We Are All Supporting Hamas: Here’s Why

Anyone watching the scenes emerging from Gaza today cannot help but be moved. Children with hollow eyes and ribs visible beneath their skin. Infants held by exhausted parents, too weak even to cry from hunger. Families queuing for hours under the heat of the sun for a bag of flour or a few bottles of water. Hospitals overwhelmed, parents weeping because they cannot feed their children. The suffering is real, and it is deeply painful to witness. Compassion demands that we care.

Yet, if we care, we must also ask a painful but necessary question: How did we arrive at this point? And why has this tragedy continued, month after month, well into 2025?

The Protests That Followed

To understand, we must go back to October 7th, 2023, and something remarkable that happened the very next day. On October 8th, before Israel had mounted any significant response, there were already protests, not only in London but in cities across the globe: New York, Paris, Sydney, Johannesburg.

These were not protests against Hamas, the group that had just committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. They were protests against Israel.

Think about that. The day after Hamas murdered over a thousand innocent people, the outrage of tens of thousands around the world was aimed not at the killers, but at the victims. And since that moment, the narrative has been dominated not by Hamas’s atrocities but by Israel’s response. This was no accident. It was Hamas’s plan.

Hamas’s Deliberate Strategy of Suffering

Hamas knew exactly what it was doing when it launched its attacks. They created a lose-lose situation for Israel. If Israel did nothing, Hamas could strike again and again, as they have openly vowed to do. If Israel responded militarily, Hamas had already designed the battlefield to maximise civilian pain and suffering.

For years, Hamas built not bomb shelters for its people but tunnels for its fighters and rockets. Billions of dollars of aid and concrete were poured underground, not to protect civilians but to hide terrorists and weapons. Which government that claims to care for its people fails to build a single civilian shelter, especially when it knows war is inevitable?

This is why, today, we see those haunting scenes: malnourished children in crowded hospital wards, families displaced and hungry, parents desperate to feed their children. Hamas designed this suffering. They made it part of their war plan, because every starving child becomes a powerful image for their propaganda.

Even Aid Becomes a Weapon

Consider the issue of humanitarian aid. In normal times, food is life. But in Hamas’s hands, aid is a weapon.

When aid is allowed in, Hamas seizes it, storing food and medicine for its fighters, selling it on the black market, and using it to reward loyalty. When aid is delivered by others, Hamas often disrupts its distribution, creating chaos and sometimes violence at the very points where food is handed out. In recent months, we have seen desperate crowds trampled, shot at, and crushed, not because Israel wants people to starve, but because Hamas’s chaos strategy thrives on these images.

For decades, Israel has taken extraordinary steps to minimise civilian casualties, often at a cost to its own soldiers. It drops leaflets, sends text messages, and issues repeated evacuation warnings. And yet now, in an age when every moment is broadcast live, we are asked to believe that Israel deliberately targets civilians who queue for bread and water. This defies logic unless we recognise Hamas’s strategy: turn human suffering into a weapon, and make the world blame Israel for it.

We Are All Supporting Hamas

Here is the uncomfortable truth: we are all, in some way, supporting Hamas. Not directly, perhaps, but effectively. Hundreds of NGOs, governments, and aid agencies have called on Israel to ease restrictions on Gaza. Twenty-seven countries have urged Israel to lift its blockade. Yet how many have called on Hamas to do the one thing that would immediately end the war: lay down its arms, release the hostages, and accept peace?

Hamas has rejected every ceasefire proposal that required it to stop fighting. It has refused to renounce violence or even recognise Israel’s right to exist. And still, time and again, global protests focus only on Israel. Compassion is noble, but compassion without truth can be dangerous. By focusing solely on Israel’s actions, ignoring Hamas’s culpability, we play directly into the hands of those who brought about this suffering in the first place.

What Is Required Now

First, Hamas must step down. They must lay down their arms and accept the reality that this war, like every war they have started, has been a disaster for their own people. Their leadership must find a way to leave the Strip, the hostages must be returned, and a new era must begin for Gaza. The situation as it stands is untenable, not only for Israel but for Palestinians themselves. Hamas began this war, but they have lost it.

Second, the people of Gaza must be given hope, not false hope of martyrdom, but the tangible hope of life, dignity, and freedom. For too long, they have been held hostage not only physically but emotionally and ideologically. They need leaders who will build schools instead of tunnels, homes instead of bunkers, and a future of peace instead of perpetual war. The international community, including Arab states, must commit to rebuilding Gaza as a place of life rather than death.

Third, we must recover moral clarity. Compassion must never blind us to truth. We can love the Palestinian people, mourn their losses, and still hold Hamas fully accountable for what has happened. True compassion demands truth because only with truth can there be justice, and only with justice can there be peace.

A Mother’s Cry

I think of a mother I once heard interviewed in Gaza. She held her two children by the hand and said through tears: “I do not want them to be martyrs. I want them to be doctors, to be teachers, to live.” That is what Hamas has stolen: the right of parents to dream for their children. And that is why the greatest act of compassion for Gaza is not to excuse Hamas, but to free Gaza from them.

A Closing Thought

The prophet Isaiah spoke of a time when nations “shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4). That vision is not naïve; it is necessary. But it begins with moral courage: with leaders who choose life over death, peace over war, and truth over propaganda.

If we truly care for life, then we must stop supporting those who glorify death. Hamas must step aside. The hostages must come home. And the people of Gaza must be given back their future so they may finally beat their swords into ploughshares and live in peace with their neighbours.