Shadowbanning and the Israel-Hamas war, explained.
“Algospeak” is an evasion tactic for automated moderation on social media, where users create new words to use in place of keywords that might get picked up by AI-powered filters. People might refer to dead as “unalive,” or sex as “seggs,” or porn as “corn” (or simply the corn emoji).
There’s an algospeak term for Palestinians as well: “P*les+in1ans.” Its very existence speaks to a concern among many people posting and sharing pro-Palestine content during the war between Hamas and Israel that their posts are being unfairly suppressed. Some users believe their accounts, along with certain hashtags, have been “shadowbanned” as a result.
Algospeak is just one of the user-developed methods of varying effectiveness that are supposed to dodge suppression on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. People might use unrelated hashtags, screenshot instead of repost, or avoid employing Arabic hashtags to attempt to evade apparent but unclear limitations on content about Palestine. It’s not clear whether these methods really work, but their spread among activists and around the internet speaks to the real fear of having this content hidden from the rest of the world.
“Shadowbanning” gets thrown around a lot as an idea, is difficult to prove, and is not always easy to define. Below is a guide to its history, how it manifests, and what you as a social media user can do about it.
What is shadowbanning?
Shadowbanning is an often covert form of platform moderation that limits who sees a piece of content, rather than banning it altogether. According to a Vice dive into the history of the term, it likely originates as far back as the internet bulletin board systems of the 1980s.
In its earliest iterations, shadowbanning worked kind of like a digital quarantine: Shadowbanned users could still log in and post to the community, but no one else could see their posts. They were present but contained. If someone was shadowbanned by one of the site’s administrators for posting awful things to a message board, they’d essentially be demoted to posting into nothingness, without knowing that was the case.
Social media, as it evolved, upended how communities formed and gathered online, and the definition of shadowbanning expanded. People get seen online not just by creating an account and posting to a community’s virtual space, but by understanding how to get engagement through a site’s algorithms and discovery tools, by getting reshares from influential users, by purchasing ads, and by building followings of their own. Moderating became more complicated as users became savvier about getting seen and working around automated filters.
At this point, shadowbanning has come to mean any “really opaque method of hiding users from search, from the algorithm, and from other areas where their profiles might show up,” said Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). A user might not know they’ve been shadowbanned. Instead, they might notice the effects: a sudden drop in likes or reposts, for instance. Their followers might also have issues seeing or sharing content a shadowbanned account posts.
If you’re from the United States, you might know shadowbanning as a term thrown around by conservative activists and politicians who believe that social media sites — in particular Facebook and Twitter (now X) — have deliberately censored right-wing views. This is part of a years-long campaign that has prompted lawsuits and congressional hearings.
While the evidence is slim that these platforms were engaging in systemic censorship of conservatives, the idea seems to catch on any time a platform takes action against a prominent right-wing account with a large following. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a pair of cases challenging laws in Texas and Florida that restrict how social media companies can moderate their sites.
Why are people concerned about shadowbanning in relation to the Israel-Hamas war?
War produces a swell of violent imagery, propaganda, and misinformation online, circulating at a rapid pace and triggering intense emotional responses from those who view it. That is inevitable. The concern from activists and digital rights observers is that content about Palestinians is not being treated fairly by the platforms’ moderation systems, leading to, among other things, shadowbanning.
Outright account bans are pretty visible to both the account holder and anyone else on the platform. Some moderation tools designed to combat misinformation involve publicly flagging content with information boxes or warnings. Shadowbanning, by comparison, is not publicly labeled, and platforms might not tell a user that their account’s reach is limited, or why. Some users, though, have noticed signs that they might be shadowbanned after posting about Palestine. According to Mashable, these include Instagram users who saw their engagement crater after posting with their location set to Gaza in solidarity, sharing links to fundraisers to help people in Palestine, or posting content that is supportive of Palestinians.
