarked that last week’s protests mean there have now been more pro-Palestinian demonstrations against Hamas inside Gaza than anywhere else in the world. Here in Britain, as elsewhere, the so-called pro-Palestinian marches have rightly been labelled hate marches, from the very first protests on October 9, 2023 in front of the Israeli embassy and the first big march a few days later – planned as the October 7 massacres were still unfolding.
The supposed rationale for these marches, and the routine description of Hamas as “freedom fighters” and “resistance”, has been concern with the human rights of Palestinians in the face of Israeli military action.
But the reaction to the murder of Odai Naser Saadi by Hamas from many of the most prominent supporters of the marches – indeed of the Palestinian cause more generally – should pull the rug from under the feet of anyone who might have been taken in by the marches, who has seen them as a valiant call for peace, and for an end to suffering on all sides. The reality, of course, is the opposite. They are not about Palestinian suffering. They are not about Palestinian rights. They are about the Jews – I’m sorry, I mean the Zionists. Oops, that should be Israel.
Because there has been no reaction that I have been able to trace, on social media or elsewhere. The murder of a Palestinian for no reason other than his objection to being ruled by Hamas has been met with utter silence from the usual suspects of Palestinian human rights defenders. If they have criticised Hamas, they somehow managed to keep it out of the news.
The social media accounts of the likes of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, the Green Party, Stop the War, the independent “pro-Gaza” MPs, Jeremy Corbyn, Zara Sultana, Francesca Albanese and – of course – Gary Lineker are full of tirades against Israel over the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. Some “pro-Palestinian” accounts have even posted statements from clan and tribal elders in Gaza against the anti-Hamas demonstrations, statements that come across as just one step removed from those of captives forced by their captors to say how well they are being treated.
But look for a mention, let alone condemnation, of the death of any of those murdered in recent days by Hamas for taking part in demonstrations against its rule and you will search in vain.
To many of these pro-Palestinian voices, it appears the deaths of Palestinians killed by Hamas are an irrelevance because they do not comply with the ideology that Israel is the evil imperialist coloniser and that those who “resist” Israel are "freedom fighters." The only dead Palestinians that matter to them are those who have been killed by Israel.
To anyone who has been studying the pro-Palestinian movement this will be one of the least surprising revelations ever. For some activists, Palestinians have never been anything other than a tool with which to attack Israel as part of a wider campaign. But much of their support is soft, based on the vague idea promoted relentlessly across the media that the Palestinians are the victims of Israeli aggression.
It is likely a vain hope, but maybe, just maybe, this obvious indifference to the murder of Palestinians by Hamas might prompt some re-thinking.
