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29 June 2025 11:25am BST
The face of the young man staring into the camera as the crowd streams around him is strong and defiant.
In his hands, the 26-year-old holds a banner bearing an incendiary message: “Hamas does not represent us.”
An accompanying video shows him spurring on others, openly fanning the flames of dissent while many of the people around him nervously avert their faces to avoid being identified on camera.
That man is Ahmed al-Masri, one of the key organisers in northern Gaza of the protests that rocked the enclave in April and May.
This week, pictures emerged of the same man on a stretcher, a frightened and helpless look in his eyes, his legs a bloodied mess.
According to multiple sources who spoke to The Telegraph, Mr Al-Masri was abducted by Hamas gunmen in Beit Lahia, near the northern border with Israel, whereupon he was brutally tortured.
His feet were deliberately broken with large stones and iron crowbars; he was also shot in the legs.
The atrocity is part of an escalating wave of bloodshed unleashed by Hamas against the ordinary Gazans it purports to represent.
As the terror group faces an unprecedented squeeze on its military and economic strength by Israel’s grinding campaign, it is turning to ever crueller methods to keep control of an increasingly desperate population.
Khaled Abu Toameh, a lecturer and expert on Palestinian affairs, said: “After the protests of the last few months, they began executing and arresting people in order to intimidate the population and to terrorise.
“I think it’s working. After a certain point, the protests disappeared.”
In recent weeks, reports have multiplied of people being dragged out of aid lines, tortured in basements, or simply executed in broad daylight.
One video, published gleefully by Hamas-affiliated social media accounts, showed masked figures using a long metal pole to smash a blindfolded man’s kneecaps.
His agonised screams and pleas for mercy are too visceral to properly describe.
Much of this violence is done in the name of the so-called Sahm unit – meaning arrow in Arabic.
Those who make it to hospital are sometimes hunted down and finished off in the wards.
In Mr Al-Masri’s case, the violence came in several waves, and was centred around a major medical facility.
People with knowledge of the situation, too frightened of reprisals to be named, said the young activist was kidnapped and taken to the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, where he was interrogated and warned not to speak to the media.
One said: “They shot two people in front of him, then they shot him in the feet.
“They broke his feet with large stones and crowbars and threw him out in the sun for an hour.
“Then they brought an ambulance and took him to the hospital where they beat him on his feet inside the ambulance.”
In another notorious incident earlier this month, Hamas gunmen allegedly taunted victims they had shot up earlier by preventing them entering a hospital, leaving them to writhe around outside.
Mr Al-Masri, who runs a pharmacy business, was first taken to the main Al-Shifa hospital, but he has now been moved elsewhere for his safety, according to friends.
They are now appealing to anyone who will help to get him out of Gaza, both to escape Hamas and to get proper treatment for his injuries.
“He’s in an extremely bad way,” one person said. “We are trying to do our best for him, but people are terrified of speaking out in case they’re next.”
Some activists believe Hamas has taken advantage of Israel’s conflict with Iran to step up its campaign of intimidation while the eyes of the world are elsewhere.
They are doing their best to flood the parts of social media seen by the West with graphic videos and photographs put out by Hamas in the Arabic corners of the internet that are mainly watched by people in Gaza.
One, Howidy Hamza, described the victims as being “killed twice”.
First, by Hamas; second “by a movement that refuses to see them”, the pro-Palestine movement in the West, many of whose supporters, including those on university campuses, hold Hamas up as a legitimate organ of resistance.
He made the point this week above a video of a blindfolded man being interrogated for alleged “collaboration with the Palestinian Authority”, the body that governs, under ultimate Israeli control, the West Bank.
With that accusation amounting to a capital crime under Hamas’s rule, it is likely the man was executed.
The Telegraph has learnt details of a further killing of a protest organiser, Mohammed Abu Saeed, who led the movement in Khan Younis.
Witnesses have said he was shot so many times in the feet that one had to be amputated.
THE TELEGRAPH
always cheering on the wrong side hallelujah.