[News] On the Record with Hamas

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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  On the Record with Hamas

Jeremy Scahill
July 9, 2024
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<https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2073209-2878-4e8e-aa6d-08e5a1c4b656_4000x2653.jpeg>Members 
of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. Photo: Mahmud 
Hams/AFP via Getty

The past nine months of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza have spurred an 
unprecedented global awakening to the plight of the Palestinian people. 
At no point in the 76 years since the formation of the state of Israel 
and the unleashing of the Nakba has there been such sustained and open 
anger at Israel and such widespread solidarity with the Palestinians. 
The massive demonstrations in cities across the globe, the severing of 
diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv, the recalling of ambassadors, 
rulings from world courts against Israel, and mounting demands for the 
establishment of an independent Palestinian state—none of this would 
have taken place without the impetus of Hamas’s armed insurrection on 
October 7 and Israel’s subsequent war of annihilation in Gaza.

This reality poses uncomfortable but ineluctable questions. From Hamas’s 
perspective, was Operation Al Aqsa Flood a successful operation? Hamas 
undoubtedly knew that Israeli retaliation would include the killing of 
many Palestinian civilians, even if the horrific scale of Israel’s 
assault was unforeseen. Was October 7, then, a collective martyrdom 
operation launched without the consent of 2.3 million Palestinians? And, 
for the many people who proclaim their support for the Palestinian cause 
but reflexively condemn the violence of the October 7 attacks, how can 
they realistically separate the two?

Drop Site conducted a series of interviews with senior Hamas officials 
alongside a comprehensive review of its statements and those of its 
leaders. I interviewed a variety of Hamas sources on background for this 
story and two—Basem Naim and Ghazi Hamad—agreed to speak on the record. 
I also spoke to a range of knowledgeable Palestinians, Israelis, and 
international sources in an effort to understand the tactical and 
political aims of the October 7 attacks. Some people will inevitably 
criticize the choice to interview and publish Hamas officials’ answers 
to these questions as propaganda. I believe it is essential that the 
public understand the perspectives of the individuals and groups who 
initiated the attack that spurred Israel’s genocidal war—an argument 
that is seldom permitted outside of simple soundbytes.

Hamas leaders cast their operations on October 7 as a righteous 
rebellion against an occupation force that has waged a military, 
political, and economic war of collective punishment against the people 
of Gaza.**“They have left us no choice other than to take the decision 
in our hands and to fight back,” said Dr. Basem Naim, a senior member of 
Hamas’s political bureau and a former government minister in Gaza. 
“October 7, for me, is an act of defense, maybe the last chance for 
Palestinians to defend themselves.”

Naim, a medical doctor, is a member of the inner circle surrounding 
former Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, the chief political leader of 
Hamas, who is based in Doha, Qatar. In the aftermath of October 7, Naim 
has served as one of the few Hamas officials authorized to speak 
publicly on behalf of the movement. In an interview, Naim offered an 
unapologetic defense of the October 7 attacks against Israel and said 
that Hamas was acting out of existential necessity in the face of 
sustained diplomatic and military assaults not only on Palestinians in 
Gaza, but also the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.

“The people in Gaza, they had one of two choices: Either to die because 
of siege and malnutrition and hunger and lacking of medicine and lacking 
of treatment abroad, or to die by a rocket. We have no other choice,” he 
said. “If we have to choose, why choose to be the good victims, the 
peaceful victims? If we have to die, we have to die in dignity. 
Standing, fighting, fighting back, and standing as dignified martyrs.”

Polls suggest that Palestinian support for Hamas remains strong. Prior 
to the October 7 attacks,opinion polling 
<https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/12/palestinians-views-oct-7>in 
Gaza and the West Bank indicated that support for Hamas was on the 
decline, with one poll finding that just 23 percent of respondents 
expressed significant support for Hamas and more than half registering 
negative views. “The October 7 war reversed that trend leading to a 
great rise in Hamas’s popularity,” Arab Barometerreported 
<https://www.arabbarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/Arab-Barometer-PSR-Palestine-Report-Part-I-EN-.pdf>.

