Except they would routinely send in military forces to capture terrorist suspects in a process they referred to as "mowing the grass". It's even more pronounced in the West Bank, where the Israeli settlements are thoroughly intermingled with the Palestinian ones, and the Palestinians had relatively few powers over their own security.
It's not a simple thing, unfortunately. Middle Eastern politics seldom are, just in general.
The claim of Israeli apartheid is not a hamas claim, it's acknowledged by various Israelis as well. Neither Gaza nor, especially the West Bank, has had full independence in many years.
Note, I am not talking about any Israeli citizens. I am talking about Israeli non-citizens who live under Israeli restrictions and off-and-on military control. This is the nature of apartheid. A people that is separate, but not fully independent. An in-between state of conquest, where you're sort-of conquered but not really and have some, but not full, freedoms.
Except it is not under full Palestinian control either. Some things are controlled by Palestinians, other things are indeed controlled by Israelis. When a country is exercising partial control over citizens that are not its own, something odd is happening.
You can justify it if you like, but it is not the normal way of things where free people are concerned.
Extremely complicated, certainly. But I hope my point that the apartheid claim, very specifically, is pretty hard to argue with comes through. It does not refer to any Israeli citizens, that's a separate topic. It is not strictly hamas propaganda, it's just a criticism of one part of a very complicated and difficult situation. The line that it is propaganda is actually itself, propaganda.
The only way to make it untrue was if Palestinians had full legal control over the West Bank, which they do not. Gaza is a murkier situation. It's really about the West Bank though, not hamas or Gaza.
The only issue with that is Israel's wish to remain a Jewish state. If they added all of those Palestinians as free and equal citizens, then that would shift the demographics of Israel sufficiently to put that at risk. So, they have to choose between values of freedom and equality, vs being a Jewish state, vs giving up that land.
Or they could attempt to remove all the people somehow.
No easy solutions, unfortunately. As usual for the Middle East.
I do agree that terrorism is a problem that needs to be dealt with. The problem is when innocents get caught up in the middle. If you just call a whole people or whole religion terrorist as an excuse to get rid of them, you're just a generic conquerer, and a liar on top.
Israel recognised Palestinian civilian and security control of the West bank in the Oslo accords from the 90's. They are blatantly shitting on their own promises whenever a genocidic occupier or their enabling security forces set foot on the West Bank without express permission from the Palestinian West Bank government.
Then Israel responds by murdering 100x civilians including women and children.
Complete disproportionate response after Iron Dome basically prevents any Israelis from dying from those so-called "rocket barrages."
Each time it's one or two Israeli soldiers killed by the one rocket out of 40 that made it in, and by a week later 1,200 Palestinian civilians are murdered. Cool.
Over and over for 5+ decades. It's just objective fact, the numbers are publicly available. I don't forget, so the people in Gaza and the West Bank sure as shit don't (between fighting off "settlers" with AR-15s from New Jersey storming their villages in the middle of the night). Israel created every Palestinian terrorist after decades of oppression, displacement, apartheid, and dire hopelessness. Almost like it's what they wanted.
And now literal genocide. Their end goal. A final solution if you will.