Why we hear so many fewer Gazan voices against Hamas than Iranian voices against the Islamic Republic
Moment 592
After Iran’s recent massacres, the internet was flooded with voices — videos, photos, raw testimony, anger, grief — from Iranians pushing back against the Islamic Republic. By contrast, voices from Gaza criticizing Hamas do exist, but they’re far fewer, harder to keep alive, and often vanish. The contrast is real, and it’s worth explaining.
Yes, Gazans have internet — at least sometimes. Smartphones are common, people use social media, and some even manage VPNs. But the issue isn’t whether you can post. It’s what happens to you if you do.
Gaza is tiny and incredibly dense. Everyone is connected through family, clans, neighborhoods. Even if a post is anonymous, it’s often not hard to narrow down who made it, or at least where it came from. Informants are everywhere. And punishment doesn’t require proof — suspicion is enough.
Hamas also represses differently than the Islamic Republic. Iran’s crackdowns are often loud and public. Hamas tends to operate quietly — arrests, disappearances, executions behind closed doors. Add a war on top of that, and everything gets buried. Deaths are blamed on airstrikes, bodies are buried quickly, and internal killings just dissolve into the chaos.
What leaves Gaza is filtered long before it reaches the outside world. Hamas controls who films, who talks to journalists, what footage circulates, and what gets confiscated. Even when the internet is working — which it often isn’t during fighting — the set of things you can safely post is narrow. Content that fits the Hamas narrative survives. Content that points inward doesn’t.
There’s also the external incentive problem. The global audience eagerly amplifies material blaming Israel, and mostly ignores or rejects material showing Hamas brutality. So from a Gazan’s point of view, posting evidence against Hamas buys you nothing and risks everything. Silence becomes the rational choice.
Then there’s the diaspora effect, which people massively underestimate. A huge share of the Iranian voices you see online aren’t physically inside Iran. Iran has a large, organized, politically active diaspora that translates, amplifies, archives, and coordinates dissent. That machinery keeps voices alive even when repression spikes — and it often isn’t obvious who’s inside the country and who isn’t.
Gaza has nothing like that. The Gazan diaspora is much smaller, far less organized, and far less able to sustain pressure once voices inside are cut down.
Support for Islamism in Gaza is probably higher than in Iran, but it’s a difference of degree, not kind. Dissent exists in Gaza too. What it lacks is scale, protection, and any real expectation that speaking out will lead to change. Iranian dissent keeps leaking because people think the regime can fall. Gazan dissent disappears because people expect retaliation — and they’re usually right.
So the relative quiet from Gaza shouldn’t be read as approval of Hamas or as evidence of restraint. It’s what you get when a small, tightly controlled society is run by a violent Islamist group, under cover of war, in a world that rewards only one kind of story.
Why we hear so many fewer Gazan voices against Hamas than Iranian voices against the mullahs. Moment 592