“If we have to choose, why choose to be the good victims, the peaceful 
victims? If we have to die, we have to die in dignity.”

A morerecent poll 
<https://www.pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/Poll%2092%20English%20press%20release%2012%20June2024%20%28003%29.pdf>conducted 
by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, whose findings 
were released in mid-June, found that two-thirds of the Gaza population 
continued to express support for the October 7 attack on Israel, with 
more than 80 percent asserting that it put Palestine at the center of 
global attention. More than half of Gaza residents polled indicated that 
they hoped Hamas would return to power after the war. “They lost 
confidence in peace with Israel. People believe that the only way is now 
to fight against Israel, to struggle against Israel,” said Ghazi Hamad, 
the former Hamas deputy foreign minister and a longstanding member of 
its political bureau, in an interview. “We put the Palestinian cause on 
the table. I think that we have a new page of history.”

“Israel has now spent nine months [fighting in Gaza]—nine months. This 
is [a] small area. No mountains, no valleys. It is a very small, 
besieged area—against Hamas’s 20,000 [fighters],” Hamad continued. “They 
bring all the military power, supported by the United States. But I 
think now they failed. They failed.”

Dr. Yara Hawari, the co-director of Al-Shabaka, an independent 
Palestinian think tank, said that assessing the role Hamas’s October 7 
attacks played in the growing global movement to support Palestinians 
raises complex moral questions. “If the Israeli regime hadn't embarked 
on a genocide in Gaza, would we be facing this kind of level of 
solidarity? I think it's a difficult thing to answer. It's also an 
uncomfortable one because I don't think Palestinians anywhere should pay 
in blood for the solidarity of people around the world and certainly not 
in over 40,000 people killed,” she told me.

“We have surpassed the numbers of the Nakba by at least three times in 
terms of those killed. And an entire place has been destroyed. Gaza 
doesn't exist anymore. It's been destroyed completely. So I think that 
it's certainly been a very revealing moment,” said Hawari, who is based 
in Ramallah. “Had October 7 not happened, would that have been revealed 
to people around the world or not? It’s an uncomfortable thing to think 
about for sure.”

Hamas has emphasized that its aim on October 7 was to shatter the status 
quo and compel the U.S. and other nations to address the plight of the 
Palestinians. On this front, informed analysts say, they succeeded. “On 
October 6, Palestine had disappeared from the regional agenda, from the 
international agenda. Israel was dealing unilaterally with the 
Palestinians without generating any attention or any criticism,” said 
Mouin Rabbani, a former UN official who worked as a special advisor on 
Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group. “The attacks of 
Hamas on October 7 and their aftermath played a crucial role, but I 
think just as much credit, if you will, goes to Israel, if not more so,” 
he added. “If Israel had responded in the way that it did in [previous 
assaults on Gaza] in 2008, 2014, 2021, it would have been a story for a 
number of weeks, there would have been a lot of hand wringing, and that 
would have been the end of it.”

“It's not only the actions of the colonized, but also the reaction of 
the colonizer that has created the current political reality, the 
current political moment,” Rabbani said.

U.S. and Israeli officials often respond to questions about the 
staggering death toll in Gaza or the mass killing of women and children 
over the past 9 months by casting blame solely on Hamas. They have 
treated the events of October 7 as if they granted Israel an open-ended 
license to kill on an industrial scale. “None of the suffering would 
have happened if Hamas hadn’t done what it did on October 7,” is a 
sentiment Secretary of State Antony Blinken is fond of repeating.

That is clearly untrue. But does multi-decade brutality of the Israeli 
occupation absolve Hamas of all responsibility for the consequences of 
its actions on October 7?

“It's kind of like telling the folks in the Warsaw uprising that you 
should have known that the German military was going to respond the way 
they did and you are going to be responsible for the deaths of other 
residents in the Warsaw ghetto.”

