Hamas has been a failure for the Palestinian people

Hamas has been a failure for the Palestinian people. It promised liberation and delivered ruin. In its self-appointed role as the defender of Palestinian dignity, it has instead led its people into an abyss — freeing a few thousand from Israeli prisons at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, and the near-erasure of Gaza itself. What, then, was achieved? Perhaps a flicker of global attention to the Palestinian plight, a renewed sympathy in international forums, and a surge of street-level solidarity in parts of the world. Yet these intangible gains are dwarfed by the tangible devastation — a generation of children traumatized, a society pulverized, and a cause morally and materially weakened. Wars of desperation often claim to be wars of necessity. But this one was neither. Hamas’s calculus was not strategic but suicidal — a political act dressed up as resistance, doomed to invite the full weight of Israeli retribution and to make ordinary Palestinians bear the cost. In the end, Gaza has not been liberated; it has been levelled. The dream of freedom has been replaced by the nightmare of survival. If history remembers anything from this tragedy, it may be that reckless absolutism — whether born of ideology or despair — can destroy the very nationhood it claims to serve.