A version of this story appeared in the Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each Wednesday.
Many in the U.S. and other Western nations understand the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the simplest of terms: as a bloodthirsty, Iran-backed Islamist terrorist group bent on the destruction of Israel and willing to use unspeakably brutal tactics to achieve that end.
As Israel ramps up its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 rampage, questions are swirling about what the group truly wants from a political standpoint, how it has evolved since its founding more than three decades ago, how its political and military identities converge and collide, and whether it could ever be pacified by anything other than a massive military defeat.
Regional experts say the Western understanding of Hamas largely ignores how the group is perceived throughout its base of operations in the Gaza Strip, let alone around the wider Muslim world, where its reputation is more nuanced. Millions share Hamas’ core tenets regarding the illegitimacy of the Israeli state.
Some argue that Hamas’ terrorist assault that claimed the lives of more than 1,400 Israelis on Oct. 7 may have deepened and expanded its following. Perceived injustices by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stirred outrage even before its retaliatory bombing campaign, which is estimated to have killed nearly 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
“Their constituency is probably growing,” said Khaled Elgindy, senior fellow and director of the program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute.
“They brought the enemy to its knees. They humiliated the Israeli leadership. Palestinians will naturally support it,” Mr. Elgindy told The Washington Times in an interview. “That doesn’t mean if there were an election tomorrow, [Palestinians] would cast a ballot for Hamas. But if there were [such an election], I think they would win in this moment.
“The reality is that Hamas is popular not for killing civilians but for dealing a heavy blow to their occupiers,” Mr. Elgindy said. “And there’s just no way around that reality. People can’t just explain it away.”
Hamas has ruled Gaza since 2006. After it won elections in the enclave, it engaged in a bloody conflict to drive out the more moderate Fatah Party. Fatah is the largest political party in the Palestinian Authority, but its influence has been limited primarily to the West Bank since the internal clash with Hamas.
The George W. Bush administration had supported the notion of democratic elections in Gaza in the hope that Fatah would win. The administration was caught flat-footed when Hamas, which the State Department had designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” since 1997, came out on top.
Despite its reign of terror, Hamas has maintained support from several regional powers. Even some with close ties to the West eagerly promote a narrative that Hamas is less a rabid, antisemitic Islamic extremist organization than a collection of freedom fighters driven to reclaim Palestinian land that Israel and its allies seized decades ago.
“Hamas is not a terrorist organization; it is a liberation group, ‘mujahedeen,’ waging a battle to protect its lands and people,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a speech to Turkish lawmakers after the Oct. 7 assault on Israel.
“The perpetrators of the massacre and the destruction taking place in Gaza are those providing unlimited support for Israel,” Mr. Erdogan said. “Israel’s attacks on Gaza, for both itself and those supporting them, amount to murder and mental illness.”
Israel pushed back immediately. “Israel wholeheartedly rejects the Turkish president’s harsh words about the terrorist organization Hamas,” Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lior Haiat wrote on social media. “Hamas is a despicable terrorist organization worse than [the Islamic State] that brutally and intentionally murders babies, children, women and the elderly.”
The way Hamas operates as a political movement and an armed force is messy. Qatar cultivates good relations with the United States, has earned the designation of a non-NATO ally and is the site of a vital Central Command forward military base at Al Udeid. Since 2012, it also has hosted the Hamas political office in Doha. Top Hamas figures, including leader Ismail Haniyeh and former leader Khaled Meshaal, travel routinely to the Qatari capital to conduct party business.
Qatari officials have yet to comment on top Biden administration officials’ claims that the gas-rich Gulf state will “reconsider” its tolerant relations with Hamas after the crisis subsides.
Hamas’ political and military members have diverse views about the group’s core goals and how to achieve them.
The Hamas name is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” It portrays itself as a movement rather than a party or group, and analysts say some voices within Hamas’ leadership advocate for a more pragmatic approach to engagement with the Israeli government. Hard-liners favor the kind of violence seen on Oct. 7.
Many interpret Hamas’ most famous slogan, “From the river to the sea,” as a literal call to destroy the state of Israel and restore Palestinian control over all lands stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. Others say it’s no more than a slogan and that Hamas’ actual aims are far more realistic.
“They’re not holding out to liberate all of historic Palestine from the river to the sea. They want to be the dominant force now, not in some unicorn future where they’ve liberated all of Palestine,” Mr. Elgindy said.
The varied international interpretations of Hamas and the notion of competing views within the group may be irrelevant in the wake of Oct. 7. “Every member of Hamas is a dead man,” Mr. Netanyahu said shortly after the Hamas assault.
