One of Hamza Howidy’s latest posts analyzes the historical background of Hamas’s long and destructive rule in Gaza and points to the two political figures who are responsible for it; namely, Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) residing in Ramallah, and Benyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister. “For 16 years”, Howidy wrote on his Instagram account on August 28th, “two bitter rivals pursued entirely different strategies that led to the same result: the rise and entrenchment of Hamas.” Furthermore, Howidy believes that they didn’t intend for October the 7th to occur, but through “cynical politics and short-term calculations, they armed and empowered the very enemy they claimed to oppose.” When Hamas violently seized Gaza in 2007, Abbas refrained from fighting Hamas even though his troops clearly outnumbered the Hamas forces. Moreover, he did not stop paying salaries for PA employees in Gaza. He was happy to rule the West Bank and present himself as the representative of Palestinians internationally, and let Hamas be blamed for any disfunction in the strip.  

According to Howidy, over the course of about a decade, over $2 billion were flowing from the PA into Gaza, salaries that were “taxed lavishly by Hamas to fund its rule”. Netanyahu allowed even more money to be transferred to Gaza in order to stabilize the Hamas regime. He agreed that Qatar poured huge amounts of cash into Hamas’s coffers, $15 to $30 million per month. Netanyahu’s objective: divide and conquer. With a strong Hamas ruling Gaza, a two state solution would not be possible. “And when the barbaric massacre of October 7 and [the] wholesale slaughter of the Gaza war ensued, it wasn’t them who paid the price, it was everyone else.” So Howidy’s conclusion is: “Hamas pulled the trigger. But Abbas and Netanyahu loaded the gun.”

Hamza Howidy is one of the most important political voices from the Palestinian exiled community. He exemplifies what we used to think of as an intellectual before social media algorithms pushed the public to replace political discourse with demonization of political opponents, i.e. the exchange of carefully presented arguments with polemical ad hominem attacks, and careful consideration and differentiation with maximum polarization. Howidy was born in 1997 in Gaza in a relatively open-minded family, as he told a reporter in October 2024.[1] His father had been working in the UK for many years. Today, Howidy lives in a refugee camp in Germany. 

In 2019 he was one of the organizers of the “We want to live” protests in Gaza. At the time, he was about to complete his studies and had started applying for jobs, as he told the German newspaper die tageszeitung in July 2024.[2] Economic conditions in Gaza were poor, but above all, Hamas pursued a policy “that only allowed Hamas members to work in the public sector, not people like me – not to mention the massive corruption.”

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The motive behind the protests was to overthrow Hamas, “but we weren’t brave enough to say that publicly, so we hid behind the slogan ‘We want to live.’” The demonstrators demanded better living conditions, more jobs and elections. “Because there have only been elections in Palestine once, in 2006. We took to the streets, but after 20 or 30 minutes we were attacked by Hamas militias. I was detained by a Hamas man standing right next to me who was working undercover. We were arrested and taken to Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip. I was there for three weeks and was tortured. My family was able to pay the bribe. Those who didn’t have the money stayed there for months.”

In June 2023, when the Israeli protest movement against Netanyahu’s far-right government and its judicial reforms intensified, the protest movement in Gaza also made a second attempt, despite massive repression by the Hamas regime. “We demonstrated, Hamas arrested us, I was alone in a cell without a toilet and with one meal a day that could hardly be called a meal.” But what frustrated Howidy most was the fact that neither Western nor Arab media were interested in the protests, there was hardly any coverage. The protesters also felt abandoned by international aid organizations. Shortly thereafter, Howidy fled via Turkey to Greece.

After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and the Gaza War began, Howidy broke the promise he had made to himself: to no longer speak publicly about the political situation in the Middle East. He criticized Hamas and Abu Obeida, the spokesman for the Al-Qassam Brigades, the militant wing of Hamas, on social media. As a result, he received death threats from other Gazans in the Greek refugee camp. Howidy fled again, this time to Germany. He has since become an internationally respected and valued voice because he speaks about events in Gaza and the West Bank from the humanistic perspective of a democrat. He has commented on CNN and has been interviewed on German public television channel ZDF; he has written for Newsweek, L‘Express, National Post, ABC Today, and other media outlets. Both the left German Green Party and the conservative Christian Democratic Union invited Howidy to talks, and he took part in the Holocaust memorial ceremony in the Bundestag.