Some digital rights organizations, including the EFF and 7amleh-The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, are actively tracking potential digital rights violations of Palestinians during the conflict, particularly on Instagram, where some Palestinian activists have noticed troubling changes to how their content circulates in recent weeks.
“These include banning the use of Arabic names for recent escalations [i.e., the Israel-Hamas war] while allowing the Hebrew name, restricting comments from profiles that are not friends, and…significantly reducing the visibility of posts, Reels, and stories,” Nadim Nashif, the co-founder and director of 7amleh, wrote in an email to Vox.
In a statement, Meta said that the post visibility issues impacting some Palestinian users were due to a global “bug” and that some Instagram hashtags were no longer searchable because a portion of the content using it violated Meta rules. Meta’s statement does not name specific hashtags that have been limited under this policy.
Mona Shtaya, a Palestinian digital rights activist, took to Instagram to characterize the hashtag shadowbans as a “collective punishment against people who share political thoughts or document human rights violations” that will negatively impact efforts to fact-check and share accurate information about the situation in Gaza.
What’s the difference between shadowbanning and moderation bias?
Shadowbanning is just one aspect of a broader problem that digital rights experts are tracking when it comes to potential bias in the enforcement of a platform’s rules. And this is not a new issue for pro-Palestinian content.
Moderation bias “comes in a lot of different flavors, and it’s not always intentional,” York said. Platforms might underresource or incorrectly resource their language competency for a specific language, something that York said has long been an issue with how US-based platforms such as Meta moderate content in Arabic. “There might be significant numbers of Arabic-language content moderators, but they struggle because Arabic is across a number of different dialects,” she noted.
Biases also emerge in how certain terms are classified by moderation algorithms. We know that this specific sort of bias can affect Palestinian content because it happened before. In 2021, during another escalation in conflict between Hamas and Israel, digital rights groups documented hundreds of content removals that seemed to unfairly target pro-Palestine sentiments. Meta eventually acknowledged that its systems were blocking references to the al-Aqsa Mosque, a holy site for Muslims that was incorrectly flagged in Meta’s systems as connected to terrorist groups.
Meta commissioned an independent report into its moderation decisions during the 2021 conflict, which documented Meta’s weaknesses in moderating Arabic posts in context. It also found that Meta’s decisions “appear to have had an adverse human rights impact” on the rights of Palestinian users’ “freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination.”
In response to the report, Meta promised to review its relevant policies and improve its moderation of Arabic, including by recruiting more moderators with expertise in specific dialects. Meta’s current moderation of Israel-Hamas war content is being led by a centralized group with expertise in Hebrew and Arabic, the company said. Some content removals, they added, are going through without account “strikes” to avoid automatically banning accounts that have had content taken down in error.
What other content gets shadowbanned?
Claims of shadowbanning are associated with divisive issues. But probably the best-documented cases have to do with how major platforms handle content about nudity and sex. Sex workers have long documented their own shadowbans on mainstream social media platforms, particularly after a pair of bills passed in 2018 aimed at stopping sex trafficking removed protections for online platforms that hosted a wide range of content about sex.
In general, York said, shadowbans become useful moderation tools for platforms when the act of directly restricting certain sorts of content might become a problem for them.
“They don’t want to be seen as cutting people off entirely,” she said. “But if they’re getting pressure from different sides, whether it’s governments or shareholders or advertisers, it is probably in their interest to try to curtail certain types of speech while also allowing the people to stay on the platform so it becomes less of a controversy.”
TikTok content can also get shadowbanned, according to its community guidelines, which note that the platform “may reduce discoverability, including by redirecting search results, or making videos ineligible for recommendation in the ‘For You’ feed” for violations. Other platforms, like Instagram, YouTube, and X, have used tools to downrank or limit the reach of “borderline” or inappropriate content, as defined by their moderation systems.
