There is a version of the Gaza story that Western governments and their media have told since 2007. It goes like this: Israel withdrew from Gaza in good faith. Palestinians responded by electing terrorists. The terrorists seized power, built tunnels, fired rockets, and brought ruin upon themselves. The world mourned, imposed sanctions, sent aid, and watched.
That version is not history. It is a liability shield.
The real story of how Hamas came to govern Gaza — and why it has remained ungovernable for nearly two decades — is a story about calculated political architecture. Multiple governments, including Israel’s own, built a system designed to prevent Palestinian statehood. Hamas was not a bug in that system. In the most uncomfortable sense, it was the intended output.
Why Israel Left in 2005
Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” from Gaza in August 2005 is remembered as a bold act of pragmatism — the old hawk abandoning 21 settlements and forcibly removing 8,000 settlers in the name of peace. That is the legend.
The internal logic was different.
Sharon’s senior advisor, Dov Weisglass, said it plainly in a 2004 interview with Haaretz: the disengagement plan was designed to put the peace process “in formaldehyde” — to postpone Palestinian statehood indefinitely and relieve international pressure on Israel to negotiate. Sharon wanted to settle Israel’s borders on Israel’s terms, without Palestinian involvement. Gaza was the price he paid to hold the West Bank.
The withdrawal was also not a withdrawal in any meaningful sense. Israel retained control of Gaza’s airspace, coastline, and every crossing point for people and goods. International law — affirmed by the UN, the US State Department, Amnesty International, and the International Committee of the Red Cross — classified Gaza as still under Israeli military occupation the day after the last soldier left the interior. The form of control changed. The control did not.
What Sharon handed to the Palestinian Authority was not sovereign territory. It was a cage with different administrators.
Why Hamas Won in 2006
In January 2006, Hamas won 74 of 132 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections with 77 percent voter turnout. The Western world responded with something between shock and moral outrage. Democracy had produced the wrong answer.
But the vote was not a vote for Hamas’s theology or its charter. Palestinian polling at the time showed fewer than 3 percent of the population supported the creation of an Islamic state. Exit polls from the election itself showed nearly 60 percent of voters still backed a peace process — including almost 40 percent of Hamas supporters themselves.
What the electorate voted for was the end of Fatah.
By 2006, Fatah had governed Palestinian political life for four decades and left it corrupted, captured, and contemptuous of its own people. The Palestinian Authority had become a patronage machine. Oslo had promised a state and delivered a bureaucracy that served as Israel’s subcontractor for West Bank administration. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, only 11 percent of Palestinians credited Fatah’s diplomacy for it. 40 percent credited Hamas’s resistance.
Hamas ran under the name “Change and Reform.” It had built schools, clinics, orphanages, and food distribution networks in the spaces where the PA had built nothing. Against a Fatah that had stolen everything and delivered nothing, it won.
The international response to a legitimate democratic outcome was to immediately freeze aid, arm Fatah to reverse the result, and treat the Palestinian people as having voted wrongly.
The Coup That Wasn’t Random
By late 2006, two competing power centers existed in Palestinian territory: Mahmoud Abbas and a Fatah structure backed by the US, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, training and equipping Fatah forces specifically to defeat Hamas militarily; and a Hamas government in Gaza that had been internationally strangled since the moment it won.
The Mecca Agreement of February 2007 produced a short-lived national unity government. It collapsed within months. By June 2007, Hamas launched a military takeover of Gaza that took less than a week. 188 people died.
The takeover had been planned for months. Hamas had dug a 220-meter tunnel under Fatah’s Khan Yunis headquarters specifically to detonate it. The operation used tactics developed against the IDF and applied them against an Arab enemy with speed and precision.
What is less discussed is what Fatah was doing in the months before. The United States had helped construct a coalition of Israel, Egypt, and Jordan to train and arm Fatah forces to preemptively defeat Hamas in Gaza. Hamas launched first.
The result was a split that has never healed: Hamas governing Gaza, the PA governing the West Bank. Two Palestinian governments, mutually delegitimizing each other, neither capable of representing the Palestinian people in any negotiation that matters.
Aerial view of destruction in Beach refugee camp, Gaza Strip. July 3, 2024.
© UNRWA / Mohammed Hinnawi · CC BY-SA 3.0 IGONetanyahu’s Strategy: Keep the Trap Closed
This is the part that requires confronting something far more uncomfortable than Iranian arms pipelines.
Benjamin Netanyahu has governed Israel for the majority of the period since Hamas took Gaza. In that time, the documented record shows a deliberate policy of keeping Hamas viable as a governing force.
Netanyahu said it himself in a Likud party meeting:
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas. This is part of our strategy, to isolate Palestinians in Gaza from Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.”
