Hamas has one genuine democratic mandate in its history: the January 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council election, which international observers — including a Carter Center delegation — judged to be free, competitive, and fairly administered. Hamas won 74 of 132 seats, campaigning less on its founding charter's rejection of Israel's existence and more on a domestic platform contrasting its discipline against years of documented Fatah corruption.
What Hamas did with that mandate is the subject of this article: not the single election, but the eighteen years of rule that followed it, none of which has been submitted to another vote.
The takeover
Power-sharing with Fatah collapsed within eighteen months. In June 2007, Hamas fighters seized full military control of Gaza in a week of factional fighting that killed around 600 Palestinians. Human Rights Watch, working in Gaza in the takeover's immediate aftermath, documented Hamas fighters summarily executing Fatah-linked rivals — including throwing at least one bound prisoner from a rooftop — after they had already surrendered. Fatah's own forces committed reprisal killings against Hamas members in the West Bank around the same period, which HRW also documented. The result split Palestinian territory into two separately-governed areas that persists today, with no unified Palestinian election possible since.
Governing without a vote
No election of any kind has been held in Gaza since 2006. Hamas's governance has instead been enforced through its own internal security services, with a documented pattern of suppressing dissent aimed at itself rather than at Israel. In 2019, Gaza residents protesting Hamas's own taxation and economic mismanagement under the "We Want to Live" banner were met with beatings and mass arrests by Hamas's internal security forces, who also detained and assaulted journalists covering the demonstrations.
During the 2023-2025 war, verified video and Human Rights Watch documentation showed Hamas-linked gunmen publicly executing Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel or looting aid — in at least one November 2024 incident, in a Gaza City street in front of onlookers, with no trial or judicial process of any kind. Hamas has defended these killings as a wartime security necessity given genuine risks of Israeli intelligence penetration; that concern does not change the fact that people were killed on accusations that were never tested by any independent process.
October 7 and its aftermath
Hamas's most consequential act of governance was the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel — covered in full, including the UN's specific findings on sexual violence and the limits of what investigators could verify, in this project's separate article on the day itself. What matters for Hamas's record as Gaza's government is what followed: a war that killed tens of thousands of the population it governs, devastated Gaza's infrastructure, and left it dependent on a contested new aid system (documented in this project's article on the Gaza aid crisis) — consequences Hamas's own leadership decided to risk without submitting that decision to any electoral or representative process among the people who would bear it.
An unresolved leadership, an unresolved war
Hamas's own leadership has been in disarray since October 2024: Yahya Sinwar was killed that month, his successor Mohammed Sinwar was killed in May 2025, the next leader Izz al-Din al-Haddad was killed in May 2026, and a February 2026 internal vote failed to produce a confirmed successor, leaving a five-person council split between factions favouring continued armed confrontation and factions favouring negotiation. Under the October 2025 ceasefire, Hamas agreed in principle to hand Gaza's governance to a transitional "National Committee for the Administration of Gaza" — but as of 2026 it has not disarmed, which the peace plan's own international monitors say has left reconstruction "paralysed," alongside Israel's own continued expansion beyond the ceasefire's agreed lines.
Eighteen years after its only free election, Gaza has no functioning path back to one.