“These deaths should be on the conscience of the Israeli leaders who 
decided to kill all these people,” said Rashid Khalidi, author of T/he 
Hundred Years’ War on Palestine/and widely viewed as the leading U.S. 
historian of Palestine. “But they also to some extent should be on the 
consciences of the people who organized [the October 7] operation. They 
should have known, and had to have known that Israel would inflict 
devastating revenge not just on them but mainly on the civilian 
population. Do you credit them for this?” Khalidi added. “The end result 
may be the permanent occupation, immiseration, and perhaps even 
expulsion of the population of Gaza, in which case I don't think anybody 
would want to credit whoever organized this operation.”

The Palestinian-American novelist and author Susan Abulhawa has twice 
traveled to Gaza since the siege began last fall and has been 
unapologetic in her defense of Palestinian armed resistance. She rejects 
the notion that Hamas is responsible for Israel’s mass killing of 
civilians in Gaza since October 7. “It's kind of like telling the folks 
in the Warsaw uprising that you should have known that the German 
military was going to respond the way they did and you are going to be 
responsible for the deaths of other residents in the Warsaw ghetto,” 
Abulhawa said. “Maybe that's true, but is it really a moral point to 
make? I don't think there has ever been so much scrutiny on an 
indigenous people, on how they're resisting their colonizers.”

Abulhawa, whose novels include /Against the Loveless World/and /Mornings 
in Jenin/, told me, “As a Palestinian, I'm grateful for it. I think what 
they have done is something that no amount of negotiation was ever able 
to achieve. Nothing else we did was able to achieve what they did on 
October 7. And I should say, actually, it's not so much what they did, 
but it was Israel's reaction that led to a shift in the narrative 
because they're finally naked before the world.”

The past 76 years of Palestinian history have been a nonstop succession 
of Israeli atrocities and war crimes. Why did Hamas launch such a 
monumental action at this specific moment?

The people who can best answer the question of what Hamas was thinking 
on October 7 are the men in the tunnels being hunted by Israeli forces 
in Gaza. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader on the ground, and Mohammed Deif, 
commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, are widely understood to have 
decided how and when the course of history would be altered.

In both Israeli and U.S. media, Sinwar is generally portrayed as a 
cartoonish villain hiding in his tunnel lair, dreaming up ways to murder 
and terrorize innocent Israelis as part of a warped, ISIS-style 
interpretation of Islam. He has been a U.S. State Department-designated 
terrorist since 2015. “The United States has to have a bogeyman, a 
Saddam Hussein figure, a Hitler figure,” said Khalidi. “I think Sinwar 
has been chosen.”

Despite the sinister portrayals, Sinwar’s writings and media interviews 
indicate he is a complex thinker with clearly defined political 
objectives who believes in armed struggle as a means to an end. He gives 
the impression of a well-educated political militant, not a cult leader 
on a mass suicide crusade. “It's not this black image of Sinwar as a man 
with two horns living in the tunnels,” said Hamad, the Hamas official 
who worked directly with Sinwar for three years. “But in the time of 
war, he's very strong. This man is very strong. If he wants to fight, he 
fights seriously.”

In 1988, just months after Hamas was founded, Sinwar was arrested by 
Israeli forces and sentenced to four life sentences on charges he had 
personally murdered alleged Palestinian collaborators. During his 22 
years in an Israeli prison, he became fluent in Hebrew and studied the 
history of the Israeli state, its political culture, and its 
intelligence and military apparatus. He translated by hand the memoirs 
of several former heads of the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet. 
“When I entered [prison], it was 1988, the Cold War was still going on. 
And here [in Palestine], the Intifada. To spread the latest news, we 
printed fliers. I came out, and I found the internet,” Sinwartold 
<https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5364286,00.html>an Italian 
journalist in 2018. “But to be honest, I never came out—I have only 
changed prisons. And despite it all, the old one was much better than 
this one. I had water, electricity. I had so many books. Gaza is much 
tougher.”

