What Does Hamas and the Palestinians Have to Lose?

In the Atlantic of July 31, 2025, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib suggests that Hamas deliberately wants Gaza to starve.

While in practice, it is Israel that is blockading the entry of food and aid into Gaza, I can understand why Hamas itself might want the same objective.

For one, Hamas has already scored a major victory with its horrific attack of October 7, 2023. It may seem callous to propose that the carnage of October 7 has indeed yielded a victory for the perpetrator, but this is in many ways similar to the mass killings that have become folkore in US culture. The perpetrator gets to become a celebrity. All the millions of people around the world who hadn't heard of Palestine - except maybe the lies of the Zionists - now know what happened to Palestine over the past 80 years. 

It is unfortunate that it took such a barbaric action on the part of the Palestinian resistance to an illegal and equally barbaric Israeli occupation, but the net outcome has been, finally and at long last, a recognition of the plight of the indigenous Palestinian population which, over the past 80 years, has lost its land to foreign settlers who falsely claim that their god, Yahweh, gave them the land some 3,000 years ago, which for many reasonable people around the world is a garbage religious argument from the Bronze Age of humanity.

The October 7, 2023 attacks and the ensuing Jewish savagery against an innocent civilian population have exposed the 100-year-old lies, falsehoods, and distortions of history by ultra-religious Jewish barbarians, disguised as the "Zionist" movement, with which European colonial settlers decided to deprive the Palestinian nation of their land and their nationhood. Israel's brith is one of the most successful GREAT REPLACEMENT episodes of modern history, whereby a ramshackle amalgam of disparate peoples, united by a primitive religion itself based on a garbage parchment written in the deserts of Arabia by wandering stinking nomads, invade Palestine, dislodge by utter violence and barbarity the indigenous population into refugee camps, and replace historic Palestine with an artificial, alien, and brutal entity.

Second, after decades of torment, persecution, blocakdes, killings, expulsions and home demolitions, dehumanization and slow-simmering ethnic cleansing by the Zionists of the Palestinians, despair can lead people to extremes. Yes, as the UN Secretary General said the day after October 7, 2023 attack that "it did not happen in a vacuum". It's not like a few crazies of Hamas, who otherwise were living a fantastic life under a generous and civilized Jewish occupation, woke up one day and decided to just go and kill innocent Israelis. The October 7 attacks came on the heels of 80 years of direct barbarity and denial of the humanity and rights of the indigenous Palestinians who for 80 years were killed, raped, imprisoned, bombed, denied access to their homes and villages.... The list is too long of all the calamities that the Zionist settlers have inflicted on the Palestinians.

Therefore, and like inhabitants of ancient Phoenician cities like Tyre and Sidon in Lebanon who decided to commit collective suicide rather than submit to the invading Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and others, it may make sense for the Palestinians of Gaza to commit collective suicide rather than submit themselves to an occupier who everyone knows has only one objective in mind - whether by brutal war or by slow simmering genocide - to anyway kill, expel, persecute, and ultimately exterminate entirely. Given the brutality of the Zionists with their uninterrupted supply of Western weapons, the Palestinians know they can't win this asymmetric war. 

Moreover, Israel never publicly articulates what it wants to do with the Palestinian people. It vilifies them, dehumanized them, rejects a Palestinian state, but it never says what plans it has for the 6 million Palestinians it controls. Which means that the Zionist rapists of Palestine do actually contemplate a future in which the Palestinians are absent. Which means, by extrapolation, that Israel does actually plan for a major ethnic cleansing in Palestine, some of which is outright extermination while the rest involves displacement.

For what are Israel's realistic options vis-a-vis the Palestinians?

1- Status quo: Maintaning the Palestinian population under brutal occupation while land theft and expulsions continue, slowly and inexorably depleting Palestine of any sense of nationhood, let alone statehood. This may take decades, but the Zionists had heretofore banked on this "slow" genocide of the Palestinians going unnoticed by the international community, which it has until October 7, 2023 which opened the floodgates of history, records, and truth and began debunking the Zionist lies and falsehoods.

2- One-state solution: Perhaps the most civilized of all solutions, in which Israelis and Palestinians live in one genuine multi-ethnic democracy. Hard to imagine, but why not? (Belgium, Lebanon, the US, the UK, India....). There virtually is no country on earth that is made up of just one ethnic or religious group. Nearly all countries are multi-diverse and have found ways to manage their diversity. Still, it is hard to imagine that the foreign ultra-religious Jewish Zionist barbarians from European stock would be so civilized to contemplate sharing Palestine with its native indigenous Palestinian population. Their criminal Yahweh's promise in his garbage torah did not say "Thou Shalt Share the Promised Land" with the natives. He in fact egged the nomadic Jews to kill every man, woman, child and beast of Palestinian Canaan. Could Yahweh have evolved into a decent civilized god by now? It doesn't seem to be the case, because his modern-day "Jews" don't seem to listen to civility and humanity. They want all the land and without any non-Jew in it. Some 3,000 years after Yahweh, the English colonial crook Lord Balfour did ask the prospective Jewish European rapists of Palestine to whom he was gifting Palestine to be civilized, "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine". Prejudice? What prejudice? Starvation, mass killings, and sheer barbarity are not "prejudice" will argue criminals like Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.

