About Hamas’s First Official Public Comments on Mass Demonstrations Against It in Gaza: In its first official commentary against large-scale anti-Hamas protests, Hamas is attempting to deflect while cautiously threatening the demonstrators. It stated that the “resistance security” is monitoring the ‘incitement campaign’ against the “resistance,” accusing Israel of being directly behind the demonstrations. Hamas attempted to pretend that it understood why people were protesting, attributing their frustrations to the pressure and suffering they are experiencing, rather than actual anti-Hamas sentiments – saying that if some chanted against the group, these must therefore be individual attitudes and not truly representative of public sentiments. Hamas kept using the phrase “the resistance security,” effectively merging the remaining governance and security apparatus with the Al-Qassam brigade’s intelligence and counterintelligence services that are part of the group’s terror activities. Hamas accused Palestinian security agencies of being part of a pre-existing incitement campaign that is being run for purely political reasons. It alleged that these protests were somehow the result of Israel’s complete failure to defeat the “resistance.” Needless to say, these are despicable and out-of-touch statements that show the real crisis Hamas is facing. It would face an impossible public relations nightmare if it starts slaughtering the tens of thousands of protestors in Gaza; it doesn’t have the mass prison infrastructure to jail a large number of opponents; and it lacks the coordinated man power and command and control structures to systematically suppress large scale protests during an active war. Its only hope for containing these demonstrations is to taint them by invoking a sense of shame and fear of aiding the “enemy” if people chant against the terrorist organization. Indeed, one of the ways in which Hamas could contain these demonstrations is by allowing them to continue but pushing people not to chant against the Islamist terror group and to only demand an end to the war instead and chant against Israel, deflecting focus away from Hamas. This seems unlikely, however, as to the majority of the Palestinian people in Gaza, Hamas is synonymous with war. Its disappearance and exit from the scene would result in the end of the most destructive and deadly chapter in modern Palestinian history.
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