<https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F78581d5a-24d0-47e7-a0c9-38b29b0105fe_3072x1556.jpeg>Yahya 
Sinwar, the Gaza leader of Hamas, interviewed by Vice News in June 2021

In his past media interviews, Sinwar has spoken of Hamas as a social 
movement with a military wing and framed its political goals as part of 
the historic struggle to reestablish a unified state of Palestine. “I am 
the Gaza leader of Hamas, of something much more complex than a 
militia—a national liberation movement. And my main duty is to act in 
the interest of my people: to defend it and its right to freedom and 
independence,” he said. “All of those who still view us as an armed 
group, and nothing more, you don't have any idea of what Hamas really 
looks like.... You focus on resistance, on the means rather than the 
goal—which is a state based on democracy, pluralism, cooperation. A 
state that protects rights and freedom, where differences are faced 
through words, not through guns. Hamas is much more than its military 
operations.”

Sinwar, unlike leaders of Al Qaeda or ISIS, has regularly invoked 
international law and UN resolutions, exhibiting a nuanced understanding 
of the history of negotiations with Israel mediated by the U.S. and 
other nations. “Let's be clear: having an armed resistance is our right, 
under international law. But we don't only have rockets. We have been 
using a variety of means of resistance,” he said in the 2018 interview. 
“We make the headlines only with blood. And not only here. No blood, no 
news. But the problem is not our resistance, it is their occupation. 
With no occupation, we wouldn't have rockets. We wouldn't have stones, 
Molotov cocktails, nothing. We would all have a normal life."

“All of those who still view us as an armed group, and nothing more, you 
don't have any idea of what Hamas really looks like.”

Throughout 2018 and 2019, Sinwar endorsed the large-scale nonviolent 
protests along the walls and fences of Gaza known as the Great March of 
Return. “We believe that if we have a way to potentially resolve the 
conflict without destruction, we’re O.K. with that,” Sinwar said at a 
rarenews conference 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/world/middleeast/gaza-protests-yehya-sinwar.html>in 
2018. “We would prefer to earn our rights by soft and peaceful means. 
But we understand that if we are not given those rights, we are entitled 
to earn them by resistance.”

Israel responded to the protests with the regular use of lethal force, 
killing 223 people and wounding more than 8,000 others. Israeli snipers 
laterboasted 
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-03-06/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/42-knees-in-one-day-israeli-snipers-open-up-about-shooting-gaza-protesters/0000017f-f2da-d497-a1ff-f2dab2520000>about 
shooting dozens of protesters in the knee during the weekly Friday 
demonstrations. For many Palestinians these events reinforced the view 
that Israel’s policies cannot be changed by words.

In May 2021, following a series of Israeli attacks on Palestinian 
worshippers at Al Aqsa mosque—as well as threats of forced evictions of 
Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem—Hamas and 
Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched a barrage of rockets at Israeli 
cities, killing 12 civilians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 
with U.S. support, ordered heavy attacks against Gaza. More than 250 
Palestinians were killed and thousands injured.

After the end of Israel’s 11-day bombing campaign against Gaza, Sinwar 
spoke toVICE News <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12khZa6d_0I>and 
sought to frame the Palestinian struggle in a U.S. context, using recent 
cases of lethal police violence against African Americans. “The same 
type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by [Israel] 
against the Palestinians in Jerusalem, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, 
and in the West Bank. And by the burning of our children. And against 
the Gaza Strip through siege, murder, and starvation.”

The Israeli attacks ended when President Joe Biden intervened and told 
Netanyahu to wrap it up. “Hey, man, we are out of runway here,” Biden 
told Netanyahu on a May 19 phone call. “It’s over.” Two days later, 
Israel agreed to a ceasefire.

“The battle between us and the occupation who desecrated our land, 
displaced our people and are still murdering and displacing 
Palestinians—confiscating lands and attacking sacred places—is an open 
ended battle,” Sinwar said. When asked about the killing of Israeli 
civilians by Hamas rockets, Sinwar became animated. “You can’t compare 
that to those who resist and defend themselves with weapons that look 
primitive in comparison. If we had the capabilities to launch precision 
missiles that targeted military targets, we wouldn’t have used the 
rockets that we did,” he shot back. “Does the world expect us to be 
well-behaved victims while we’re getting killed? For us to be 
slaughtered without making a noise? That’s impossible.”

Two and a half years later, Sinwar authorized the start of Operation Al 
Aqsa Flood, the single deadliest attack inside Israel in history.

