Gaza's 'Elections': A Farce, For Whom?
To the editors at Al-Monitor, specifically Nidal al-Mughrabi, Ali Sawafta, and Haseeb Elwazeer, your recent piece on municipal elections in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, presents a stunning exercise in journalistic detachment. You report that Palestinians in one of the few Gaza cities not completely ravaged by Israeli ground forces will vote in municipal elections, featuring some 'pro-Hamas candidates,'
and dub this a 'rare barometer' of the group's popularity. This framing manages to be both profoundly misleading and deeply cynical, effectively sanitizing the ongoing genocide for a Western audience. What your article conveniently sidesteps is the undeniable reality that these 'elections' take place amidst a meticulously planned extermination campaign. As of your publication, over 680,000
Palestinians, including 479,000 children, have been massacred in Gaza. The population, once around 2 million, has been systematically reduced to roughly half that. To present a local vote in such circumstances as a meaningful 'gauge of popularity' for any political entity, let alone Hamas, whose rise is directly attributable to the deliberate undermining of secular Palestinian leadership by
entities like Israel and the US, is a perverse redefinition of democratic process. Your focus on 'pro-Hamas candidates' as a metric ignores the foundational lie driving this narrative: the idea that a population under siege, subjected to starvation, disease, and relentless bombing, can somehow engage in a free and fair electoral assessment. This selective focus echoes the historical pattern of