Amin Abed, the Gazan dissident who founded the anti-Hamas 'We Want to Live' movement back in 2019, is speaking out again, this time with a blunt demand that Hamas be completely stripped of its weapons. Abed says disarmament alone won't be enough, arguing that Gaza's youth also need a real deradicalization effort to undo what he describes as generations of extremist indoctrination rooted in ideology over a century old. His proposal goes a step further than most calls for disarmament circulating in current ceasefire talks: seize every weapon Hamas has and melt them down into garbage containers, turning tools once used for terror into something ordinary Gazans can actually use.

Abed's words carry weight because of what he has personally endured for saying them. He has been kidnapped and brutally beaten multiple times by Hamas members simply for criticizing the group's rule over Gaza, a risk few residents are willing to take given how harshly the group has historically responded to dissent. His latest comments land at a moment when Hamas disarmament has become the central sticking point in negotiations over Gaza's postwar future, with mediators, Israel and the United States all pushing for some version of a weapons handover that Hamas has so far resisted. For dissidents like Abed, the fight isn't just about who holds the guns, it's about breaking a cycle of indoctrination he believes has shaped generations of Gazans long before the current war began.