Roots of resistance
In broad terms, it is easy to understand the underlying philosophy of the Hamas movement.
The group emerged in the late 1980s as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and sprang to life during the Palestinians’ first intifada, or uprising, against Israel.
Its founding 1988 document, or “covenant,” leaves little doubt about driving principles.
“The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned,” the covenant reads in part. “The day that enemies usurp part of Muslim land, jihad becomes the individual duty of every Muslim. In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.”
The document denounces the “Zionist” role throughout history and argues at one point, “They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state.”
Hamas first turned to terrorist tactics such as suicide bombings and civilian attacks in April 1993, just a few months before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, the longtime leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization umbrella group, signed the Oslo Accords. The accords established the Palestinian Authority, which was given power to establish limited self-governments in Gaza and the West Bank.
Hamas leaders deeply opposed the accords because they ran counter to the group’s goals of uniting the Muslim world against Israel and blocking the prospect of diplomatic ties between Muslim-majority nations and Israel.
Hamas’ initial covenant speaks at length about the duty of all Muslims to band together to fight Israel. The Oct. 7 attacks are widely thought to be at least partially driven by the Palestinian militant group’s desire to sabotage thawing relations between Israel and parts of the Arab world, including potentially Saudi Arabia.
The group’s founding documents state clearly that any recognition by the Muslim world of Israel’s existence and sovereignty represents a threat to the goal of eventually liberating Palestinian lands.
While never renouncing the charter, Hamas leaders circulated a “General Principles & Policies” document in 2017 that appeared to promote a more moderate image of the group as a legitimate political actor on the world stage. The rhetoric deployed in the document, however, was as fiery as ever.
“Palestine is a land that was seized by a racist, anti-human and colonial Zionist project that was founded on a false promise,” the 2017 document stated. “Palestine symbolizes the resistance that shall continue until liberation is accomplished, until the return is fulfilled and until a fully sovereign state is established with Jerusalem as its capital.”
‘Part of our social fabric’
Hamas’ military branch, known as the Qassam Brigades, is estimated to have 20,000 to 40,000 fighters. It is those fighters who breached the Israel-Gaza border on Oct. 7 and rampaged through southern Israel.
Like any other political movement, Hamas has drawn a broad spectrum of popularity and perception.
Palestinians may disagree with Hamas’ violent tactics but widely accept the group as part of legitimate political discourse, said Nathan J. Brown, a Middle East scholar at George Washington University.
“Across the political spectrum,” Mr. Brown told PBS’s “Newshour” in a recent interview, “most Palestinians, even those who detest Hamas, would say it’s a legitimate part of Palestinian society, it’s part of our body politics, it’s part of our social fabric, so even though we don’t like them, even though they’re extremist and they’re too religious, and they’re too violent, and so on, we still recognize them as legitimate Palestinian actors.”
After Hamas’ electoral win in Gaza in 2006, Israel and Egypt ramped up a blockade of the Gaza Strip in an effort to stop the shipment of weapons to Hamas. Critics have portrayed the blockade as one of the root causes of the extreme poverty of Gaza. Some human rights groups have described Gaza as an “open-air prison” because of Israel’s and Egypt’s strict border controls.
Hamas gets much of its funding from outside sources, notably Iran and Qatar. Much of that money is funneled through the United Nations and is ostensibly for humanitarian purposes and basic services for the people of Gaza. Some of it, however, winds up in the hands of Hamas, which on Oct. 7 proved its paramilitary capabilities and effectiveness at waging war against Israel.
Proving itself as such a force may have been another motivation for that attack, Mr. Brown said.
“Hamas probably saw this as an opportunity to show that it could do what no other Palestinian movement has been able to do in a long, long time. And that is really [to] confront and threaten Israel militarily,” he told PBS. “It was an opportunistic move.”
The attacks also killed dozens of foreign nationals and collected some 200 hostages of all ages. That means severe ramifications for Hamas.
Mr. Elgindy told The Times that Hamas has lost any hope that Israel and its Western allies might see it as a legitimate political organization.
“Hamas wanted legitimacy. They wanted legitimacy within Palestinian politics,” which led to their participation in the 2006 elections, Mr. Elgindy said.
“That’s part of what makes this so shocking. All of that has now been blown to smithereens,” he said. “If there was any possibility of normalizing Hamas’ presence inside Palestinian politics, that has now disappeared. The international community will not stomach any kind of legitimization of Hamas.”
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.