The origins of Hamas

Hamas is still seen by many Palestinians as the last defender of their cause

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

By The Week Staff

published 21 October 2023

On 7 October Hamas launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, killing 1,400 people and taking more than 200 hostages.

In the last two weeks, at least 3,700 people have been killed in Gaza as Israel launched retaliatory air strikes.

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It grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist movement. The Brotherhood's Palestinian wing, founded in the 1940s, was initially not involved in the armed struggle against Israel – which was led by the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) – and instead devoted itself to charitable and religious work. But during the first Intifada, a violent uprising against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories that began in 1987, it turned to militancy, as the PLO started to negotiate with Israel. It was in that year that Hamas was officially co-founded by the Gaza-based quadriplegic cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

Hamas's charter, published in 1988, calls for the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic society in historic Palestine. Article 11 asserts a God-given right to "every inch of Palestine". The charter is explicitly genocidal: it imagines a day of judgment, when Jews try to hide but are slaughtered by Muslims. It also blames Jewish "scheming" for many tumultuous events in world history, from the French Revolution to the First World War. In 2017, Hamas published a new policy document that avoided the aggressive antisemitism of the charter, and proposed a long-term ceasefire with Israel, a hudna. But it has never recognised the Israeli state, and recent actions suggest its ideology has not softened. "This land is ours, Al-Quds [Jerusalem] is ours, everything is ours," its political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, told Israelis after the 7 October attacks. "You are strangers in this pure and blessed land. There is no place or safety for you."

Initially, Hamas abducted and killed Israeli soldiers. It tried to undermine any political settlement, first employing suicide bombers in April 1993, five months before the PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords. For its first seven years, Hamas only attacked what it called legitimate military targets; but it began to target Israeli civilians after the killing of 29 Palestinians in a mosque in Hebron in the West Bank by an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, in 1994. If the Israelis did not distinguish between "fighters and civilians" then it would be "forced to treat the Zionists in the same manner", it stated at the time. A series of horrific bus suicide bombings followed. These attacks bolstered its status among Palestinians.

Hamas's brand – indeed, its name – is resistance. Many Palestinians believed, and still believe, that the PLO struck a poor peace deal with Israel in 1993, which was never honoured. They never got their own state. The Palestinian National Authority, run by the PLO's political wing, Fatah, was and still is widely seen as powerless and corrupt. The West Bank has remained under Israeli military control (although arguably Hamas's militancy made further steps towards a two-state solution impossible). Hamas is still seen by many Palestinians as the last defender of their cause; a recent poll suggested that a third of them would vote for its political wing.

In 2005, Israel withdrew unilaterally from Gaza (which doesn't have the same strategic value to it as the West Bank). In 2006, in the second Palestinian parliamentary elections, Hamas unexpectedly won. Fatah refused to accept the result. A brief, brutal civil war between the two factions followed, which left Fatah in control in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza. Hamas, blockaded in Gaza by Israel since, has used it as a launchpad for a series of raids and rocket attacks on Israel, resulting in many conflicts and two full-blown wars, in 2008-2009 and 2014, before the present one.

Hamas's political leadership operates in exile in Doha, Qatar, led by Ismail Haniyeh, who was elected in 2006 (Hamas has held no elections since then). Day-to-day affairs in Gaza are overseen by Yahya Sinwar, who served 22 years in an Israeli prison for the killing of two Israeli soldiers. Its military wing – the Al-Qassam Brigades – is led by Mohammed Deif. Deif, a nom de guerre, means "the guest", a reference to his habit of staying with different sympathisers each night to avoid detection; a 2014 Israeli air strike killed his wife and two children. Many Hamas leaders, from Sheikh Yassin on, have been assassinated by Israel.

Gaza relies on aid, largely from Qatar and the UN, to feed and care for its poor. (Before the war, unemployment was at 45%.) Hamas makes money by taxing goods brought in through its network of tunnels from Egypt. Historically, it has been funded by the Palestinian diaspora, donors in the Persian Gulf, and sympathetic states such as Turkey. Its biggest current donor is Iran; the US says Tehran provides up to $100m per year to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

To some extent, it doesn't: a senior Hamas member, Moussa Abu Marzouk, denies that civilians were targeted. Despite the clear evidence, he claims that all those attacked were either soldiers or armed "settlers"; and that those killed at the Supernova rave could have been mistaken for "resting" soldiers. In defence of Hamas's violence, Abu Marzouk claims that Palestinians have no alternative: "Nothing has been achieved towards the idea of two states, from 1948 until today. We are a people under occupation." What would you do, he asked one journalist, if you were "forced to live in a cage"?

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