Sheltering on the beach at Mawasi in southern Gaza, Ahmed Yousef has lost hope. The man in his seventies, once a key figure in Hamas, has lost faith in the Islamist movement. He accuses his former comrades of hastening Gaza’s destruction by the Israeli army through launching the October 7 terrorist attack. At 76, Yousef has nowhere left to go. His hometown, Rafah, has been razed, and Israeli soldiers occupy its ruins. He lives in a tent with his family in a camp for displaced persons. “We lost the war. We have lost everything. Armed struggle has failed,” he said bitterly by phone. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has barred foreign media from entering Gaza.
A former adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister for all Palestinian territories from 2006 to 2007 and for Gaza alone from 2007 to 2014, Yousef long embodied a more moderate face of Hamas, welcoming diplomats and foreign journalists to his office during their visits to Gaza. Today, he believes that “Hamas made a grave mistake by carrying out the attack of October 7, 2023. It gave [Israeli PM Benjamin] Netanyahu justification to launch this war.”
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