While it’s very difficult — if not impossible — to prove shadowbanning unless a company decides to confirm that it happened, there are some documented cases of the biases inherent within these moderation systems that, while not quite fitting the definition of shadowbanning, might be worth considering while trying to evaluate claims. TikTok had to correct an error in 2021 that automatically banned creators from using phrases like “black people” or “black success” in their marketing bios for the platform’s database of creators who are available to create sponsored content for brands. In 2017, LGBTQ creators discovered that YouTube had labeled otherwise innocuous videos that happened to feature LGBTQ people in them as “restricted content,” limiting their viewability.
How can you tell if your account has been shadowbanned?
This can be difficult! “I do feel like people are often gaslighted by the companies about this,” said York. Many platforms, she continued, “won’t even admit that shadowbanning exists,” even if they use automated moderation tools like keyword filters or account limitations that are capable of creating shadowbans. And some of the telltale signs of shadowbanning — lost followers, a drop in engagement — could be explained by an organic loss of interest in a user’s content or a legitimate software bug.
Some platform-specific sites promise to analyze your account and let you know if you’ve been shadowbanned, but those tools are not foolproof. (You should also be careful about giving your account information to a third-party site.) There is one solution, York said: Companies could be more transparent about the content they take down or limit, and explain why.
Finding good information about a conflict is already difficult. This is especially true for those trying to learn more about the Israel-Hamas war, and in particular, about Gaza. Few journalists have been able to do on-the-ground reporting from Gaza, making it extremely difficult to verify and contextualize the situation there. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of this writing, 29 journalists have died since the war began. Adding the specter of shadowbans to this crisis of reliable information threatens yet another avenue for providing and amplifying firsthand accounts to a wider public.
From the politics of US health care to assistance for selecting a Medicare Advantage plan.
Health care open enrollment is here and we’re here to help guide you through it.
During this baffling annual ritual, Americans encounter our health care system’s most confounding questions. Why am I stuck with my employer’s health plan? Who thought flexible spending accounts were a good idea? Why do I have to make so many choices when enrolling in Medicare? Is my dental insurance a scam?
Those were the questions we had here at Vox going into this open enrollment season. But we were curious to know what questions our audience had too. Last week, Vox supporters had an opportunity to ask and have answered their questions about open enrollment. If I were to identify a common theme, it was less about specific benefits and more big picture: Why is it so hard to make things simpler? Why is our health care discourse so contentious?
In the spirit of Vox’s commitment to keeping our journalism free to all, we wanted to share some of those questions and answers with all of our readers. So here they are, lightly edited for clarity and length.
Why does Medicare For All or some universal health care for everybody seem like such a monumental task to accomplish in the USA as opposed to other countries around the world? Is it simply that we as Americans are focused on ourselves instead of helping others around us or is it more complicated than that?
I think the problem boils down to two distinct but related issues.
- The health care industry is very influential in Congress and willing to spend a lot of money to preserve the status quo.
- The American public may have reservations about our current health care system, but they are apprehensive about change.
The first issue speaks for itself: Going back to the Truman era, the industry has marshaled immense resources to oppose proposals that would lead to more government involvement in health care. The Clinton health plan, opposed by the insurance industry’s Harry & Louise ads, is the best example of the effectiveness of its tactics. The Obama administration cut deals with the industry to get the Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed but, as a result, the law largely worked under the infrastructure that was already in place. There are some signs of the industry’s influence waning, such as Congress’s success in authorizing Medicare drug negotiations, but its ability to sway Republicans and moderate Democrats will always be the most important vote-counting hurdle to any major restructuring getting passed.
The political headwinds are also strengthened by the second issue: the voters. I have sat in on focus groups about Medicare-for-all with middle-of-the-road-ish voters who are in theory open to change. They may not love what they have now, but many of them like the idea of having choices and they are worried that they will somehow end up worse off if there is a big overhaul. I do think people find some of the theoretical benefits of Medicare-for-all appealing, but they can be swayed by arguments pointing out the potential downsides. And the truth is, for all its problems, there is a critical mass of people who are just satisfied enough with the status quo. Polling consistently finds Americans think poorly of the system as a whole but they are more positive about their own health coverage. That’s the paradox Medicare-for-all supporters have to solve.
