Columnist in Palestinian Authority Daily: Gazans must rise up against Hamas, and demand the release of the Israeli hostages and Hamas’s withdraw from the political scene so as to end the war
In his August 9, 2025 column in the Palestinian Authority (PA) daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, journalist Bassem Barhoum wrote that there was only one hope for ending the war in Gaza: the Palestinian public in Gaza must rise up and take to the streets to demand the release of the Israeli hostages and the withdrawal of Hamas from the political scene.
Barhoum argues that Hamas is not a national Palestinian movement at all, but a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood that serves "its own interests and those of its regional allies" rather than the national interests of the Palestinian people.
Hamas’s coup against the PA in 2007, he adds, created a crisis that led to "a nakba more serious than the first nakba" of 1948.