From Gaza to Tehran, from the politics of resistance to the limits of regional diplomacy, a pressing question has resurfaced amid the 2026 war: why was Palestine not explicitly placed at the center of Iran’s ceasefire framework? In this critical reading, Ramzy Baroud challenges the assumption of abandonment, arguing instead that the answer lies in the fragmented nature of Palestinian representation and the uneven political architecture of the resistance camp itself.
FOR many years, being accused of being ‘pro-Iran’ was not a terrifying notion only for those living in the West, but also in the Middle East, and yes, including Palestine itself.
The accusation itself was always meant to wound, to isolate, to delegitimise. One was either an “Iranian tail,” an “arm,” or an “agent.” The language varied, but the political purpose did not. It was designed to strip entire movements of their agency, to suggest that no Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni, or Iraqi force could ever arrive at resistance on its own terms, through its own experience, its own blood, its own history.
Within Palestinian discourse, this accusation was cultivated most aggressively by the camp of the Palestinian Authority, particularly the Fatah establishment orbiting it. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were not to be debated as Palestinian movements with their own popular constituencies, political traditions, and military choices. They were to be dismissed as foreign extensions, as though collaboration with Washington and security coordination with Israel were somehow more “national” than alliance with forces that actually armed, funded, and defended resistance.
The irony was never subtle. The camp, openly embedded in the American order, dependent on its money and political cover, accused others of foreign dependency. The side that coexisted with occupation, and in many ways adapted itself to it, reserved for itself the monopoly on national legitimacy.
That discourse began to crack—not because its authors suddenly discovered honesty, but because genocide in Gaza stripped the region bare. The Palestinian Authority stood by as a spectator, or worse. Arab governments that had spent decades sermonizing about the centrality of the Palestinian cause, either accommodated the mass extermination or openly worked to disarm the resistance—one of Netanyahu’s central strategic goals all along. As Gaza was starved, bombed, and buried, old accusations about Iran started sounding less like analysis and more like propaganda.
The sectarian language also began to collapse under the weight of reality. For years, anti-Iran forces in the region weaponized Sunni-Shia divisions to poison any possibility of a unified anti-colonial politics. Yet when Gaza became the center of the region’s moral and political horizon, it was not the self-proclaimed guardians of Arabism who rose in any meaningful way. It was Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansarallah in Yemen, Iraqi groups, and eventually Iran itself that treated Gaza not as a charitable cause but as the nerve center of a broader confrontation.
Some continued, of course, with the same exhausted nonsense—that Shias and Zionists were somehow interchangeable, that Iran’s support was merely opportunism, that every act of solidarity concealed a plot. But those voices weakened as Gaza itself spoke differently. Under extermination, under siege, under starvation, many Palestinians in Gaza praised Iran openly and shamed Arab regimes just as openly. The old sectarian vocabulary, though never fully dead, was forced onto the defensive.
Then came the war on Iran.
When the US-Israeli assault began on February 28, 2026, killing Iran’s supreme spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and triggering a major escalation, the question of Iran’s relation to Palestine returned with renewed force. Iranian official discourse did not drop Palestine. Quite the opposite. Iranian official discourse continued to frame Gaza in the language of genocide, colonial erasure, and anti-colonial struggle, while consistently reaffirming support for Palestinian self-determination and liberation across historic Palestine.
This matters because it immediately rules out the lazy argument that Iran simply “moved on” from Palestine once the war reached its own cities. It did not. Palestine remained central to the discourse. Gaza remained central to the moral language. The rupture appeared somewhere else: not in rhetoric, but in diplomacy.
That is where the real question begins.
When Iran’s proposed 10-point framework for ending the war entered public discussion, the debate focused on sanctions, the Strait of Hormuz, enrichment, US withdrawal, and, crucially, Lebanon. The broad pattern was unmistakable: Lebanon was explicitly treated by Tehran as part of the ceasefire architecture, while Gaza was not foregrounded in the same way in the public conversation surrounding the plan. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said Tehran was in touch with Lebanon to ensure ceasefire commitments were respected “on all fronts.” Meanwhile, international reporting repeatedly described Lebanon as a core sticking point in the talks.
This absence was enough to generate a predictable chorus: Iran had abandoned Palestine. Gaza had been traded away. Tehran had finally revealed itself.
That conclusion is too easy. Worse, it is intellectually unserious.
