Young Americans overwhelmingly support Hamas over Israel

In the latest embarrassment for Israel and its backers, a poll has shown that young Americans overwhelmingly support Hamas over Israel.

This is bad news for the Israeli politicians who think America will give them unlimited support forever.

New – who do you support (Age 18-24)

Hamas 60%
Israel 40%

Harvard – Harris #B – RV – 7/12 pic.twitter.com/3SZFFThIF0

— Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) July 17, 2026

Israel losing support

When Hamas conducted the attack on 7 October, Israel had subjected Palestinians to apartheid conditions for decades.

Amnesty International wrote about this extensively:

In May 2021, Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, began protesting against Israel’s plan to forcibly evict them from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. Many of the families are refugees, who settled in Sheikh Jarrah after being forcibly displaced around the time of Israel’s establishment as a state in 1948.

Since Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967, Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been continuously targeted by Israeli authorities, who use discriminatory laws to systematically dispossess Palestinians of their land and homes for the benefit of Jewish Israelis.

In response to the demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah, thousands of Palestinians across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) held their own protests in support of the families, and against their shared experience of fragmentation, dispossession, and segregation. These were met with excessive and deadly force by Israeli authorities with thousands injured, arrested and detained.

The events of May 2021 were emblematic of the oppression which Palestinians have faced every day, for decades. The discrimination, the dispossession, the repression of dissent, the killings and injuries – all are part of a system which is designed to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what Israel has subjected Palestine to. In other words, you can say the 7 October attack was horrific, but you can’t say it was surprising.

You could go further than this too and say senior Israeli politicians wanted the Palestinians to lash out. Here’s what Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2019:

Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas…This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.

Israel crushed peaceful resistance, supported a militaristic alternative, and subjected Palestinians to constant violence. The regime then used the inevitable backlash to justify a genocide.

Young people have seen through this because they haven’t undergone decades of indoctrination from the establishment media. And make no mistake; Israel is going to wish it had polling this good 10 years from now.

Featured image via Yuki Iwamura/ Associated Press