Political rivals Hamas and Fatah are locked in a battle of words and images over conditions in the Hamas-ruled coastal strip

The two most powerful Palestinian political movements in Gaza – Hamas and Fatah – are slugging it out in a social media war that is pitting video against video and hashtag against hashtag ahead of municipal elections in the Palestinian territories slated for October.



The widespread use of social media for the first time in Palestinian elections has seen both sides locked in a conflict of narratives over conditions in the coastal strip ruled by Hamas since 2007, which has lived through three devastating conflicts with Israel in the last eight years.

The battle of words and images was triggered by a series of slick videos posted on YouTube representing Hamas’s pitch for the municipal elections – not least in Gaza City, one of the three most important and populous Palestinian cities.



The message, after years emphasising Israeli occupation, siege and resistance, is relentlessly upbeat, featuring two key phrases that have also been deployed as hashtags on Twitter and Facebook: “Thank you, Hamas” and “Gaza is more beautiful”.



The online battle has continued as the Israeli military – on Sunday and overnight on Monday – launched some 50 strikes against targets in Gaza. The attacks by jets and Israeli tanks were in response to a missile, claimed by a jihadist group, that hit the nearby Israeli community of Sderot.

The Hamas videos, featuring drone shots, pop music and stylised production, depict a Gaza at odds with the grinding reality of high unemployment, frequent power cuts and war-damaged buildings.



Instead, the scenes flit from the new sea-side corniche to artfully-lit office blocks and an amusement park opened by Hamas, to universities, municipal labourers hard at work and lifeguards on the beaches.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Palestinian man walks past the ruins of houses in Gaza City destroyed during fighting between Hamas and Israel in 2014. Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

In reply, Fatah – the party of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, which governs on the West Bank – has re-edited the videos to show what it believes is the reality of almost a decade of Hamas rule, saying they will reconstruct a battered Gaza.

In the Fatah version – using the same hashtag “thank you Hamas” but this time ironically – Israeli bombs are depicted exploding over the rooftops. Neighbourhoods heavily damaged in the last conflict in 2014, such as Shuja’iya, are shown as a grey patchwork of rubble. Hamas police are seen beating women on the street or fighting Salafists in a Rafah mosque.

Most horrifying of all is the inclusion of shots of dead Palestinian children from recent conflicts.

It has not only been the rival videos that have been struggling for attention but associated hashtags too, often mirroring each others’ messages: Hamas asserting it is “ready to rule” with Fatah saying it is “able to rule”.

The original hashtags are already becoming the punchline for jokes among opponents of Hamas, while a shot-by-shot deconstruction of Hamas’s first video has been widely shared on Facebook.

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Among other things it claims that many of the achievements Hamas is claiming credit for were either built when Fatah was in power or were paid for – like the Gaza Strip’s refurbished central north-south road – with foreign money from places such as Qatar and Turkey or by private investors including Gaza’s Capital Mall.

The impetus for the campaigns on both sides is the recognition that, with 90,000 young people eligible to vote for the first time, old methods of electioneering may not suffice to grab attention in a battered and weary Gaza where both Fatah and Hamas are regarded with distrust by a sizeable section of the 1.8 million population.

What seems certain is that the battle seems likely to intensify as both sides train up social media activists to fight their corner.

A sense of the campaigns’ surreal strangeness is underlined by the fact that Khaled Safi, a Hamas-supporting social media consultant, says he has advised both Hamas and Fatah activists.

“Officials recognise that these elections will be the first Palestinian elections fought on social media,” he told the Guardian.

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“According to some statistics from 2015 some 1.7 million of Palestinians are on Facebook with many young people using social media as their number one source for news and knowledge now.”

Safi says the aggressiveness of the rival social media campaigns reflects the polarisation of Palestinian society, a divide he expects to be exacerbated further.

“Palestinian society is full of polarised ideologies. Unlike the [Palestinian legislative council] elections in 2006 when the parties tried to convince rivals and those who were neutral to vote for them, these elections are about persauding their own core base to vote.

“There is lack of confidence within the parties themselves, whether it is Fatah or Hamas. It is about persuading voters to vote for them again.

“With the level of misery we are living with, I really feel social media is a magic solution. It reaches more people, more cheaply – and every party wants to show it is more [tech savvy].”

Safi sees the Hamas campaign – for all its positive spin – as essentially oppositional, forcing Fatah to reply.

What cannot be disputed is that Hamas’s supporters, even ahead of the official start of campaigning, were not only ahead of the curve but far glitzier as well.

“Hamas,” says Safi, “takes the opportunity to try new techniques all the time. Fatah depends on its old-fashioned ideas and its appeal to its legitimacy, so Hamas is trying all the time to prove itself.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Palestinian Hamas supporters at a rally near the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Photograph: Adel Hana/AP

The “Thank you Hamas” and “Gaza is more beautiful” campaign, needless to say, has been met with scepticism and derision by senior figures allied with Fatah in Gaza, including Sufian Abu Zaida, who claims that even some figures in Hamas he has spoken to are embarrassed by the videos.

“People are making jokes about it. I met today with one of the Hamas leaders and he said that there is a lot of criticism of it in Hamas – that they will gradually disappear. It is harming Hamas, which usually represents Gaza as suffering and under siege, [but] now appears to be representing Gaza as a paradise of Hamas’s making.”

And among those who both Hamas and Fatah are trying to convince – Gaza’s new generation of Palestinian voters – there is deep scepticism aimed at both sides.

Farah Bakr, 18, will be able to vote if the elections take place in October. A blogger who built a huge following during the 2014 conflict, she won’t be voting for either party.

“I see most Palestinians in Gaza being against both Fatah and Hamas. When I saw the videos I was amazed ... After everything we’ve lived through, all the wars, I believe all these videos are such a lie. We live in Gaza. We know what is happening.”