The New Gaza Tragedy: When Liberation Movements Devour Their Soul

The killings in Gaza evoke the same moral collapse witnessed in Beirut four decades ago

By Shyam Bhatia

In Gaza, a new and unsettling pattern is emerging. Hamas fighters are turning their weapons inward, targeting suspected collaborators, critics and even those who simply refuse to obey. In some districts the executions take place in full view of frightened families; elsewhere the victims disappear overnight, their names murmured but never written down. What began as a movement of resistance now functions as a government of fear, a reminder of how revolutions devour their own.

Independent reports confirm that masked gunmen, some wearing Hamas headbands, executed kneeling prisoners in Gaza City accused of helping Israel. The Independent Commission for Human Rights in Palestine (ICHR), founded by Yasser Arafat in 1993, condemned the killings as “a gross violation of the right to life, physical integrity and the right to a fair trial.”

Hamas executes two suspected informants. Pic – Al Arabiya

The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza released its own statement on October 14, denouncing “the execution of citizens in Gaza outside the judiciary.” It described a video showing eight bound men shot by masked gunmen and called on the authorities “to open an immediate investigation and bring those responsible to justice in accordance with due process.”

Only hours earlier President Trump had been celebrating his “Peace 2025” accord as “the dawn of a new Middle East.” Asked about the killings, he first brushed them aside saying Hamas had “taken out a couple of gangs that were very, very bad,” then added a warning: “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them, perhaps violently.”

The images from Gaza recall another tragedy from another generation. In 1982, the Christian Phalangist militia rampaged through the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, in retaliation for the assassination of their leader Bashir Gemayel. The deeper motive was sectarian hatred, the urge to make an example of many for the suspected crimes of a few.

The Phalange said it was defending Lebanon and Christianity from Palestinian “terror.” Hamas today says it is defending Palestine and Islam from Israeli occupation. Both claimed holy purpose. Both became executioners.

I walked through the narrow lanes of Shatila after the killing stopped. The smell of death hung in the air. Women lay sprawled where they had fallen, still holding their children. Old men had been dragged from their homes and shot in the alleys. The Israeli army, which had surrounded the camps and promised protection, stood by and watched. Later Israel’s own Kahan Commission accepted “indirect responsibility,” a rare moment of moral accounting in a region that prefers silence to shame.

In Gaza there will be no commission, no accounting. The world has grown numb. Hamas executes its own in the shadows, unseen by foreign reporters and largely ignored by international observers who prefer to view the conflict through the simple prism of occupier and occupied. Yet the truth is more complicated. A movement once born of desperation has become its own oppressor, turning liberation into loyalty tests and resistance into rule by fear.

Reports suggest that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government armed rival clans inside Gaza — among them groups led by Yasser Abu Shabab and Hossam al-Astal — to weaken Hamas during the war. The result is a patchwork of militias, each claiming to represent Gaza’s future. When Hamas now vows to “cleanse” the Strip of collaborators, it is not only hunting traitors, it is eliminating rivals.

The parallels between Beirut 1982 and Gaza 2025 are not literal. One was a massacre by proxy, the other an internal purge. Yet the moral pattern is unmistakable. Both show what happens when ideology eclipses empathy and when the language of resistance becomes permission to kill. In both, the executioners justified their violence by invoking the memory of earlier wrongs. And in both, the victims were their own: Palestinians in one, Palestinians again in the other.

Every side in the Middle East claims victimhood, and often with reason. The greater tragedy is how quickly victimhood turns to vengeance. In the name of justice, men become what they once opposed. The Phalange believed it was avenging its dead; Hamas believes it is protecting its people. Both have left behind silence, mass graves and unhealed grief.

The massacre at Sabra and Shatila forced the world to face how moral boundaries can vanish overnight, how those who pray and fast can also kill without mercy. Gaza today raises the same question. The victims of yesterday’s injustice have become the instruments of terror.

For Palestinians, this is more than political decay. It is the erosion of the moral authority that once made their cause unassailable. Liberation movements can survive siege and starvation, but not the loss of their own soul. When Hamas kills Palestinians, it harms its people more deeply than any Israeli airstrike ever could.

The Phalange once boasted that it had “cleansed” Beirut. Hamas, in a darker echo, now boasts of “purging traitors.” Both slogans reek of moral rot, the illusion that purity can be achieved through blood. Yet beneath the noise, ordinary people still cling to small acts of humanity: a doctor treating the wounded in Rafah, a mother digging through rubble in Shuja’iyya, an old man lighting a candle for his murdered neighbours in Shatila.

History in this region does not repeat itself because people forget. It repeats because every generation convinces itself that cruelty is justified by memory. Until someone decides that vengeance is not virtue, the ghosts of Sabra and Shatila will continue to walk through Gaza.

London, October 15, 2025

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 17 October 2025