When I was 11, Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, arrived unannounced at the mosque next to my family’s home in Gaza City. It was 2001 and the Islamist terrorist group, which had not yet taken control of Gaza, had turned the el-Yarmouk mosque into a base for proselytizing and propaganda. My friends and I gathered around as Sheikh Yassin chatted with us about our neighborhood, families and studies, almost as if he were the village elder. Once he went into the mosque, his guards showed off their weapons and boasted to us that Hamas was akin to an exclusive club for the valiant “resistance.”

It required obedience to one’s family, religious piety, academic excellence, a spotless reputation and useful skills and talents. It was a message I heard many times from leaders and members of Hamas: It wanted the best of the Palestinian people to build the foundations for a Palestinian resistance motivated by fundamentalist Islam, with Israel’s annihilation leading to a single nation from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea. Hamas was driving us to bloodshed as even the Palestinian leadership, under the Palestine Liberation Organization, had decided that armed resistance was futile and had begun building the foundations of a Palestinian state that I saw as a child.

Our family flew on the newly established Palestinian Airlines into the newly created Gaza International Airport, using bright new Palestinian passports. There were Palestinian telecommunication companies, an industrial zone, a newly discovered gas field, the start of a seaport, new infrastructure and a growing financial sector, all hallmarks of a march toward statehood that the Oslo Peace Process, however flawed, had ushered in. Gaza, despite its complicated history, was a beautiful place that meant so much to my family — and it seemed that it was about to get even more promising.

But it was not to be. Four years after I met Sheikh Yassin, Israel pulled all its troops and settlements from the Gaza Strip. Two years later, in 2007, Hamas seized power after winning the first and last free and competitive Palestinian legislative elections the prior year. Despite its posturing as an elite club, Hamas, from its inception, behaved like a mob of gangsters, brutalizing Palestinian women who violated its fanatic sense of morality, torturing and killing those who were suspected of opposing them and carrying out grisly suicide attacks against Israeli civilians, which weakened the Palestinian Authority and empowered the extremist right in Israel, which seized the opportunity to destroy hopes of a new Palestinian horizon or future. Now, in the ruins of my once beautiful homeland, we are witnessing the coda of the group’s two decades of horrific rule.