“On that accursed day, they pushed Gaza off the edge of the cliff … then picked up their phones to find the best angle for the shot,” Gazan writer and poet Ni’ma Hassan wrote on her Facebook page on October 7.
A few hours later, she posted again, perhaps responding to readers who had attacked her for criticizing Hamas, as she has done before: “Even after three years, they tell us that the outcome is what counts and victory is near. By God! Even if you build paradise … we will not forgive what has happened and is still happening to us.”
This is a representative opinion expressed by many Gazans three years after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, according to the latest article by Amira Hass published on October 13, 2026, in the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Hass is the Haaretz correspondent for the occupied territories — Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel has illegally held since the Six-Day War in June 1967.
Born in Jerusalem in 1956, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Hass joined Haaretz in 1989. She has been in her current position since 1993. While carrying out her assignment, she spent three years living in Gaza, which served as the basis for her widely acclaimed book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege. She has lived in the West Bank city of Ramallah since 1997.
Hass is “the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank,” Democracy Now noted in its introduction to an October 19, 2023, interview with her.
We publish the article below for the information of our readers. The headline, subhead, text, and photos that follow are from the original.
— World-Outlook editors
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‘We Will Not Forgive’: Gazans Rage at Hamas for the October 7 Gamble
They loathe Israel for destroying Gaza. They also blame Hamas for gambling with their lives and promising victory. In searing Facebook posts, Gazans describe the loss, abuse and daily humiliations no camera can capture.
By Amira Hass
October 13, 2026, IDT
“On that accursed day, they pushed Gaza off the edge of the cliff … then picked up their phones to find the best angle for the shot,” Gazan writer and poet Ni’ma Hassan wrote on her Facebook page on October 7.
A few hours later, she posted again, perhaps responding to readers who had attacked her for criticizing Hamas, as she has done before: “Even after three years, they tell us that the outcome is what counts and victory is near. By God! Even if you build paradise […]we will not forgive what has happened and is still happening to us.”
Hasan writes openly what many in Gaza say among themselves and some put into writing, with varying degrees of boldness and bluntness. They see no contradiction between criticizing Hamas and recognizing that Israel chose to destroy Gaza and their lives there, and even declared its intention to do so.
Their anger at Hamas over what they describe as a strategic mistake, an adventure, a gamble or even a conspiracy does not diminish their loathing for Israel or their knowledge that this endless war is part of Israel’s longstanding policy against the Palestinian people.
Journalist Hamed Jad, the Gaza bureau chief for the Ramallah-based daily Al-Ayyam, also recalled Hamas’ promises of a decisive victory after the terrible suffering. He, too, was writing on the third anniversary of “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’ name for the October 7 attack.
About a year after the attack, at a press conference with Khalil al-Hayya, now chairman of Hamas’ political bureau, Jad asked: “Can you name a single achievement October 7 has brought?” Al-Hayya replied that it was too early to judge.
This week, Jad revisited that answer from two years ago with bitter irony: “Al-Hayya was right when he told me: ‘It is unfair to judge the Flood before it has ended, because it has not yet ended.’ Indeed, three years later, the Flood has not stopped, and we are still drowning in its raging waves, ground down day after day by the millstones of killing, destruction, displacement and loss.”
Addressing al-Hayya, who is now abroad and four of whose sons were killed by Israel, Jad asked with biting sarcasm: “Do you still insist that it is too early, and unfair, as you put it, to judge the Flood and the suffering it has inflicted on us so far?”
Those living in the Gaza Strip today, and those who have managed to escape, long for October 6, 2023. They have not forgotten the blockade Israel imposed on them or their isolation from the world; the unemployment and poverty that isolation caused, and the humiliation that came with both; the struggle for the right to receive medical treatment outside the Strip; or being prevented from seeing relatives and friends living just 80 kilometers away.
Yet Gazans defied the blockade through community and family life, their studies and their plans for their children. They cultivated their talents in painting, poetry, prose and computer science, pursued building projects and business ventures, and connected with the world online.
In the face of Israel, the hostile power that controlled them and aspired to “sink Gaza into the sea,” their insistence on living rather than merely existing was an act of civil resistance. Hamas’ “Flood” held this kind of unarmed struggle in contempt.
Here is a fragment of life before the Flood, from another post Hassan wrote that same day: “My daughter Mayar spent Friday, October 6, 2023, memorizing a short play in English about olive trees to perform on the school radio. My job was to buy her a Palestinian dress. On the morning of October 7, they burned the school, the olive trees, the studio … and we left the dress and the city behind.”
Her daughter will no longer be able to fulfill her dream of riding a motorcycle through the city’s streets without anyone making comments. The city no longer has streets, and her daughter now wears a hijab. She has grown up, in other words, and will no longer be able to fulfill her wish.
Hassan leaves no doubt that by “they,” she means Israel. But in another text, addressed to Hamas, she tallies figures that have reached her: more than 70,000 children who have lost one or both parents; more than 86,000 households headed by women; nearly 260,000 families living in shelters; more than 64,000 widows; and almost 17,000 people have disabilities.
United Nations (UN) reports support some of these figures: UNICEF reported more than 58,000 children who had lost a parent in October 2025, while UN Women estimated 86,290 women-headed households in September 2026.
“And amid all these details,” Hasan adds, “two million lives of unrelenting pain.”
There are everyday pains that go unphotographed, supposedly small ones, that teacher Samia Wadi describes in another Facebook post. One student is always late, arriving halfway through class because she has to wait for her sister to return from her own lesson and hand over the pair of shoes they share. Many students take no notes as Wadi explains the lesson. She knows they are waiting for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) to provide notebooks.