Hamas officials told me that for strategic reasons they timed the 
attacks to coincide with Shemini Atzeret, the final day of the Sukkot 
thanksgiving holiday, but more broadly to exploit mounting divisions 
within Israeli society and the deepening unpopularity of Netanyahu 
within Israel. On a tactical level, they engaged in extensive monitoring 
of the Israeli military facilities along what is referred to as the 
“Gaza envelope” and identified vulnerabilities in surveillance systems 
and perimeter defenses.

Throughout the two years leading up to the October 7 attacks, Hamas 
officials told me, they sent Israel repeated warnings to halt the 
activity of illegal settlements and annexations in the West Bank and 
East Jerusalem. Hamas also protested Israel’s mounting attacks and 
provocations on the grounds of Al Aqsa mosque, the holiest Islamic site 
in Palestine, and demanded that the U.S. and other nations restrain 
Israel. “We talked to the mediators, especially the United Nations and 
the Egyptians and the Qataris: ‘Tell Israel to stop this. We will not be 
able to tolerate more and more,’” said Hamad, a Hebrew speaker with a 
long history of negotiating with Israeli officials. “They did not listen 
to us. They thought that Hamas is weak, Hamas is now just looking for 
some humanitarian aid, some facilities in the Gaza Strip. But at the 
same time, we were preparing.”

“We talked to the mediators, especially the United Nations and the 
Egyptians and the Qataris: ‘Tell Israel to stop this. We will not be 
able to tolerate more and more.’”

“We were preparing because we are under occupation,” said Hamad. “We 
think that the West Bank and Gaza is one unit. This is our people under 
oppression, under killing and massacres. We have to save them. And 
Israel feels that they are above the law. They can do anything. No one 
can stop them.”

“We have said it before October 7 that the earthquake is coming. And the 
repercussions of this earthquake will be beyond the borders of 
Palestine,” Naim said.

As Hamas delivered messages through international mediators, it 
simultaneously held regular secret meetings in Gaza where its leaders 
brainstormed potential ways to confront Israel. “We had meetings in the 
political bureau of Hamas in Gaza, and we discussed the situation all 
the time. What was put on the table was an evaluation of Israel in the 
West Bank and Al Aqsa mosque,” said Hamad. “Hamas decided to do 
something in order to make a kind of deterrence to Israel.” They also 
wanted to send a message to the Palestinian masses: “We are not weak 
[like] the Palestinian Authority.”

Hamad said the discussions focused on actions that would force the world 
to pay attention to the plight of Palestinians, but also to send a 
message to Israel. “We are going to show them that we can do something 
in order to harm you and to hurt you,” he said. “What is the other 
alternative? Either we, as Palestinians, are waiting and waiting and 
waiting and waiting for many years for some countries, the international 
community, to do something in order to save the Palestinians, or we can 
go in the violent way to make a kind of shock, in order to get the 
attention of the world.”

Naim said Hamas had concluded that Israeli policy could only be altered 
through violent resistance. “I have to say we are also reading history 
very well. We [learned] from the history in Vietnam, in Somalia, in 
South Africa, in Algiers,” he said. “At the end, they are not peaceful 
NGOs who will come and say, ‘Sorry we have bothered you for some years 
and now we are leaving and please forgive us.’ They are so brutal and 
bloody that they will not leave except with the same tools they are using.”

Hamad and other Hamas political officials said that while they 
participated in the strategy meetings in Gaza leading up to the attacks, 
most of them were not privy to the operational details or timing of the 
operations. “There is a special group headed by Sinwar, who took the 
decision for October 7. A very narrow circle,” he said. “We did not know 
anything about this. We were surprised with October 7.”