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Howidy criticizes Hamas’s criminal policies. He considers the pro-Palestinian protests in the West to be hypocritical. These protests, he argues, reveal the intellectual dishonesty of a narrative that classifies all residents of the Gaza Strip as either accomplices or victims of Hamas violence, thereby dehumanizing them. Howidy condemns Israel’s warfare because of the many civilian casualties. On December 3, 2024, for example, he posted a sad message on Instagram. A few days earlier, his friend Abood Khuail had been killed by an Israeli bomb in Gaza, along with eleven members of his family. Howidy wrote: “The Khuails weren’t Hamas. They weren’t a threat. They were just a family trying to survive. My friend Abood dreamed of a two-state solution where Palestinians and Israelis could coexist with dignity and freedom.” A few months later he criticized that “there is no safe place for Gaza’s children – no shelter from the bombs, no escape from the violence that rains down from above.”

In the toxic and emotionalized public debate, Howidy’s voice stands for doubt, deliberation and reason, a position that often leaves him feeling isolated. He is not only caught between two stools, he is caught between two fronts. As a result, Howidy is also subjected to hostility and threats in Germany. He supports the initiative Realign For Palestine (RFP), a project at the Atlantic Council that aims to amplify pragmatic and rational voices that courageously hold multiple truths, advocating for Palestinian statehood and self-determination, and asserting that the two-nation solution is the only credible, humane path forward for peace between the Palestinian and Israeli people. Howidy’s personal statement on the website of RFP reads: “I support the Realign for Palestine project because I also seek to foster a transformative narrative for the Palestinian community – one that acknowledges our failures and wrong decisions in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” The radical wing of the pro-Palestinian movement considers him a Zionist. And Zionism for them is not a national movement like any other, but a synonym for evil.

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Howidy continues to lament the Arab public’s lack of interest in the political situation in Gaza. Like many people in Gaza, he criticized Al Jazeera’s coverage, which in the beginning ignored the recent protests in Gaza in the summer of 2025 against Hamas rule and soon reinterpreted them as protests against Israel because they clearly did not fit its own political agenda. “Suddenly, Al Jazeera stopped reporting on Gaza. (And now they’re silencing us by putting words in our mouths). Al Jazeera and other ‘pro-Palestine’ media networks are betraying the Palestinians and protecting the regime oppressing them”, he wrote on his Instagram account. Howidy then took on the job that Arab media outlets did not want to do. He gave a voice to people from Gaza who expressed their frustration with Hamas rule, but also with the international protests against the Gaza war: “Hamas distributed food to their members while we were starving.” – “They built tunnels to save themselves while we were left above the ground to face death.” – “Islamist and leftist communities outside of Gaza hate to hear us speak.” – “To them, we are just a reality show.”

When Israeli forces attacked Iran’s nuclear program and representatives of the regime in Tehran in the summer of 2025, Howidy wrote that for over three decades, Iran has actively worked to prevent Palestinians from reaching a political settlement that might sideline Tehran’s influence in the region. Iran’s “current predicament is the direct result of policies rooted in sabotaging any chance of peace.” After the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement in Oslo in 1993, Iran had poured money and weapons into militant movements to undermine the newly emerging Palestinian Authority and destroy state institutions.

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Howidy is fighting for a free, democratically governed Palestinian state. Free from Israeli occupation, and liberated from the influence of Iran and Qatar. But first, the people of Gaza must be saved from starvation. In July, Howidy drew his readers’ attention to the catastrophic humanitarian situation: “Babies are dying of malnutrition. Doctors are begging for supplies. People are collapsing from hunger in the streets. Please see our pain. Please show compassion. Please demand change.”

Hamza Howidy was born and studied in Gaza. Today, the 27-year-old activist and journalist lives in refugee accommodation in Germany. He is currently facing deportation from Germany to Greece. 

Ulrich Gutmair is an editor for politics, culture and arts for the daily news­paper die tageszeitung. His book The First Days of Berlin tells the story of the short lived Temporary Autonomous Zone after the fall of the Wall in central Berlin. His latest publication Wir sind die Türken von morgen shows how early German-language Punk’s politics of negation attacked authoritarian societies.