As buildings crumble and hunger tightens its grip on Gaza’s population, a remarkable thing happened this week: people protested. In any functioning democratic society, this would barely warrant mention. In Gaza—a landscape transformed into rubble and desperation by months of relentless Israeli bombardment—it became instant propaganda fodder for the Zionist camp. “Gaza protests Hamas rule”, the verdict was out, loud and clear.
Within hours, social media feeds filled with triumphant declarations from pro-Israeli voices. They lauded the purported Gaza protests against Hamas rule. “Look!” they proclaimed with barely contained glee. “Gazans are finally turning against Hamas!” The narrative spreads with the efficiency that only selective truth-telling can achieve.
From Arab Zionists to BRICS news outlets run by Indians, several influential social media accounts peddled the narrative of the Gaza protests.
European mainstream media also picked up the cue and started peddling the same narrative.
🇵🇸 🇮🇱 Hundreds of #Palestinians shouted anti-#Hamas slogans at a protest in northern #Gaza on Tuesday calling for an end to the war with #Israel, witnesses said.
— FRANCE 24 English (@France24_en) March 26, 2025
Read more ➡️ https://t.co/KIzcWIDlDA
📸 Reuters pic.twitter.com/muMHwWjCuV
Hundreds join largest anti-Hamas protest since Gaza war began https://t.co/G01zWeHCnd
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) March 25, 2025
Pro-Israeli former Palestinians based in the US also chipped in.
And, of course, Indians who are fanboys of Israeli atrocities.
❗BREAKING: Taqiyya in Palestine
— श्रवण बिश्नोई (किसान) (@SharwanKumarBi7) March 26, 2025
🇵🇸 Anti-Hamas protest breaks out in Gaza.
Civilians heard chanting "Hamas are terrorist." pic.twitter.com/NOJMmqOqMv
What these voices conveniently omitted speaks volumes. As children marched through ruins demanding international intervention to stop the bloodshed, their words were systematically repackaged and resold as something entirely different.
“The spontaneous marches that erupted in Beit Lahia were demanding the free world increase pressure on the Zionist enemy to stop the bloodshed and open the crossings for aid,” stated community leaders from northern Gaza in a declaration that somehow failed to make headlines in the West’s media outlets.
A tale of two protests
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, something equally noteworthy was happening: Israelis were protesting their own government. Police clashed with demonstrators, arrests were made, and lawmakers were forced to abandon their vehicles and walk to the Knesset. Protesters blocked roads ahead of a budget vote that would ultimately allocate vast sums to continue military operations while cutting education, health and welfare.
“This is a budget of war, and with God’s help, it will be a budget of victory,” declared Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, as his government slashed social services whilst boosting funding for settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Curiously, these protests received a fraction of the attention granted to the Gaza demonstrations. One might be forgiven for wondering why images of Israeli police using “excessive force” against Israeli citizens failed to generate the same breathless coverage as Palestinians protesting in a war zone.
“The lawyers’ network representing detained anti-government protesters accused the police of using excessive force in the arrests,” reported Israeli sources. Members of the newly formed National Guard—a “brainchild” of far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir—were “filmed punching, kicking and hurling protesters to the ground” in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the Communist Party of Israel claimed.
These facts apparently lacked the viral potential of repackaging Palestinian suffering.
The hijacking of legitimate grievances
“We stand in the face of an existential war targeting our people, alongside an inhumane siege imposed by Israel—our sworn enemy,” stated community leaders from southern Gaza. “We call on all regional and international forces to fulfil their duties and put an end to the Zionist killing machine, which has slaughtered our children, elders and women for 15 months,” the statement added.
This nuanced reality—of a population demanding international intervention to end their suffering—has been twisted into a simplistic anti-Hamas narrative that serves a particular political agenda.
“We reject any attempt to politically exploit these marches or divert them from the national cause at this critical time,” the statement from Beit Lahia continues. “Beit Lahia has always been a stronghold of revolutionaries and resistance fighters and will not allow infiltrators to distort its national stance.”
The information battlefield
While Americans, former Palestinians and Indians supporting Israel shared videos of Palestinians marching through ruins, claiming them to be visuals of Gaza protests against Hamas rule, they carefully avoided mentioning the real context. These selective editors of reality conveniently ignored statements from Palestinian factions calling for vigilance against precisely this type of manipulation.
“We call on you to remain vigilant, cautious and attentive to any attempts to divert the course of your righteous public anger or exploit your suffering to threaten national unity,” stated the National and Islamic Action factions in Gaza. “The occupation seeks to undermine our unity, export its crises to us and ignite internal conflicts,” the organisation’s statement added.
This warning proved prescient as international voices quickly appropriated genuine Palestinian grievances to serve external political narratives.
