Israel Withdrew, Hamas Took Over, and Gaza Never Became a Palestinian State

There is a fact so inconvenient to Hamas that it must be buried under slogans, funerals, and theatrical rage: since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Gaza has been the one place where Palestinians do not live under direct Israeli presence. No Israeli settlements. No Israeli soldiers. No checkpoints inside the Strip. No nightly raids. No land seizures by settlers. And yet, this territory – freed from the daily mechanics of occupation – did not become a model of Palestinian self-rule. It became a monument to political irresponsibility.

If the behavior of Hamas were emerging from the West Bank, where Israel’s security apparatus penetrates every layer of daily life, one could at least understand the logic of permanent confrontation. But Gaza is not the West Bank. Gaza was handed – yes, handed – to Palestinian control. And Hamas responded not with governance, but with war. Not with institution-building, but with militarization. Not with sovereignty, but with spectacle.

Hamas took power in 2006, and within a year plunged Gaza into violent conflict – not only with Israel alone, but with fellow Palestinians – followed by repeated wars with the Hebrew state in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022, and 2023-2025.

The first reflex of this movement, upon assuming authority, was not to prove that Palestinians could govern themselves responsibly, but to prove that they could still fight. That instinct tells us everything.

A liberation movement that cannot transition into a governing authority is not a liberation movement. It is a permanent insurgency addicted to relevance through destruction. Hamas never attempted the difficult work of statehood: transparent administration, independent courts, accountable security forces, economic policy, or civil pluralism. These were dismissed as bourgeois distractions. Rockets were easier.

For years, Hamas has sold the world a single lie repeated until it hardened into dogma: Gaza is an open-air prison. This is false – not because Gaza has not suffered, but because Hamas itself built the prison. Borders did not close because Gaza became peaceful and prosperous; they closed because Hamas turned the territory into a launchpad for perpetual war. Restrictions followed violence, not the other way around.

Before October 7, reality stubbornly contradicted Hamas’ most repeated lie. Gaza was not hermetically sealed. Tens of thousands of Gazans crossed daily into Israel for work, earning salaries that sustained entire families and injected oxygen into an otherwise suffocated economy.

Goods moved in and out. Trucks entered. Fuel entered. Food entered. Israel supplied electricity and water – an absurdity if Gaza were truly the “open-air prison” its propagandists insisted it was. Prisons do not depend on the alleged jailer to keep their lights on. That arrangement was not occupation; it was interdependence strained by mistrust – mistrust earned, not imposed.

The closure regime Hamas denounces was never ideological; it was reactive. Borders tighten when weapons flow, not when peace does. Restrictions followed Hamas’ systematic conversion of civilian infrastructure into military assets, its obsession with importing rockets rather than medicine, explosives rather than textbooks. Every concrete barrier Hamas points to has a genealogy: weapons smuggling, tunnel networks, attacks launched from residential areas. Security measures were not born of cruelty but of pattern recognition. When a governing authority behaves like a militia, it is treated like one.

And even then, Gaza was never sealed to the world. Through Rafah, Gazans traveled to Egypt, to El-Arish, and from there outward – to universities, hospitals, airports, and foreign capitals. A territory with an external exit route, international travel, labor mobility, trade corridors, and utilities flowing in daily does not meet any serious definition of a prison. What imprisoned Gaza was not geography, but governance – an armed movement that policed borders for ideology while accusing others of doing the same for security.

The deeper truth Hamas cannot confront is this: its war is not about borders or blockades, but about existence itself. The 1937 Peel Commission Partition Plan proposed granting Jews barely 17-20% of Mandatory Palestine, a small, fragmented coastal territory, yet Zionist leaders accepted it as a painful compromise, while Arab leadership rejected it entirely, opposing any recognition of Jewish statehood regardless of borders or scale.

Supposedly, that partition has become reality today – a Jewish state confined to barely 20% of the land, narrow, fragmented, and territorially minimal – rockets would still be flown and fired, because the core opposition has never been borders or proportions, but the very existence of a Jewish state itself.

Because this is not a territorial dispute to Hamas; it is a theological one. Compromise is heresy. Coexistence is surrender. Any Jewish sovereignty, no matter how small, is illegitimate by definition. That is the logic of Islamist fundamentalism: politics subordinated to absolutism, negotiation replaced by annihilationist fantasy.

This is why Hamas could never tolerate Gaza becoming functional. A thriving, semi-open, economically viable Gaza would have exposed the movement’s ideological bankruptcy. Peace – even imperfect, conditional peace – would have been far more dangerous to Hamas than Israeli airstrikes. Normal life is the enemy of movements built on perpetual mobilization. So Hamas sabotaged normalcy, provoked escalation, then wrapped the devastation in the language of victimhood.

Call it what it is. Gaza was not an open-air prison. It was a territory hijacked by an organization that mistook endless war for destiny and mistook civilian suffering for political capital. Hamas did not resist occupation; it manufactured catastrophe – and then demanded the world applaud its ruin as resistance.

Every governing authority is judged by choices under constraint. Hamas faced constraints, yes – but it also faced opportunity. It chose tunnels over schools, arsenals over infrastructure, propaganda over public welfare. Electricity shortages, water crises, economic collapse – these were not inevitable. They were the price of elevating “resistance” above responsibility.

And resistance to what, exactly? There were no settlers to expel. No occupying army inside Gaza. The enemy Hamas needed was ideological, not territorial. Conflict was not a response to occupation; it was a substitute for governance.

This is the central moral failure of Hamas: it treats Palestinian suffering not as a tragedy to be alleviated, but as a resource to be exploited. Martyrdom becomes currency. Ruins become proof of relevance. Civilian despair becomes a press strategy. A leadership that hides underground while civilians live above ground has forfeited the right to speak of dignity.

Contrast this with what could have been. Gaza could have become the Palestinian counter-argument to Israeli skepticism: proof that withdrawal leads to peace, not rockets. It could have attracted investment, built institutions, negotiated from a position of credibility, and forced the world – and Israel – to confront a functioning Palestinian polity. Hamas destroyed that possibility deliberately, because success would have undermined its entire ideology.

Again, Hamas does not fear Israel as much as it fears normalcy. A stable Gaza would expose the emptiness of its absolutism. A prospering society would ask uncomfortable questions: Why war instead of wages? Why tunnels instead of universities? Why eternal sacrifice demanded by leaders who sacrifice nothing?

The most devastating indictment of Hamas is not Israeli firepower; it is time. Nearly two decades of uncontested rule have produced no vision beyond confrontation, no economy beyond aid dependency, no politics beyond repression. Dissent is crushed. Journalists are silenced. Elections are avoided. A movement that claims to represent the people is terrified of letting them speak.

History is unforgiving to leaders who mistake noise for achievement. Hamas has mastered the language of defiance while emptying it of meaning. It has confused fury with strategy and destruction with destiny. Gaza did not fail because it was abandoned by the world. It failed because it was captured by an ideology incapable of governing free people.

True liberation begins when leaders choose life over death, institutions over impulses, and responsibility over myth. Hamas chose otherwise. And Gaza – tragically, inexcusably – paid the price.