Palestinians Commit Suicide as Their Leaders Live in Hotels and Villas

by Khaled Abu Toameh 

• Many residents of the Gaza Strip undoubtedly regret the day they voted for Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election.
• The last protest, which took place in 2017 under the slogan "We Want to Live!", was brutally crushed by Hamas's security forces and armed militias.
• "In all countries of the world, you pay taxes for the services that the state provides you, except for us. In return, there are no hospitals, no education, no electricity, no water, no public utilities, not even rodent control." — Khalil Talmas, Gaza Strip resident, Facebook, July 27, 2022.
• "'We Want to Live!'... is a cry of pain from the depths of a crushed and exhausted Palestinian people. It is a cry against taxes, extortion, repression and corruption." — Anas Al-Jazzar, Twitter, July 28, 2022.
• Other Palestinians said that the current protest was directed not only against Hamas, but also against the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank....
• These Palestinians pointed out the corrupt leaders of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and their family members are leading comfortable lives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in five-star hotels and big villas in Qatar and Turkey, while most people were living in poverty and unemployment and misery.
• "So the [Hamas] leaders' families, their children, grandchildren do not believe in their own [political and military] project, and although they can live in Gaza in the utmost luxury, they choose to leave it for the hotels and villas of Doha and Istanbul. They left the hungry people of Gaza to live in poverty, deprivation and hunger." — Mohammed Nashwan, Gaza Strip resident, alarab.co.uk, July 21, 2022.
• [T]hese voices offer a glimmer of hope that the Palestinians are finally beginning to realize that their corrupt and incompetent leaders -- whether in the Palestinian Authority or Hamas -- are continuing to lead them from one disaster to another, while depriving them of the international aid that is rightly theirs and denying them a decent life.

Since the Islamist Hamas group seized control of the Gaza Strip 15 years ago, residents have been reminded on a daily basis of the failure of the Iranian-backed group to provide them with decent living conditions. Pictured: A man shops for second-hand clothes at a market in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, on July 29, 2022. (Photo by Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images)

It has been 15 years since the Islamist Hamas group seized control of the Gaza Strip, home to some two million Palestinians. Since then, the residents of the Gaza Strip have been reminded on a daily basis of the failure of the Iranian-backed group to provide them with decent living conditions.

Instead, the repressive governance of the Hamas leaders only brings the Palestinians in Gaza more misery.

The situation in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip has become so bad that an increasing number of young people have been committing suicide by self-immolation, throwing themselves from rooftops, swallowing large amounts of medicine and hanging.

Many residents of the Gaza Strip undoubtedly regret the day they voted for Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election.

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