3- One-time massive event of ethnic cleansing, genocide and displacement to void Palestine of its indigenous people, which seems to be the option currently pursued by the ultra-religious Israeli barbarians. A terrible legacy for the Zionists, themselves once victims of genocide, to bear.

Yes, as The Atlantic title below headlines, Hamas wants Gaza to starve because no other dignified option besides suicide has so far been offered by the world to the Palestinian tragedy. They have nothing left to lose. For 80 years the Palestinians have first been evicted from their ancestral villages, towns and cities, then from refugee camp to refugee camp. 80% of Gaza's population is made up of refugees expelled from villages, towns and cities that once were Palestinian and are now Israeli. Better death, the Palestinians seem to be telling the world, than more errance into further refugee camps.

And if suicide is their only option, the Palestinians might as well commit suicide à la Samson. Hence October 7, 2023.

Death and annihilation are right now the Palestinians' only, best, and ironically, most "viable", option, just as it is the most sublime dream for the Zionists.
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Hamas Wants Gaza to Starve
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
Thu, July 31, 2025


Majdi Fathi / Andalou / Getty

This week, the world seems to be finally paying attention to the magnitude of the suffering in Gaza. The futile policies pursued by the Israeli government—prodded by the far-right cabinet ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir—have reduced the supply of humanitarian aid, food, and supplies in Gaza. Israel has unnecessarily reengineered the distribution of aid, failing to achieve its goal of separating the civilian population from Hamas while further constricting its supply. And for these decisions, it has attracted the justified condemnation of the international community.

Despite the surge of hundreds of trucks into Gaza over the past four days, very few supplies have made it into warehouses to be distributed to the population. Aid shipments are being seized by a combination of desperate civilians, lawless gangs, clan-affiliated thugs, and merchants of death. Chaos and apocalyptic scenery are the norm, not the exception. There is no denying the reality of the widespread malnutrition and hunger in the Gaza Strip.

In recent days, I’ve spoken with dozens of Gazans who are furious about what is unfolding around them. They are angry, one told me, at the “hordes of selfish people who are attacking aid convoys to steal and collect aid in a horrific manner without caring for Gazans who chose not to participate in these humiliating and demeaning displays of inhumanity, no matter the level of hunger.” But their anger is directed primarily at Hamas, which they hold responsible for putting the people of Gaza in this position, and for its continued refusal to end the war that it started. “Hitler fought in his bunker until he killed himself in World War II in the Battle of Berlin,” another person said, complaining that Hamas is hunkered down in its tunnels, willing to see Gaza destroyed to the very last child.

Hamas actually wants a famine in Gaza. Producing mass death from hunger is the group’s final play, its last hope for ending the war in a way that advances its goals. Hamas has benefited from Israel’s decision to use food as a lever against the terror group, because the catastrophic conditions for civilians have generated an international outcry, which is worsening Israel’s global standing and forcing it to reverse course.

Online supporters of the terror group have consistently attacked any efforts to alleviate the crisis. In posts and videos, they have dismissed efforts to send in food by convoys of trucks from Egypt and Jordan, pointing to the chaotic scenes as desperate Gazans scramble for aid. They have likewise attacked the airdrops that are now under way and called for them to be stopped immediately.

Hamas’s evident desire to extend and deepen the crisis of hunger helps explain the recent breakdown of cease-fire negotiations, even as Gazans are needlessly dying. The group’s intransigence led both Israel and Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, to walk away from the talks. If the hunger crisis and humanitarian issues are addressed, Hamas can no longer use the suffering of Gazans to generate an international outcry or use the resultant leverage to end the war on its own terms.

But the two-state-solution conference convened by France and Saudi Arabia at the United Nations shows the way forward. In a remarkable statement, endorsed by the European Union and the Arab League, the participants condemned the October 7 attacks and the taking of hostages, and declared that “Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority.” The conference envisions the end of hostilities, the establishment of an international mission in Gaza, and the ultimate return of the Palestinian Authority to govern the Strip.

Many Arab states have been reluctant to call out Hamas publicly, even though they do so privately on a regular basis, for fear of upsetting their own populations. But now they have recognized the importance of openly and transparently calling for Hamas to give up control of Gaza and disarm. Both Israel and the international community should capitalize on this shift, to isolate the terrorist organization and give hope for a better trajectory for Gaza’s future.

If Hamas believes that the suffering of Gazans bolsters its cause, Israeli decision makers should take that to heart. They should abandon their misguided and inhumane policies and cease their efforts to pressure the population as a means of pressuring the terror group. The best way to undermine Hamas’s position is to instead flood Gaza with food, and to alleviate the suffering of its people.