A team of United Nations experts tasked with gathering information on sexual violence linked to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel found “reasonable grounds to believe” that some victims were sexually assaulted, including rape and gang rape, according to a U.N. report released Monday.
“In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed,” a press release announcing the report’s findings said. “The mission team also found a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations.”
The 23-page report said the team also found “clear and convincing information” that some of the women and children taken back to Gaza that day by Hamas as hostages were subjected to “rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” There were “reasonable grounds to believe,” it said, “that this violence may be ongoing.”
The last election in Palestine was in 2006.
Over half the Palestinians that are alive today were not alive then. Even then; less than half the voters voted for Hamas- they used a plurality system and Hamas had ~40% of the votes.
Further, Hamas was given/allowed funding by Israeli leaders (Netanyahu in particular saw to it) specifically to destabilize any Palestinian state.
So, no. I wouldn’t describe the government in Gaza as “democratic”; when the last election in Israel was about a prior to Oct 7’s attack.