<https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd264765b-929c-44fd-95fe-4b2e576d7e73_7105x4737.jpeg>Gaza 
City during an Israeli airstrike on October 9, 2023. Photo: Mahmud 
Hams/AFP via Getty

Before October 7, the prospects for a Palestinian state were becoming 
slimmer and slimmer. The conditions in Gaza were dire and there were no 
signs of improvement because of the intense Israeli blockade and lack of 
interest from the world. Residents of the Strip, according to polls, 
were increasingly apportioning blame for their misery on Hamas—one of 
the central aims of Israel’s collective punishment strategy. The U.S. 
was spearheading a series of diplomatic initiatives to normalize 
relations between Israel and Arab states. The Abraham Accords, launched 
under President Donald Trump, effectively excised the issue of 
Palestinian self-determination as a condition for normalization, a major 
victory for Israel. Israeli provocations and attacks against worshippers 
at Al Aqsa were becoming a regular occurrence. Israel was aggressively 
moving forward with its annexation of Palestinian land and armed 
settlers were conducting deadly paramilitary actions, often with the 
support or facilitation of the government, against Palestinian farms and 
homes in the occupied territories.

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank was widely despised for its 
corruption and collaboration with Israel, including through the brutal 
actions of its U.S.-backed security forces. The PA, often referred to as 
a subcontractor of the Israeli occupation, routinely arrests dissidents, 
union organizers, and journalists, in addition to people Israel has 
identified as security risks.

Hamas wanted to shatter the status quo on Gaza, position itself as the 
defender of the Palestinian people, and open possibilities for a new 
alignment of political power to replace what they saw as PA leader 
Mahmoud Abbas’s Vichy rule. At its highest level, Operation Al Aqsa 
Flood was to be the opening salvo in what Hamas hoped would be a 
decisive and historic moment in the war for the liberation of Palestine.

On a tactical level, the October 7 operations exceeded Hamas’s 
projections. “It was very surprising for us how speedy one of the 
strongest brigades in the Israel Army—the Gaza brigade is one of the 
strongest, most sophisticated groups of their army—to collapse within 
hours without any serious resistance, and that even the state as a 
whole, for hours and maybe days, continued to be paralyzed, were not 
able to respond in the proper professional way,” said Naim, the Hamas 
political bureau member.

“They were able to create this image of undefeated, undefeatable army, 
undefeatable soldiers, the long hand of Israel, which can hit everywhere 
or strike everywhere and come back, relax, to drink at some cafe in Tel 
Aviv, like what they have done in Iraq, in Syria, Lebanon, everywhere. I 
think it has shown that [Israel’s self-promoted reputation] was not 
reflecting the reality.” The attacks, he said, showed Palestinians and 
their allies that “Israel is defeatable and liberation of Palestine is a 
good possibility.”

“There was absolutely no control of the battle space. There was no 
control of this area.”

Nine months after the attacks, Israel remains in a state of shock and 
disbelief over the total failure of its vaunted military and 
intelligence agencies to protect the most vulnerable areas of Israel.

“Hamas won the war on October 7. The fact that they were able to conquer 
parts of Israel and kill so many Israelis,” said Gershon Baskin, an 
experienced Israeli negotiator in regular touch with elements of Hamas. 
“They took out Israel's electronic surveillance system with drones that 
you can buy on Amazon and hand grenades. They took down Israel's 
internal communication systems in the kibbutzim all around the Gaza 
Strip. They were so much more sophisticated than Israel.”

Hamas “never imagined that there would be no Israeli army when they 
crossed the border into Israel,” said Baskin. “One of the Hamas leaders 
told me, ‘If we knew there was going to be no army there, we would have 
sent 10,000 people and conquered Tel Aviv.’ And they're not mistaken. 
They had no army there, and when they encountered the [Nova] music 
festival that they didn't know about, they went on a killing spree.”

Khalidi also believes that Hamas was not prepared for its own 
operational success on October 7. “I don't think they expected the Gaza 
division to fall apart. I don't think they expected to overrun a dozen 
or more border settlements. I don't think they expected thousands and 
thousands of Gazans to come out of this prison that Israel has created 
and kidnap individual Israelis. I don't think they expected the kind of 
killing that took place in these border settlements. I don't think all 
of this was planned, frankly,” he told me. “There was absolutely no 
control of the battle space. There was no control of this area. The 
Israeli army took four days to reoccupy every single military position, 
every single border village. So there were two days, three days, in some 
cases more, during which there was complete chaos. I'm sure horrific 
things happened.”