Two others miss class every few days, whenever the truck delivering purified water passes through the displacement camp where they live, so they can fill their jerry cans. Another student is frequently absent. Wadi knows that the girl’s grandfather banished her widowed mother from the southern Strip to the north. The younger children stayed with him. Reading between the lines, the absent student has to look after them.
Another teacher is described as moving “with the lightness of a merciful angel among her very young pupils” in a tent turned into a classroom. The writer, also posting on Facebook, is mental health specialist Dr. Saeed al-Kahlout. In his poetic style, he describes how she gently explains the lesson and promises her pupils a better future. She pauses over the “r” at the beginning of “right,” he writes, then over the “l” at the beginning of “life.”
Just then, a stray bullet is fired from a tank a few hundred meters away. “The bullet sliced swiftly through the air, crossed the distance in moments and lodged in the teacher’s heart … In the classroom tent, the children watched their teacher struggle for her final breaths, drenched in her own blood. In the tent where she lived, children are waiting for their mother, not yet knowing that she will never return.”
A few weeks ago, tempers flared in Gaza when some sheikh used his Friday sermon to subject his listeners, willing and unwilling alike, to a flood of abuse over women’s supposedly immodest behavior. Many women and men criticized his misogynistic detachment from a reality in which women bear the burden of keeping families going under conditions so harsh they are scarcely imaginable.
Some women go further, writing about “the consequences of annihilation that no one sees. Before the war, these things happened discreetly, and very rarely. Now they happen brazenly, proudly, as a matter of routine and a way of life,” as the young Najia Mahmoud writes by way of introduction. The English translation is based on Tamar Goldschmidt’s Hebrew translation.
For three years, Goldschmidt has been posting breathtaking texts by men and women in Gaza on her Facebook page. Amid collapsing walls and falling skies, these writers paint in words events, feelings, and thoughts that no camera can capture, and Goldschmidt translates them with extraordinary skill.
Mahmoud writes: “The age of slavery has not ended. It has moved into the tents and called itself ‘protecting the daughter’s honor’ and ‘the circumstances of war.’ What is happening around us today makes your blood boil, turns your stomach and makes you sick beyond words. The child marriages that have suddenly become widespread in Gaza are not marriages. They are an auction of girls!
“To give you an idea of just how low things have sunk: My neighbor, a man in his twenties, is married to a 15-year-old girl. He ‘wipes the floor with her’ day and night. He beats her for half an hour, and the girl stays silent despite the pain. The moment a cry of pain slips out, he starts beating her all over again.
“And what drives you out of your mind, makes you go crazy and want to set every last tent on fire, is not just the beating. What drives you out of your mind is that her family is a few meters away, his family is right there with him in the same compound, and every one of them has a shoe stuffed in their mouth and says nothing!
“They throw their own flesh and blood to a piece of human garbage, and when you open your mouth, they trot out an excuse uglier than the sin itself: ‘By God, lady, times are hard, and we can’t afford to support the girls, so let’s protect her honor.’ What expenses? What honor are you talking about?! Anyone who can’t raise children shouldn’t have them in the first place! Why do you keep having one daughter after another if you’re going to throw them to their torturers in such a vile way?”
Mahmoud continues: “We are living through war and annihilation. The soup kitchen feeds you, you and your children, and all of us in the tents live on aid like paupers. Not one of you is any better off financially than his daughter. These days, none of you is paying out of your own pocket, so how can you plead poverty and sell your daughter so cheaply and so shamefully?
“With the same coercion and lack of decency, you see a man throw his little children out among the stray dogs and into danger to peddle goods and support him! A tiny child, no bigger than your little finger, ought to be at school or at least sitting safely in his tent. Instead, he’s dumped on the streets to support an entire family. What right do you have to make a child worry about keeping you alive?”
Writing from a different angle a few days ago, Dr. al-Kahlout described other children: “The two children sat on a donkey-drawn cart on their way back from the learning tent, their new school. Al-Mawasi’s scorching sun seared their tiny faces. Sand from the school, where the pupils sit directly on the ground, mingled with the dust of the road and danced through their worn-out clothes. They began asking what had become of their mutual friends.
“‘What about Tamer?!’ asked the first, sitting on the edge of the cart and lifting his little feet whenever another cart, drawn by a horse, came close, afraid it would crash into them. ‘Tamer was killed with his dad at the entrance to their tent. A missile tore them to pieces. People spent three days picking up bits of flesh around the tent.’
“The boy said this while staring at something in the distance, as though the scene had suddenly appeared before his eyes. Then he remembered something, broke off his story and asked: ‘And Aboud? Where is he? Why didn’t he come to school today?’
“‘Aboud, oh, Aboud! Both his legs got cut off. While he was asleep, a piece of shrapnel tore through the tent and landed right on them. When he woke up, they found him with his legs cut off.’
“‘And what about our teacher, Mr. Issam? Did you see Mr. Issam today?’
“‘Didn’t you hear what happened to him? Mr. Issam got hit by a bullet while he was waiting in line to fill up water in the city center, and he got paralyzed. He’s in a tent now. He doesn’t react or answer.’
“‘And Hani? Hani, when they went back to their house in the north, the wall fell on them. He died, and his little sister and their mom, and his dad went crazy because of it. I’m telling you, wow, he walks around the streets shouting: My children and their mother. Oh God, my children and their mother.’”
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Categories: Palestine/Israel