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The eruption of anti-Hamas protests in Gaza is not merely an internal Palestinian power struggle; it represents an ideological reckoning. As Gaza’s citizens courageously defy Hamas rule and protest for an end to the war and the end of Hamas rule in Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza are having to reckon with the same forces that have caused chaos and destruction across the wider Middle East for many decades.

In December 2024, the Al-Qaeda offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which has controlled much of Syria’s Idlib province for nearly ten years, led a coalition of rebel forces who captured Damascus, ending the Assad family’s five-decade rule and a brutal civil war that claimed 600,000 lives and displaced over half of Syria’s population.

Many Westerners, including myself, tried to hold out hope that the interim government led by HTS leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa would rebuild Syria as a normal and peaceful country after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime. But since then entire families of Alawites have been killed in areas such as Latakia, Tartus, and Hama governorates. While these killings have been variously attributed to supporters of Syria’s interim authorities and to former government elements, reports indicate that, in the latest wave of violence, HTS fighters and other extremist factions carried out mass executions, kidnappings, and ethnic cleansing against Alawite civilians in areas near the front lines.

These massacres have been underreported by mainstream media, as global attention remains fixated on Israel and Palestine, while missing the bigger regional picture. This is a shame because many of the problems in the region are deeply interconnected. While jihadists rampage in Syria, a different set of jihadists rampage across Yemen, and another set in Sudan, and so do Hamas in Palestine, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Jihad also keeps continuing to bubble up in Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, and across the region. In 1990, just five percent of civil wars worldwide involved jihadist groups; by 2017, this figure had risen to over forty percent. Acknowledging this is not whataboutery—it is diagnostic.