So I think as long as those two factors hold true, it’s hard to imagine big changes happening. It’s certainly possible that things will deteriorate enough that the political environment will change. But who knows if we’ll ever reach that point.
Why is health care so political in the US?
I don’t think the US is unique in having health care be a contentious issue. I traveled to other countries for our Everybody Covered series a few years ago and each of the places I visited had been through spirited health care debates. Protesters marched through the halls of the Taiwanese capital when Taiwan was considering its single-payer plan. Australia has seen its health care system swing wildly between the public and private sectors depending on which party was in power, before settling into a hybrid model. Doctors in the Netherlands protested over working conditions in the early 2000s, leading to reforms to their sector.
But I think the US health care discourse is distinct for one big reason. While those countries have difficult debates about health care and have seen big changes, they have reached a social consensus that universal health care is the goal. It’s just a question of how to achieve it. The US has never reached that kind of consensus. Even today, the two parties have very different views on that question. I think that’s why our health care debate can seem so divisive: because it’s over fundamental questions about what the government should be doing and its obligations to its citizens.
On top of that, you have a lot of money behind any health care debate. Health care is one of our economy’s biggest sectors and the various companies involved with it are willing to spend a lot of money whenever their interests are at stake.
Something I’ve been wondering about is how much more accessible care for mental health has gotten, even though there’s a long way to go. When did mental health become more recognized/a more important part of health insurance?
You’re right: We do still have a long way to go. A recent survey found that 40 percent of patients who sought in-network mental health care had to make four or more calls to find a provider who would see them — compared to just 14 percent for physical health care. More than half of patients said they had had an insurance claim for mental health care denied three or more times, compared to about one-third who said they had the same experience with physical services.
But, to your point, that doesn’t mean we haven’t made progress. Insurers used to have no obligation to cover mental health care at all. The first mental health parity law was passed in the late 1990s as a kind of bipartisan consolation prize after Bill Clinton’s health care reform plan fizzled out. It was largely symbolic because the health insurance market was mostly unregulated at the time. Sometimes health insurers didn’t cover mental health care at all. On the individual market, health insurers would disqualify people from coverage if they had mental health needs.
In 2008, Congress took another pass at improving coverage for mental health services, attaching a bill to the must-pass financial bailout and establishing the rules that exist today. (The ACA then extended these requirements to insurance sold on the law’s insurance marketplaces.) The 2008 law said insurers couldn’t place unfair limits on mental health care. You couldn’t be limited to two mental health visits but permitted six doctor visits, for example. Patients couldn’t face higher out-of-pocket costs for mental health services.
In practice, though, it has been hard to enforce. Mental health providers may be in an insurance network, but that doesn’t mean they have availability to see new patients, to name one common problem. The Biden administration is taking new steps, 15 years after the law first passed, to try to force more compliance.
On behalf of my mother, I’d like to ask how best to determine if a Medicare Advantage plan serves her better than traditional Medicare. I know that the Advantage plans generally cover medical, prescription and some dental and that traditional Medicare does not cover prescriptions or dental and that she’d have to enroll in a Part D plan for prescriptions. Other seniors I know have told us to steer clear of Advantage plans due to losing benefits under medical.
It’s funny you should ask. After our series published, I was sent a new online tool for Medicare plan shopping, by a Berkeley professor who sits on the company’s board. I can’t formally endorse it, of course, but I did mess around with it a bit as a hypothetical shopper and it seemed designed to help people compare different options. Healthpilot might be worth checking out: http://healthpilot.com/.
The AARP has other resources that might be useful to people in this situation. As Allie Volpe wrote for our series, in a guide to picking your health plan, there’s a lot of free assistance available to help people make open enrollment decisions.