The architecture of that strategy operated through Qatar. Between 2012 and 2018, Qatar transferred more than $1 billion to Hamas-governed Gaza — with Israel’s explicit approval. Cash was carried into Gaza in suitcases, making it deliberately difficult to trace. A 2018 letter from Netanyahu personally implored the Qatari government to increase the transfers. Netanyahu’s government also secured a letter from US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin assuring Qatar that funding Hamas-governed Gaza would not be treated as terror financing.
In 2009, when Netanyahu returned to power, he ended one specific and significant form of security coordination: the joint operation between the Israeli military and PA security forces targeting Hamas in the occupied territories. Every other form of coordination continued. That one stopped.
From then on, Netanyahu’s stated position was that Israel could not negotiate with a divided Palestinian leadership — while his policy actively prevented that leadership from unifying.
Former Shin Bet Director Yoram Cohen — Israel’s own domestic intelligence chief — said publicly that this was a colossal strategic error. Retired General Shlomo Brom explained the logic from inside the Israeli security establishment: “One effective way to prevent a two-state solution is to divide between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.”
These are Israeli generals and intelligence directors explaining Israeli policy.
1.4 million displaced Palestinians sheltering in Al-Mawasi — a designated 'safe zone' lacking water, sewage infrastructure, and shelter, that has repeatedly come under fire.
© UNRWA · CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO2 Million People Inside the Proof
Gaza is 365 square kilometers. 2 million people. One of the most densely populated territories on earth, with no functioning airport, no seaport access, rationed electricity, an aquifer so contaminated by seawater infiltration that the water is barely drinkable, and every crossing controlled by the power conducting a military campaign against it.
As of April 2026, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 72,562 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. 172,320 more have been injured. 80 percent of the population relies on water trucking for drinking water. Since March 2025, Israeli authorities have blocked UNRWA from directly bringing humanitarian personnel or aid into the Strip. 593 aid workers have been killed. Less than 10 percent of the funding required for humanitarian operations in 2026 has been secured.
The Israeli government has instructed its forces to expand military control to up to 70 percent of the Gaza Strip.
This is what the trap looks like after the architecture that built it has collapsed inward.
What “Terrorism” Explains and What It Doesn’t
Hamas is a designated terrorist organization. Its October 7, 2023 attack killed approximately 1,200 people and constituted one of the worst mass atrocity events in Israeli history. That is true, documented, and morally unambiguous.
It explains nothing about why 2 million people have lived under siege for eighteen years. It explains nothing about why Netanyahu actively sustained the organization’s financial lifeline. It explains nothing about why Israel refused to cooperate with the PA in dismantling Hamas when it had the opportunity to do so. It explains nothing about why the United States sanctioned democracy when it produced Hamas and armed Fatah when it lost.
The “terrorism” frame is forensic. It identifies an act. It does not interrogate the conditions that produced it, the strategic choices that sustained the actors who committed it, or the political interests served by keeping those conditions in place.
Gaza is not a story about what happens when terrorists take over a territory. It is a story about what happens when a territory is designed to fail — when its economy is deliberately strangled, its political leadership deliberately split, its international aid deliberately conditioned on political compliance, and its most extreme governing faction deliberately kept solvent by the government that claimed to be fighting it.
The trap was not a consequence of Hamas. The trap was the policy. Hamas was the excuse to keep it locked.
Aerial view of Rafah showing destruction following Israeli forces withdrawal as the ceasefire took hold. Once home to 1.4 million displaced people, now rubble.
© UNRWA · CC BY-SA 3.0 IGOThe Civilization Question
There is a version of this story in which every actor made defensible decisions in their own context, and the catastrophe emerged from the collision of defensible decisions. Historians will debate that.
But there is another version — increasingly difficult to dismiss — in which 2 million people were consciously placed inside a political and economic structure designed to prevent their liberation, and every actor with the power to change that structure found a reason not to. The US called it counterterrorism. Israel called it security. Qatar called it humanitarianism. Iran called it resistance. The PA called it negotiations.
None of them called it what it was: the permanent warehousing of a population whose political rights were inconvenient to every government in the region.
Gaza is a failure of human civilization not because it was caused by evil. It is a failure because it was caused by policy — rational, calculated, self-interested policy — executed by institutions that described themselves as defenders of democracy, security, and peace.
The architecture held for eighteen years. Then it exploded. And the people inside it are still there.
Politicize Mind publishes structural analysis of institutional collapse. Photography: © UNRWA / Ashraf Amra, Mohammed Hinnawi · CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO · Wikimedia Commons. This piece draws on documented reporting from The New York Times, Haaretz, Brookings Institution, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Wilson Center, UN OCHA, UNRWA, and the Congressional Research Service.