She Polled Gazans on Oct. 6. Here’s What She Found.

The day before Hamas’s horrific attacks in Israel, the Arab Barometer, one of the leading polling operations in the Arab world, was finishing up a survey of public opinion in Gaza. The result is a remarkable snapshot of how Gazans felt about Hamas and hoped the conflict with Israel would end. And what Gazans were thinking on Oct. 6 matters, now that they’re all living with the brutal consequences of what Hamas did on Oct. 7. So I invited on the show Amaney Jamal, the dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and a co-founder and co-principal investigator of Arab Barometer, so she could walk me through the results. And, it’s a complicated picture. The people of Gaza, like any other population, have diverse beliefs. But one thing is clear: Hamas was not very popular. As Jamal and her co-author write: “The Hamas-led government may be uninterested in peace, but it is empirically wrong for Israeli political leaders to accuse all Gazans of the same.” Mentioned: Palestinian Center f