What will “full” war between Israel and Hamas mean? And 6 other questions about the conflict.
Israel has launched what appears to be a ground invasion of Gaza, after the worst outbreak of violence between it and Hamas in decades. The weeks-old conflict has already claimed over 9,000 lives as of Saturday, and likely will claim many more.
“We moved to a new phase in the war,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in a statement in Hebrew on Saturday.
Over the previous 24 hours, Israel had expanded its air, sea, and ground assault on Gaza, amid a near-total internet and phone blackout in the territory. Israel has not yet explicitly called this an invasion, and the effort appears more limited than the full-scale one some experts expected. But Israel repeatedly signaled Friday and Saturday that this is a significant ground operation. Now, after heavy bombardment of the Palestinian territory, Israeli troops are actively fighting in Gaza.
It has been, according to one Palestinian who was able to post online, “the worst night in the history of Gaza.”
This flare-up of the conflict began on October 7, when the armed wing of the Palestinian group Hamas launched a massive, complex, and well-coordinated attack on Israel early on October 7 from the territory it controls in Gaza. Militants killed more than 1,400 people, including at least 31 US citizens; wounded 4,500; kidnapped over 220 people, including US citizens and many civilians; and fired rockets on Israeli civilians.
It was the most devastating and brutal assault Israel had suffered in decades; Israeli officials described it as their country’s 9/11. The horror of the attack only became clearer in the days after, as reports of some — if not all — of the worst atrocities were confirmed. In recent days, the Israeli military shared videos and information with a select group of journalists about the extent of Hamas’s violence. It included grueling stories and imagery about families and children being targeted.
In response to the October 7 attack, Israel officially declared war against Hamas one day later. In the weeks since, the country has launched over 8,000 missiles on Gaza, declared a “full siege” of the territory it has blockaded for 16 years, and told Palestinians in the north of Gaza — where approximately 1.1 million people live — that they should relocate to the south. Only after US and international pressure did Israel allow a trickle of trucks with humanitarian aid to enter the country.
Thus far, over 7,700 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed and over 18,000 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. An estimated 1.4 million people are displaced, with about half of them sheltering in United Nations-run facilities. Protests around the world calling for a ceasefire intensified Friday night, and world leaders like UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the EU’s top diplomat made similar calls on Saturday.
“Without a fundamental change, the people of Gaza will face an unprecedented avalanche of human suffering,” Guterres’s office said in online statement Friday.
Several countries, including Egypt and Jordan, have volunteered to try to defuse the situation diplomatically, and Qatar has been helping lead negotiations to secure the release of Hamas-held hostages and potentially deliver a temporary ceasefire.
The Biden administration stood immediately behind Israel after Hamas’s terrorist attack, promising additional military support, sending several US warships and aircraft squadrons into the Eastern Mediterranean, speaking vociferously on Israel’s behalf, and repeatedly visiting the country. The US has also reportedly pushed Israel in private to consider avoiding a full-scale ground invasion that would lead to high casualties and could draw in other regional actors.
Given the near-total communications blackout — and the Israeli military’s circumspection about its operations — it’s hard to know the extent of what’s currently happening in Gaza. A few reporters, like those for Al Jazeera, are occasionally able to provide updates via satellite.
We do know there were factors that likely contributed more immediately to this outbreak of violence — months of simmering conflict in Jerusalem and the West Bank over increased Israeli settlements, a far-right Israeli government that has been conducting a de facto annexation of the West Bank, and Arab states normalizing relations with Israel (including a new potential deal with Saudi Arabia) — but also that it is a war decades in the making.
Most Gazans are either refugees from the 1948 Nakba, when mass numbers of Palestinians were displaced during the Arab-Israeli War, or descendants of those refugees, said Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They’ve lived under a strict blockade by Israel and Egypt since Hamas assumed control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, relying on foreign aid to access basic necessities. About one-third of Gazans live in extreme poverty, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
The international community has largely abandoned efforts to find a political solution to this crisis. Now there is likely to be a long, bloody battle causing significant deaths on both sides, with Palestinians set to bear the brunt of the casualties and destruction going forward.
