Sitting on his sofa in front of a wall pockmarked by shrapnel, Moumen al-Natour, a 30-year-old lawyer, is planning a daring campaign that he hopes will hasten the end of Hamas’s control over where he lives, Gaza City. Only when they are evicted from Gaza, he says, can his life return to a semblance of normality – and he can fulfil his dream, to hold a proper wedding ceremony and party in a Gaza Strip at peace.
However, he has not seen his fiancée for months. He also wants to visit his father’s grave – he died from hepatitis last year, probably caused by polluted drinking water.
In 2019 Moumen ran a campaign called We Want to Live, in which Gazans protested at the suffocating and repressive rule of the Islamist hardline Hamas movement. He even managed to help run street protests in northern Gaza this year, at huge risk to those who took part. Several were later either beaten, tortured or killed. He escaped.
Only last week, he says Hamas gunmen came in to the Shifa Hospital, which still functions in west Gaza City, and attacked an anti-Hamas protester, breaking his legs and inflicting horrific injuries before dragging him into the street and dumping him there. That man was taken to another hospital but has survived.
Yet, he says, the protesters and the activist young Gazans he leads have “broken the barrier of fear”.
He describes his own existence now as “a life of hell”. His part of the city is relatively quiet, but with Israeli soldiers several miles away to the north and the east, he has no way out.
“I was sheltering in eastern Gaza, but I chose to return to our old apartment here in the west of Gaza City because we had a couple of months of ceasefire early this year. My family – eight brothers and my sisters and my mum – prefer to be in a familiar environment with our possessions, rather than in a tent in the east of Gaza – even though it’s more dangerous here,” Moumen tells World News & Features.
Each week he buys one kilogram of flour, from what he calls the ‘black market’. It costs a staggering 50 dollars, he says, and the piece each week is going up. Other than that, he searches out some fresh vegetables and other provisions, again paying vastly inflated prices.
“I have been drawing on my good resources, stored in a Palestinian Bank in Ramallah, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority close to Jerusalem, sixty miles to the North-East. “I earned well as a lawyer,” he explains, “and I contact a middle man who gives me exactly half of what I transfer from my account in Ramallah to his account there. Somehow, he has a huge stash of money in Gaza, as banks here no longer operate.. Now, though, I have hardly any money left in my account.”
He says he and his family are hungry.
He disagrees with claims by United Nations and aid organisations that a return to the former system of aid distribution during the war would transform Gazans’ lives.
He says though that the Gazan Humanitarian Foundation needs urgently to get its aid distributed in the north, where the Hamas-controlled Gaza City remains impoverished and close to social collapse.
“What we want Israel to do is to blockade the whole area of western Gaza City, and only allow people in an out if they produce their ID cards and show they are not identified as connected with Hamas.
He is frustrated that Israelis forces are not co-ordinating with genuine anti-Hamas opponents like himself, rather than relying on unilateral armed force.
He is convinced Hamas will be fully defeated within weeks or months if Israel continues the fighting. Then, he says, the really hard work begins.
“Ultimately before we find a political solution to the Palestinian issue, we need to reform ourselves… and that means a whole new way of educating ourselves, a new way of seeing our neighbours, Jewish and Arab Israelis, as potential friends and partners, not just as enemies.”
He adds: “We need to get out of this state of despair.
“We need a revolution for our society. Society is the foundation of any regime. Any government, any state, if Society collapses, then the whole State will collapse.
“Our society needs a new serious leadership to find a social solution. Not a political one. The political solution comes after Society is ready for the state and Society has to have an economy that is developing and sustaining itself.”
He knows this cannot be done without Western and moderate Arab support. “We need them urgently for the rebuilding process.
“After this war we need to start a period of peace between Israel and us Palestinians.
“I believe in peace with Israel as a state and I recognise it as a state.
“There is a part of the society that believes in peace with Israel and it believes that the role of the U.S in the Middle East is important. Those who believe in politics believe that the role of the U.S is much better than the role of Iran. We want the role of the U.S in the region and we don’t want a vacuum.” He is aware that this sounds like an idealistic, even over-optimistic scenario.
“Of course we cannot even start unless all the Israeli hostages, or those few still alive, are released. But Hamas will only do that if they are literally given a way out. They should all be deported to Arab countries, just like happened to Yasser Arafat and his gunmen in 1982 when Israel got to the edge of Beirut and forced them to go to Tunisia.”
Meanwhile, Moumen remains committed to planning and implementing an internal uprising – dangerous though that is. He says an internal fight-back is already underway. Families, he says, have been putting huge pressure on Hamas gunmen when they seek shelter in civilian households, and Hamas is severely weakened, even demoralised.
He knows his own life and his family’s life remains in severe danger.
“When all this horror is over, I will not be going to take refuge in Europe or another Arab state. My place is here: to help make Gaza a shining light. That is, a life without the horror of Hamas.”