Iran did not leave Palestine out because Palestine no longer mattered. It left Gaza out, more precisely, because Tehran has historically been far more cautious about claiming the right to politically represent the Palestinian file than many of its critics are willing to admit. Lebanon and Palestine are both central to Iran’s regional doctrine, but they are not situated in the same way within the political architecture of the resistance camp.
There is a reason for this, and it is historical.
Hezbollah’s relationship with Iran is not merely one of alliance. It is institutional, ideological, doctrinal, and deeply sedimented. Iran Primer’s background on Hezbollah and Iranian regional alliances captures this clearly: Hezbollah emerged through direct Iranian sponsorship and evolved within a framework shaped by the doctrine of wilayat al-faqih, even as it became thoroughly Lebanese in its political and social embeddedness. Hamas is different. Palestinian Islamic Jihad is different again.
PIJ’s founders were heavily influenced by the Iranian Revolution and maintained a more consistent ideological alignment with Tehran. Hamas, by contrast, arose from a different genealogy—Muslim Brotherhood roots, Palestinian nationalist priorities, governance burdens in Gaza, and a diaspora leadership forced to survive across shifting Arab capitals.
This is not a minor distinction. It explains why Iran can speak of Lebanon as part of one strategic continuum while speaking of Palestine with greater political caution, even when the emotional and ideological commitment remains intense. Hezbollah and Iran are fused through a long-developed doctrinal and military ecosystem. Palestine, by contrast, remains a field of fragmented representation, competing authorities, rival capitals, and divided strategic horizons.
This fragmentation did not begin yesterday.
When the PLO signed the Oslo Accords in September 1993, much of the Arab world celebrated the arrival of “peace.” History, of course, has rendered its verdict. Oslo did not end colonial domination. It reorganized it. It rebranded occupation as a peace process, transformed Palestinian liberation into administrative subcontracting, and gave Israel time, legitimacy, and international cover to deepen settlements, fragment the land, and domesticate the Palestinian national movement. The accords were supposed to culminate in a final settlement within five years. Instead, they hardened into a structure for managing Palestinian dispossession.
Iran opposed Oslo from the beginning. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani denounced the agreement in severe terms, while later Iranian positions continued to reject the US-managed peace process. Yet there is an enduring thread in Tehran’s posture: caution, at key moments, to avoid appearing as if it stands in opposition to the Palestinian choice. Indeed, Tehran had repeatedly signaled that it is willing to accept any decision embraced by the Palestinian majority.
That caveat is more important than it appears. Iran’s line, over time, was not simply “Palestine matters.” It was also: Palestine is not ours to sign away, define unilaterally, or negotiate over as a substitute sovereign. That position still matters here. It helps explain why Tehran’s diplomatic language could remain saturated with Palestine while stopping short of making Gaza the explicit test clause of a war-ending framework negotiated primarily around Iran’s own direct confrontation with Washington.
This is also why Hamas matters so much in this story.
On March 14, 2026, Hamas issued one of the most revealing statements of the entire war. Reuters reported that Hamas affirmed Iran’s right to respond to the US-Israeli assault “by all available means,” but at the same time called on “our brothers in Iran not to target neighboring countries.” Reuters correctly noted the significance: Hamas was expressing solidarity, but also distance. It was not speaking in the fully integrated language of Hezbollah.
That statement should not be misread as weakness or betrayal. It reveals something deeper: the Palestinian movement, especially in exile, has never enjoyed the luxury of a single coherent strategic theater. Its leaders have had to survive in Damascus, Doha, Ankara, Beirut, Cairo, Amman, and elsewhere—each capital offering refuge with one hand and limits with the other. That reality long predates Hamas. It belongs to the entire Palestinian diaspora experience. Stateless movements learn quickly that today’s host may become tomorrow’s jailer.
So when Hamas’s external leadership speaks with one degree of caution, while voices inside Gaza speak with greater fury and fewer diplomatic filters, this is not a contradiction for its own sake. It is the political geography of dispossession. Those living under siege may, paradoxically, speak with greater clarity than those navigating “hospitality” in Arab capitals shaped by US power, Gulf money, and Israeli red lines.