The exploitation of desperation
The genius of this propaganda effort lies in its exploitation of genuine suffering. Palestinians in Gaza are undoubtedly desperate—starving, bombed, displaced and traumatised. The Gaza protests, even against Hamas rule, are real expressions of that desperation. What’s manufactured is not the Gaza protests themselves, but the framing that divorces them from their actual demands and context.
“As in any country, varying opinions exist within Gaza, including opposition to Hamas, particularly from some Fatah (Palestine Liberation Organization’s Fatah faction) supporters,” Palestinian resistance sources acknowledge. “The occupation has attempted to exploit these voices to create a misleading narrative that the people of Gaza have turned against the resistance—when in reality, recent prisoner exchange deals prove otherwise,” they claimed.
This exploitation of civilian suffering represents a particularly cynical form of information warfare—one that uses the genuine grievances of a desperate population as ammunition against their own interests.
The unseen protests
While social media algorithms pushed narratives of Palestinian discontent with Hamas to Western audiences, they simultaneously buried images of Israeli citizens denouncing their government’s policies.
Demonstrations in Jerusalem split across multiple locations: outside the Knesset, near the Prime Minister’s Office and at a silent sit-in organised by hostage family members and their supporters. At this last gathering, family members “spoke every so often, talking about their utter despair and the lack of contact with any members of the government,” the communist party stated.
These desperate Israeli voices—calling for negotiation rather than continued bombardment—somehow failed to generate the same enthusiastic coverage as recontextualised Gaza protests against Hamas.
The budget behind the bombs
As protesters were being arrested in Jerusalem, the Knesset passed a budget allocating 110 billion shekels to defence—a staggering figure that comes at the expense of basic social services. The 756 billion-shekel budget includes “unprecedented taxation, wage cuts and deductions amounting to 24 billion shekels” that will disproportionately impact ordinary Israelis through “VAT hikes, salary reductions in the public sector, freezing income tax brackets and child allowances, raising National Insurance fees, and a broad budget cut of about 5 billion shekels across government ministries,” the Israeli communists stated.
This financial reality—that Israel’s military campaign comes at a significant cost to its own citizens—receives scant attention compared to carefully edited clips of Palestinians calling for international intervention to stop manslaughter in Gaza.
The true demands
What were Palestinians actually demanding in their protests? According to their own statements, they were calling for “the free world to increase pressure on the Zionist enemy to stop the bloodshed and open the crossings for aid.” They were demanding Egypt “take a firm Arab stance to end the famine devastating our people.” They were urging “our people in the West Bank and within occupied Palestine, as well as our Arab and Islamic brothers, to make this Friday a day of mass mobilisation—besieging Israeli and US embassies until food and water are allowed into Gaza.”
These demands—for an end to bombing, for food, for water—somehow transformed into evidence of anti-Hamas sentiment in the alchemy of social media propaganda.
The manipulation machine
What we’re witnessing is not merely biased coverage but a sophisticated manipulation of genuine suffering. Palestinians who march for food become, through selective editing and contextual removal, evidence for whatever narrative serves external interests.
“The central governorate has always been a revolutionary stronghold and will not allow its demands to be exploited by infiltrators,” stated community leaders, apparently aware of how quickly their legitimate grievances would be weaponised against them.
This sophisticated form of propaganda doesn’t require fabrication—it merely demands selective attention. Show the protest but hide the demands. Amplify the frustration but silence the context. Present the effect while concealing the cause.
The silenced Israeli voices
Perhaps most telling is how Israeli protesters calling for negotiation rather than continued military action are rendered nearly invisible in this narrative landscape. Their demands for peace, their confrontations with police, their arrests and their mistreatment generate a fraction of the attention given to repackaged Palestinian suffering.
This violence against Israeli citizens demonstrating for peace receives minimal coverage compared to carefully framed clips from Gaza protests.
Weaponising desperation
What we’re witnessing is the weaponisation of desperation itself. When Gaza protests starvation, the protests become ammunition for narratives that perpetuate the very conditions the Palestinians are protesting against. When Israelis protest for negotiation and peace, their voices are minimised and marginalised. Protesting Israelis don’t exist for the West and its pro-Zionist media.
The hypocrisy is staggering but unsurprising. In the information war surrounding Gaza, suffering itself has become a resource to be mined, refined and deployed in service of predetermined narratives. The genuine desperation of Palestinians becomes, through careful editing and selective amplification, evidence for the very policies causing that desperation.
Amid the rubble of Gaza and the protest-filled streets of Jerusalem, one thing becomes clear: in this conflict, truth itself has become a casualty—not through outright lies, but through the more insidious process of selective attention, contextual removal and narrative manipulation.
As notables from all Gaza governorates stated in their call for Thursday protests, they “affirmed their support for the resistance, and rejected attempts of political exploitation of the protests.” It seems their concerns were well-founded.
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