Hamas has consistently denied allegations that its fighters 
intentionally killed civilians on October 7. In a manifesto published on 
January 21, titled “Our Narrative,” Hamas sought to explain Operation Al 
Aqsa Flood, though the document consisted mostly of general grievances. 
Among the tangible aims of the attacks in Israel, Hamas said, its 
fighters had “targeted the Israeli military sites, and sought to arrest 
the enemy’s soldiers to [put] pressure on the Israeli authorities to 
release the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails through a 
prisoners exchange deal.”

“Maybe some faults happened during Operation Al Aqsa Flood’s 
implementation due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and 
military system, and the chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza,” 
it continued. Sinwarreportedly acknowledged 
<https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-chiefs-brutal-calculation-civilian-bloodshed-will-help-hamas-626720e7?mod=hp_lead_pos7>to 
his comrades after October 7 that “things went out of control” and 
“People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.”

Rabbani said that it is undeniable that Hamas killed civilians during 
the October 7 attacks and expressed serious doubts about the group’s 
official position that Al Aqsa Flood was focused solely on targeting the 
Israeli military. “Hamas has a history of this—its suicide bombings 
against civilian buses and restaurants and so on during the Second 
Intifada,” he said. Rabbani recalls reading accounts of the October 7 
attacks and watching videos from that day of Israeli civilians being 
killed or captured. “My initial view was that these were probably people 
who had been suffering in Gaza their whole lives, didn't expect to go 
back alive, and wanted to go out with a bang. I'm sure that's the 
explanation for some of these cases,” he said.

“But I also wonder to what extent it was premeditated. I'd be very 
interested to learn to what extent Hamas intended to inflict a terribly 
traumatic blow on Israeli society, and not only the Israeli military,” 
he added. “There is evidence to support it. There is also evidence to 
contradict it. But I think it's a question worth examining in more detail.”

The discourse surrounding the killing of Israeli civilians on October 7 
has been a central element in shaping public opinion on the war. “So 
much of the rage in Israel is a function of this very high toll of 
civilian death,” said Khalidi. “War leads to civilian deaths, but this 
was far beyond what could or should have been acceptable under any 
circumstances, and that is also on the planners of this operation. I 
think that's a hard thing to say, but I think it's something that should 
be said.”

“My initial view was that these were probably people who had been 
suffering in Gaza their whole lives, didn't expect to go back alive, and 
wanted to go out with a bang,” said Rabbani. “But I also wonder to what 
extent it was premeditated.”

Israel’s social security agency has determined the official death toll 
from October 7 to be 1,139 people. Among those killed, 695 were 
categorized as Israeli civilians, along with 71 foreign civilians and 
373 members of Israeli security forces. As horrifying as the civilian 
death toll was on October 7, the message was and remains firm from U.S. 
and Israeli officials: Israeli lives are worth exponentially more than 
those of Palestinians.

Hamas has said that its forces targeted military bases and illegal 
settlements, characterizing the killing of civilians in the kibbutzim as 
collateral damage in battles against armed settlers “registered as 
civilians while the fact is they were armed men fighting alongside the 
Israeli army.” Hamas officials suggested that many of the confirmed dead 
Israeli civilians were killed in crossfire, “friendly fire” incidents, 
or intentionally killed by the Israeli Army to prevent them from being 
taken alive back to Gaza. “If there was any case of targeting 
civilians," Hamas alleged in its manifesto, "it happened accidentally 
and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces.”

Abulhawa charged that the Israeli and U.S. governments launched a 
coordinated propaganda campaign in the immediate aftermath of October 7 
aimed at dehumanizing Palestinians and successfully crafted a false 
narrative of Hamas fighters as bestial monsters who killed for the sake 
of killing. She cited the volume of horror stories of sadistic crimes 
allegedly committed by Hamas fighters, including the beheading of 
babies, that have been promoted by Israeli and US officials, including 
Biden, only to later be disproven under scrutiny from journalists and 
independent researchers. “They said that they beheaded babies, that they 
eviscerated a pregnant woman, that they burned a baby in an oven, like 
really horrific violence that seemed just evil and gratuitous to kill 
Jews. That was the narrative,” she said. “It had not even a seed of truth.”

