Samira, a mother of two, longs for her old life when she was an Arabic teacher and had a comfortable home - before the Hamas attack on Israel a year ago plunged Gaza into suffering and chaos.
She has joined a growing number of Gazans who are wondering whether they have paid too high a price for the Hamas attack on October 7 last year. The ensuing Israeli offensive razed Gaza to the ground, killing tens of thousands of people and forcing more than a million Palestinians to flee their homes.
"Despite all the difficulties, our life was going well. We had jobs, houses and the city," said 52-year-old Samira, who declined to give her last name for fear of reprisals.
Samira describes Israel as "our main enemy...the source of all our woes," but also blames Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind the October 7 attacks, for what she sees as a huge error in judgment.
"What was he thinking? Didn't he expect Israel to destroy Gaza?" she said.
Reuters spoke to dozens of Gazans, all of whom asked not to be identified by full name to avoid reprisals. For some, Hamas is a hero because of the October 7 attack, when Palestinian militants launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, something they thought they would never see.
However, several said the Iran-backed militant group - which has ruled Gaza since 2007 - thought little of their suffering, and some felt the attack was a terrible mistake.
Sinwar, 62, has not been seen in public since the Oct. 7 attack, in which gunmen killed 1.200 people and abducted another 251, including women and children, according to Israeli figures. He runs Hamas from the shadows of a network of tunnels under Gaza and, according to people in contact with him, remains convinced that armed struggle is the only way to force the creation of a Palestinian state.
Hamas claims the October 7 attack - the deadliest in Israel's 75-year history - marked a turning point in the decades-long struggle for a Palestinian state, which has slipped off the international agenda. Officials say the group is winning the battle against Israel, which has failed to achieve its wartime goals of destroying Hamas as a fighting force, eliminating its leaders or returning its hostages.
However, according to Gaza health authorities, around 42.000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive, and starvation is threatening the camps for displaced people where more than a million people have sought refuge.
A poll released in mid-September by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Research (PSR), which is funded by Western donors, showed that for the first time, a majority of Gazans oppose the decision to carry out the attack. The poll, conducted in early September, found that 57 percent of respondents in the Gaza Strip said the decision to launch the attack was wrong, while only 39 percent said it was the right one, a sharp drop from the previous poll in June.
Hamas has long been accused of cracking down on dissidents in Gaza by beatings or worse. However, recent months have seen some rare public demonstrations of dissent.
Former Hamas official Ahmed Youssef Saleh questioned on Facebook in July whether anyone in Hamas "studied and thought about the consequences" before launching the attack that sparked Israel's uncompromising invasion.
Saleh's post has since attracted hundreds of comments, with many criticizing the Islamist group themselves. Saleh, who continues to post regularly, did not respond to requests for comment.
A poll published in mid-September showed that, for the first time, the majority of Gazans oppose the decision to carry out the attack
Palestinian activist Amin Abed, who criticized the October 7 attack, was beaten by masked men in July and ended up in hospital. His father walked the streets of the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza using a megaphone to blame Hamas for the attack.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, dismissed such criticism of the group as "limited remarks." "Those remarks come from pain and nothing more," he told Reuters, adding that the spirit of the Palestinian people is nowhere near broken.
"We had no choice but to launch this great battle, regardless of the cost, because the Palestinian cause was nearing its end amid the growing aggression and Israeli crimes against our people and our holy sites," he said.
The signs of dissent are important to Hamas, which wants to retain control of Gaza after the war ends, despite insistence by Israel and the United States that it cannot play any role in governing the enclave after the war.
Ashraf Abuelhoul, editor-in-chief of Egypt's state-run newspaper Al-Ahram and an expert on Palestinian affairs, said the nature of any role for Hamas in post-war Gaza would depend on how the conflict ends.
"Inside Gaza, the situation will be different and when people realize that Gaza has become intolerable, support for Hamas will decline," he said. However, he added that Iran could demand a future role for the militant group as part of a solution to the broader regional conflict.
Palestinians blame Israel for their economic suffering, settlement expansion in the West Bank and for blocking their political aspirations for a Palestinian state with occupied East Jerusalem as its capital. Many see the October 7 attack as a response to decades of Israeli occupation rather than a specific Israeli offensive or policy.
Mahmoud, 29, a Gaza resident now displaced in the Zawayd area in the center of the Gaza Strip, criticized the United Nations and Western powers for allowing Israel to ignore repeated calls for the creation of a Palestinian state. He said the attack put the neglected topic at the center of the international agenda.
"The whole world woke up on October 7: they realized that there are people who are still under occupation; people who will not rest until the Israeli occupation ends," said Mahmoud, who asked not to be identified by his full name.
However, many advocates of a two-state solution see that possibility looking more remote than ever after October 7, with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu firmly rejecting the idea and increasing the pace of settlement building in the West Bank.
A PSR poll showed that the percentage of Gazans who said they wanted Hamas to rule post-war Gaza dropped to 36 percent, from 46 percent in June.
"For the first time, we see that more Gazans want the PA, not Hamas, to control Gaza after the war. This is probably the most decisive indicator,” Halil Shikaki, director of the Palestine Center for Policy and Research, told Reuters, referring to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas.
Even in the West Bank, where support for Hamas has remained strong, support for the attack has declined, the poll shows, although nearly two-thirds of respondents still think it was the right decision. PSR stated that it interviewed 1.200 people face-to-face, of which 790 were in the West Bank and 410 in Gaza, with a margin of error of 3,5 percent.
In August, Israel's military accused Hamas of trying to falsify the results of PSR polls to show false support for Hamas and October 7, although the military said there was no evidence that PSR was cooperating with Hamas. The PSR investigated the allegation but found no evidence that the data had been manipulated.
Abuelhul, the editor of the Egyptian paper, said it would be very difficult to comprehensively measure Hamas's popularity in Gaza until the war is over. He said that the PU, which is controlled by Hamas's rival, the Fatah party, must reform if it wants to play a role in post-war Gaza.
"It is important that the Palestinians reach an agreement on a new government, with new faces, which will be in charge of managing the citizens' affairs and for the reconstruction of Gaza," he said.
Prepared by: A.Š.
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