Gaza is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Just days after Israeli troops withdrew from key areas, fierce fighting broke out between Hamas forces and the Dughmush clan, one of Gaza’s most powerful armed families. Gunfire rattled through the streets of Gaza City as civilians fled and Hamas fighters hunted their rivals house by house. Officials tried to play it down, calling it a mere “revenge incident.” It isn’t. It’s the beginning of Gaza turning in on itself.
The current violence exposes the truth that many in the West still refuse to face. Hamas was never a governing movement. It was a militia masquerading as one.
What the world is witnessing is not a new war, but the slow-motion implosion of a failed political project. Hamas built its rule on terror and intimidation, not governance. It created a society where power came from the gun, not the ballot box. Now those same guns are being turned inward. For seventeen years, Hamas promised to liberate “Palestine. Instead, it has enslaved Gaza.
The current violence exposes the truth that many in the West still refuse to face. Hamas was never a governing movement. It was a militia masquerading as one. It taxed and tortured, smuggled and extorted. It built tunnels and rockets instead of roads and hospitals. It maintained power through fear and propaganda, while using Gaza’s population as human shields and bargaining chips.
When Israeli forces pulled back, the thin fabric of Hamas’ control began to tear. The Dughmush clan, whose armed networks have long operated as a kind of parallel authority, is only the first to challenge the regime. Dozens have been killed in street battles. Families have been displaced once again. And yet the international community still pretends that this is a temporary hiccup, an unfortunate episode in Gaza’s “post-war recovery.”
It is nothing of the sort. It is the logical end of Hamas’ rule.
For years, diplomats and commentators assured us that if Israel simply relaxed its blockade and treated Hamas as a political interlocutor, moderation would follow. It never did. The movement did not mellow with power; it metastasised. Gaza under Hamas has become a theocratic garrison, where dissent is crushed and fanaticism rewarded. The world kept hoping that responsibility would temper ideology. It didn’t. The ideology devoured responsibility instead.
Today, as rival factions exchange fire, the Western narrative about Gaza lies in ruins. Those who claimed that Hamas could bring stability now confront a grim reality: a society governed by fear inevitably consumes itself once that fear loses direction. Hamas cannot run a civil administration because it never wanted to. Its mission was not to govern, but to fight - even if that meant fighting its own people.
The scenes from Gaza are proof that Israel’s warnings were not paranoia but foresight. Israeli officials said repeatedly that any “independent Gaza” under Hamas would end in chaos. Few listened. Many in Europe still framed Hamas as a product of occupation, a misunderstood movement that could be reasoned with. But what kind of liberation movement turns its guns on its own civilians the moment the external threat recedes?
The uncomfortable truth is that the problem is not Israel’s presence, but Hamas’ existence. The misery of Gaza is not imposed from without but engineered from within.
The uncomfortable truth is that the problem is not Israel’s presence, but Hamas’ existence. The misery of Gaza is not imposed from without but engineered from within. For years, Western aid helped sustain Hamas’ grip by treating the regime as a conduit for humanitarian assistance. The result is plain to see: an entrenched tyranny feeding off the same international sympathy it exploits.
Gaza’s descent into civil strife should end the illusion that Hamas is indispensable. It isn’t. It is replaceable, and it must be replaced if Gaza is ever to have a future. The question is whether the world has the courage to say so. Washington already knows it, even if it whispers it behind closed doors. Hamas remains in control only because no one has yet offered an alternative. But “temporary” arrangements in the Middle East have a way of becoming permanent disasters.
Israel’s critics will struggle to explain this moment. They insisted that the problem lay in Israeli policy, in the blockade, in the lack of negotiations. Yet now, in the absence of Israeli troops, Gaza is tearing itself apart.
This is not occupation; it is self-destruction. And it confirms what Israel has argued all along: that peace cannot grow in the soil of fanaticism.