Here’s what else you need to know.
- Where does the conflict currently stand?
After a couple of days of fighting to secure its borders after the Hamas attack, and then weeks of heavy bombardment of Gaza, Israel recently ramped up its military operations against Hamas. First, it conducted small, hours-long raids into Gaza with tanks, and then on Friday night began its largest ground assault since October 7.
Troops and tanks entered Gaza; they remain actively fighting there today. Palestinian journalist Hind Khoudary told Tahrir Podcast that bombardment was continuous throughout the night.
“Our forces are currently operating on the ground in the Gaza Strip,” Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said in a video posted Saturday afternoon to X, the website formerly known as Twitter. “These activities are being supported by precise and heavy fire.” Hamas also confirmed that fighting was taking place in at least two areas in northern Gaza.
These operations have turned Gaza into a “ball of fire,” Ashraf al-Qudra, a Gaza health ministry spokesperson, told reporters. Over 300 people have been killed in designated safe zones, he added, and destruction is widespread. Already, Gaza was suffering a humanitarian crisis because of the siege; hospitals were on the brink of collapse and people were drinking saline groundwater, according to a UN update. The suffering is likely only to get worse.
Around the same time Israel launched its assault, landline, cellular, and internet communications out of Gaza went largely dark. While a few people with Israeli or international SIM cards, or those with satellite connections, were able to communicate or post online, most were not. That caused not just extreme anxiety for Palestinians inside Gaza weathering the bombardment and those outside trying unsuccessfully to confirm the safety of their family members, but also undermined emergency and humanitarian efforts. Groups like the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Health Organization said they had lost contact with teams on the ground. The WHO said on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, that lack of telecommunications was “making it impossible for ambulances to reach the injured.”
Experts previously told Vox that the weeks’ small raids were likely intended to gather intelligence about Hamas and disrupt its command communications, in addition to taking out targets as the IDF claimed on social media — all in preparation for a much larger incursion.
Israel has not explicitly framed this as a full-scale ground invasion, nor is it clear whether the IDF is attempting to seize and control territory or not. Such an operation would be highly fraught for the Israel Defense Forces, which will have to contend with chaotic fighting on Gaza’s dense streets. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been reluctant to put boots on the ground in Gaza since Israel formally withdrew troops in 2005 after 38 years of occupation.
But there are indications that the weekend’s offensive might not be the extent of things. Halevi’s video Saturday said that “the objectives of this war require a ground operation.”
“This is a war with multiple stages; today we move on to the next one,” he said. He described the IDF’s objectives as “dismantling Hamas, securing our borders, and the supreme effort to return the hostages home.”
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Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images
To those ends, Saturday, the IDF posted a video on X urging “all residents of northern Gaza and Gaza City to relocate south immediately” to avoid “intense hostilities” — a message in English to an Arabic-speaking population it seemed unlikely they’d be able to even receive, given the extremely limited telecommunications.
It’s unclear what this means for the fate of the over 200 Israeli civilian and military hostages that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants are holding. There had been hope earlier Friday that the Qatari-led negotiations were progressing well, and some analysts argue that Israel’s current operation could be designed to put pressure on Hamas to make concessions in those negotiations. But much remains in flux.
—Ellen Ioanes
- What do I need to understand about Gaza and Israel’s relationship to understand today?
Palestinians living in Gaza and Israelis have always been deeply connected.
With Israel’s victory in the 1967 War, it conquered Gaza and became an occupying power overseeing the Palestinians living there. (Egypt had controlled the territory from 1948 to 1967.) Israel had not always so severely fenced off Gaza from the rest of the world or blockaded flows in and out of it. For several decades, Palestinians from Gaza worked in the Israeli economy. Starting in 1970, Israel established settlements in the territory and military installations. Israel restricted most Palestinians’ movement in and out of Gaza from the onset of the Second Intifada, or uprising, in 2000.
