What Do You Really Know About Gazans?

For the first time in two years, we Israelis are finally starting to talk about the future of Gaza and its relationship with Israel. This future depends crucially on the beliefs and ideologies held by the two million people of Gaza. Unfortunately, our perceptions of Gazans have been poisoned by lies, misinformation and misunderstandings.

“Nearly 90% of Palestinians supported the attack on October 7th.” So proclaimed the Prime Minister of Israel to the United Nations General Assembly on September 26th. That was a lie. “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza,” wrote Avigdor Liberman, an opposition politician, on November 30th, 2023. That malicious falsehood was endlessly echoed over the last two years. And Yehuda Schlesinger, then a journalist for Israel Hayom, expressed an even more chilling sentiment: “Every adult [in Gaza] has raised children to kill. Every woman is a monster. Every youth wants to be a martyr. Every baby will grow up to be a terrorist. [We must] erase, kill, destroy, exterminate.”

Such statements, uttered by senior figures in our politics and media and echoed endlessly in our discourse, affect us in two ways. First, when we convince ourselves that no Gazans are innocents, we become jaded to the horrors that Gazan civilians have faced throughout this war. When every death is seen as a threat averted rather than a soul snuffed out, we feel no need to minimize civilian casualties and pain. Second, it blinds us to the possibility of a better future. When we do not hear the voices in Gaza crying out for change, we cannot imagine a different future for Gaza—and if we cannot imagine it, we cannot build toward it.

A moral reckoning is required here, but before that, we need to get our facts straight.

Start with Netanyahu’s claim about support for Hamas’ atrocities on October 7th. The number appears to be made up; the most-cited poll, published on December 13th 2023 by the respected Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), had 72% of Palestinians—in both the West Bank and Gaza—agreeing that “Hamas’ decision to launch the October 7th offensive was correct.” Polling group AWRAD found similar numbers. Both found substantially lower numbers in Gaza, and PCPSR found much lower support today: 37% in the most recent survey from May of this year. By the time Netanyahu gave his speech, Gazans were overwhelmingly rejecting Hamas’ attacks on October 7th.

Peer deeper into the original poll and an additional insight emerges. Over two thirds replied that “international law does not allow attacking or killing civilian women and children in their own homes.” How could many of those same respondents support the October 7th attacks? Because only 16% answered that they thought Hamas had committed such crimes. Only a quarter of polled Gazans reported seeing videos depicting atrocities against Israeli civilians. Conspiracy theories abound that Israeli civilian casualties were caused by “friendly fire” from IDF forces, as anyone who has spoken to Palestinians on the matter will attest. In the West Bank, where support for the attacks was much higher, only 7% watched the videos. If support for October 7th were a celebration of atrocities, as Netanyahu claimed, the opposite should be true—the areas with more support should have had higher viewing rates for the videos.

The very idea of relying on polls here is problematic. Any moral argument that puts the lives of 2 million men, women and children in the balance must rely on a strong evidential foundation. Yet polls are a highly imperfect source. Consider all the failures of polling during US elections, perhaps the most professionally polled event in the world. Some people hesitate to state their views truthfully; getting a representative sample is difficult; perhaps only particular types of people will respond to polls. Now consider polling people in an active war zone controlled by a terrorist group. How much would we rely on these polls in any other context?

As if to emphasize this point, the IDF published a document in August 2024 suggesting that numbers in a PCPSR poll had been manipulated by Hamas (without PCPSR’s knowledge). Whereas the poll indicated that 71% of Palestinians supported the October 7th attacks, the true number according to the document was 31%. PCPSR has challenged these findings, but this should at least give us pause. Results also vary wildly given small changes in question wording. Depending on the poll you choose, the percentage of Gazans today who would support Hamas in a hypothetical election could be 34% or 6%.

In fact, there’s a sense in which no poll can accurately sample the people of Gaza, a sense in which Netanyahu’s number was obviously and absurdly wrong. Polls generally only survey adults, yet about half of Gazans are children. When Netanyahu and others hold all Gazans accountable for Hamas’ actions, they are including the 800,000 Gazans under the age of 14.

​Polls are only one source of information—and misinformation—about Gazans. Sometimes we are misled by rumors: many believe to this day that Gazans who worked in Israel before the war provided intelligence to Hamas, even though the Shin Bet announced last year that it had not found evidence for this claim after extensive interrogations. Sometimes we fall for basic psychological errors, such as extrapolating from small, unrepresentative samples. How many Israelis base their perceptions of all Gazans on videos they’ve seen? Yet combine all the Gazans behaving despicably in videos, add all those who we know participated in the atrocities on October 7th, plus all members of all terrorist groups, plus any Gazans who held Israeli hostages, and the number is definitely less than 3% of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents. Meanwhile, we tend to dismiss contrary evidence; the thousands who protested and fought against Hamas despite enormous risk to themselves did not stop the countless headlines proclaiming “Gaza is Hamas.”

​Singer Idan Raichel and activist Yoseph Haddad have claimed that “No Gazans have been found who are Righteous Among the Nations”—in contrast to some Holocaust-era Europeans who helped Jews. Put aside the vastly different contexts—few of Gaza’s 2 million residents would have any way of assisting Jews if they wanted to. The claim unravels completely at a moment’s thought. Imagine a Gazan had information about hostages or Hamas terrorists and wanted to help; what would they do? They would convey intelligence to Israel. Would we hear their names? Of course not. But many reports do indicate that Israeli operations, including hostage rescue operations, were aided by information that came from Gazans. Just in July, a number of Palestinian collaborators were injured when a Hamas tunnel exploded, and were treated in Israel. We don’t know how many of these were willing collaborators, but that’s exactly the point: We don’t know, and we wouldn’t know.

​Peaceful gestures don’t go viral. Few saw the images of a few Gazans holding photographs of Israeli victims amid the rubble of Gaza, an initiative organized by the Gaza Youth Committee. And how many Israelis heard about the Gazan imam, Salman Al-Dayah, who issued a religious ruling against Hamas’ actions on October 7th?

The point is not to claim that “The Palestinians oppose Hamas” or “The Palestinians reject violence.” The Palestinians of Gaza are 2 million men, women and children, with radically different views, and whose beliefs change radically over time. Netanyahu accused “The Palestinians” of celebrating during 9/11; yet the vast majority of Gazans alive today had not even been born in 2001. In fact, most Gazans alive today hadn’t been born when Hamas won the elections of 2006.

That is the most important message we need to keep in mind. History teaches us that massive shifts in ideologies and views can happen very quickly. There may never have been two better historical examples of a population seemingly drenched in violence, fascism and extremism than the societies of Germany and Japan during World War II. Who could have disputed that it would take many generations for these societies to embrace peace and democracy? Yet in reality, these countries embarked on that path within a few years. Hope is always there, but we need to see reality clearly to realize it.