"democratically elected" being an extremely load bearing sentiment if you know anything about what people's lives are actually like on the ground. did you know a large majority of the populace didn't even vote in 2006? since 2006? there hasn't been elections since. The median age is 18.

Pulled all their military out? Oh, they still controlled their airspace, critical infra, borders tho? Sounds very self determined!

Serious, bad faith or extremely reductive misrepresentation that I can't tell is borne from ignorance willful or accidental.

your comment is the equivalent of acting like cuba's economy is all their own choosing, without analyzing the immense damage sanctions (and why sanctions were there in the first place) have done to the country, or accosting haiti without knowing why their struggles exist. context matters.

2006 is 20(!) years ago, the elections had a 70% turnout, and Hamas received only 44% of the vote.

Considering that about 60% of the Gaza population is age 20 or younger, that means about 18% of the current population voted for Hamas.

And of course Israel directly helped this by arresting a huge number of Hamas politicians right before the elections, and openly interfering with the election process in general.

So no, Hamas does not represent the will of the people in Gaza, and calling it "democratically elected" is at this point a straight-up lie.

Support for Hamas also came from Netanyahu[0], he explicitly gave support to be used as wedge for the Palestinian cause, to perpetuate the conflict giving casus belli to Israeli actions against Palestinians in Gaza.

[0] https://www.972mag.com/netanyahu-hamas-october-7-adam-raz/

This argument you make is the same one Osama bin Laden uses in his 2004 “Letter to the American People”: he argues that because the American people re-elected George W. Bush, the populace was complicit in the policy consequences, self-rationalizing 2001.

Congratulations for using a heuristic that resulted in 9/11! Osama’s rationalization at least had a more accurate premise that the American people continued to be able to vote — unlike in Palestine. So congrats on having either a worse moral compass or worse reasoning skills than Bin Laden!

That's a weird way of saying there hasn't been an election in 20 years.