Israel withdrew its security forces and settlements from Gaza in 2005, but the territory nevertheless has remained effectively under Israeli occupation. Hamas won legislative elections in 2006, and amid a violent split with the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank, the Islamist movement assumed control of the territory the next year. Israel has blockaded the territory since. The more than 2 million people in Gaza live in what human rights groups have called an “open-air prison.” The territory’s airspace, borders, and sea are under Israeli control, and neighboring Egypt to the south has also imposed severe restrictions on movement.
The United Nations describes the occupied territory as a “chronic humanitarian crisis.”
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“This pressure being put on Palestinians — it just assumes that they’re insignificant and they will tolerate any degree of humiliation, and that’s just not true,” said Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia University historian.
Israel has launched intense military operations on the densely populated territory many times over the past decade and a half in response to rocket attacks from Palestinian militants. The Israeli military has called it “mowing the grass”: a tactic of conducting semi-regular attacks on alleged terrorist cells to take out leaders and new militant groups, which also kill noncombatants and destroy civilian infrastructure in the process. But mowing the lawn almost by definition does not address the root causes of terrorism but only reduces the level of Hamas’s violence temporarily and perpetuates an escalating cycle of violence. Experts say that there is no military solution to the political problem posed by Hamas.
Hamas’s wanton violence does not by any means represent the views of all Palestinians. A survey of Palestinians from this summer showed that if legislative elections were held for the first time since 2006, about 44 percent of Gazan voters would choose Hamas. But there has been no opportunity for elections, and so in addition to Israeli military action, Palestinians living in Gaza must endure an unrepresentative government that imposes some Islamic tenets, implements repressive policies against LGBTQ people, and uses abusive policies against detainees.
Even as the situation for Palestinians living in Gaza has gotten worse in the past 15 years, less and less attention from world leaders and US administrations has been paid to it. Yet the cause of Palestine — to secure an independent, sovereign, and viable state — continues to galvanize grassroots support in the Arab Middle East and the Muslim world.
—Jonathan Guyer
- But why did Hamas launch such a huge attack on October 7?
According to Hamas itself, the attack was provoked by recent events surrounding the Temple Mount, a site in Jerusalem holy to Jews and Muslims alike. Earlier this month, Israeli settlers had been entering the al-Aqsa Mosque atop the mount and praying, which Hamas termed “desecration” in a statement on their offensive (which they’ve named Operation Al-Aqsa Storm).
It’s implausible, to put it mildly, that Hamas was simply outraged by these events and is acting accordingly. This kind of complex operation had to be months in the making; Hamas sources have confirmed as much to Reuters.
But at the same time, Hamas’s choice of casus belli does tell us something important.
Palestinian politics is defined, in large part, by how its leadership responds to Israel’s continued occupation — both its physical presence in the West Bank and its economically devastating blockade of the Gaza Strip. Hamas’s strategy to outcompete its rivals, including the Fatah faction currently in charge of the West Bank, is to channel Palestinian rage at their suffering: to be the authentic voice of resistance to Israel and the occupation.
And the past few months have seen plenty of outrages, ones even more significant than events in Jerusalem. Israel’s current hard-right government, dominated by factions that oppose a peace agreement with the Palestinians, has been conducting a de facto annexation of the West Bank. It has ignored settler violence against West Bank civilians, including a February rampage in the town of Huwara.
Israel’s focus on the West Bank may also have created an operational opportunity for Hamas. According to Uzi Ben Yitzhak, a retired Israeli general, the Israeli government had deployed most of the regular IDF forces to the West Bank to manage the situation there — leaving only a skeleton force at the Gaza border and creating conditions where a Hamas surprise attack could succeed.
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Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images