This is one reason the old accusation—“Iran abandoned Palestine”—fails so badly. It assumes Palestine is a single political subject with a unified leadership and a clear external doctrine. It is not. There is the Palestinian Authority camp, embedded in the Oslo ruin and increasingly aligned with Arab regime suspicion of Iran. There is Hamas, divided between internal and external constraints. There is Islamic Jihad, more consistently anchored in Tehran’s orbit. There are wider currents in the diaspora, donor-driven media networks, Gulf-funded institutions, business classes tied to normalization, and political elites still haunted by the fantasy that Palestine can be saved through deference to the very capitals that helped bury it.
In that fragmented field, Iran can support Palestine, arm Palestinian factions, center Palestine in its ideological discourse, and still refrain from presenting itself as the sole negotiator of Gaza’s fate. That restraint may frustrate many Palestinians, especially at a time of genocide.
Frustration aside, we must not allow logic to give way to misinterpretation: Iran did not abandon the Palestinians.
The Hezbollah comparison clarifies this further. Hezbollah’s late Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah long presented Palestine as integral to the resistance horizon, but always from within a disciplined, coherent ecosystem of command, doctrine, and regional alignment. Even in victory speeches after Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 and after the 2006 war, Nasrallah framed Palestine through resistance, not negotiation, and offered Lebanon’s model as an example to Palestinians. That is not how Palestinian politics functions in reality, because Palestinian representation has been broken by Oslo, by exile, by Arab state manipulation, by donor capture, and by the structural violence of occupation itself.
Syria is part of this history too. The geopolitical fragmentation over the Syrian war badly strained Hamas’s ties with Tehran and Hezbollah. Those ties were later mended, through painstaking regional political work that involved Hamas leaders, PIJ officials, and Hezbollah’s leadership, especially in the years before the Gaza genocide. The genocide accelerated that repair by making the regional stakes impossible to ignore. But repair is not the same as full fusion. The Palestinian front remains the strongest moral pillar of the resistance axis, but not its most institutionally unified one.
That is why Gaza was not specifically named in the way many expected.
Not because Tehran had ceased to care. Not because Palestine had been sold. But because Iran’s diplomacy reflects a hierarchy of political integration that many supporters of the resistance camp prefer not to confront directly. Lebanon, for Tehran, is part of a strategic continuum with far more cohesive channels of representation and obligation. Palestine is central, but politically fractured. Iran speaks for itself. It speaks with Hezbollah in a more integrated way. With Palestine, it still stops at a threshold: it backs, arms, praises, mourns, and invokes—but it does not fully presume to sign on behalf of a shattered and contested national field.
One may disagree with that threshold. One may argue that genocide in Gaza should have made its explicit inclusion non-negotiable, and such an argument would be morally powerful. But it is different from claiming Iran “abandoned” Palestine. The record does not support that. Iran’s official discourse in 2026 repeatedly returned to Gaza, genocide, and Palestine as the core wound of the region, even amid attacks on Iran itself.
The real lesson is harder, and more uncomfortable.
Without understanding these nuances, it is easy to collapse back into stale diatribes about sectarianism, Iranian opportunism, or some fantastical civilizational plot. But these clichés explain nothing. The more serious reading is that the resistance axis is not a perfectly unified bloc. It is strongest where political coherence, military coordination, and ideological integration have been built over decades. It is weaker where fragmentation, donor dependency, diaspora precarity, and rival leaderships have hollowed out a national movement from within.
And yet the outcome of the war still matters profoundly for Palestine.
A weakened Iran would not simply mean a setback for Tehran. It would mean a region even more fully dominated by Israel and the United States, more normalization imposed from above, more pressure to disarm every resistance formation from Gaza to Lebanon, and more isolation for Palestinians inside occupied Palestine. A stronger Iran, by contrast, would not magically liberate Palestine, but it would alter the regional balance, constrain Israeli impunity, and widen the space in which Palestinian resistance can survive and reorganize. That much is evident from the way regional diplomacy, ceasefire debates, and military calculations have already unfolded during this war.
So the question was never really: Did Iran abandon the Palestinians? The harder question is this: why does Palestine remain the moral center of the resistance camp, yet still lack the unified political representation that would force every regional negotiation to pass explicitly through Gaza? Until that question is faced honestly, the wrong people will keep being accused of betrayal, while the real architects of Palestinian abandonment continue to pose as realists.
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Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, ‘Before the Flood,’ was published by Seven Stories Press. He is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Illustration courtesy: Palestine Chronicle