Hamas’s Naim credited the October 7 attacks and the nine months of armed 
insurgency against the invading Israeli forces for elevating the plight 
of Palestinian liberation to the center of global attention. “This 
popular support everywhere, especially in America and Europe, do you 
believe this would happen by a workshop in Washington, D.C., discussing 
between Palestinians and Americans how to run Rafah crossings?” he 
asked. “Unfortunately, this is the way. There is no other way.”

Hamad told me that no one involved with the planning of the October 7 
attacks that he spoke with predicted the full scope of Israel’s response 
and that many Hamas leaders expected a more intense and prolonged 
version of previous Israeli attacks on Gaza. “This is a point that is 
very sensitive,” he said. “No one expected this reaction from the Israel 
side, because what happened now in Gaza, it is a full destruction of 
Gaza, killing about 40,000 people, destroying all the institutions, 
hospitals and everything. I know the situation is horrible in Gaza. It's 
very, very hard. And we need at least ten years to reconstruct Gaza.”

“This war is totally different,” Hamad said. “Totally different.”

International mediators have restarted negotiations between Hamas and 
Israel and there are indications that some type of incremental agreement 
may be on the horizon, though the permanent ceasefire that Hamas has 
demanded seems unlikely. “The main issue is Hamas won't do a deal 
without the end of the war and Israel won't do a deal that ends the 
war,” Baskin told me.

Israel has insisted that Hamas disarm and that the group be barred from 
participating in the post-war governance of Gaza. Hamas has maintained 
it will remain a political force with the right to armed defense against 
Israeli occupation. “America should understand, and this is very 
important, Hamas will be part of the Palestinian scene,” said Hamad. 
“Hamas will not be expelled. Hamas created October 7 and created this 
history.”

According to a member of Hamas’s negotiating team, the Palestinian 
representatives have observed U.S. mediators growing increasingly 
frustrated with the Israeli side. “Everything that [Israel] needs, they 
call the babysitter. The United States is fed up now from the Israeli 
behavior,” said the Hamas official, who asked to remain anonymous. “They 
are scared that this war will be wider in different regions, so they 
want to control Netanyahu and his madness. They are trying to [put] more 
pressure on Israel to accept this ceasefire. They are trying, but I 
think until now they did not use all the cards in order to push Israel. 
I think it's like their spoiled boy.” The Hamas negotiator told me he 
has the impression that “the United States is trying to deal gently and 
softly with Israel, trying to apply pressure, but not squeeze them in 
the corner. Because of this, now there is a big conflict and dispute 
between Israel and the United States.”

Of all the objectives of the October 7 attacks, the one that Hamas was 
most confident would yield concrete results was freeing Palestinians 
from Israeli jails. According to Israeli figures, more than 240 people, 
including Israeli soldiers and civilians as well as foreigners, were 
taken back to Gaza during the Hamas-led attacks.

“[Hamas] made a quick deal with the Israelis,” said Baskin. “It was 
three prisoners for every hostage. I think that was an amazingly low price.”

Sinwar has consistently prioritized the liberation of Palestinian 
prisoners. It was how he gained his own freedom in 2011, in an exchange 
that saw Sinwar and more than 1,000 other Palestinians freed from 
Israeli jails in return for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. “It 
isn't a political issue, for me it is a moral issue,” he said in 2018. 
“I will try more than my best to free those who are still inside.”

Naim said Israel has historically shown a willingness to pay a high 
price for the return of its soldiers, including freeing Palestinians it 
characterizes as terrorists. “Some of them are now [in prison] for more 
than 45, 44 years,” he said. “They have also exercised a lot of pressure 
on the leadership to do something.”

But, three weeks into the war, when Sinwar officially proposed a 
sweeping deal to release “all Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails 
in exchange for all prisoners held by the Palestinian resistance,” 
Israel rejected it.

Baskin has served as a shadow peace negotiator with a variety of 
Palestinian factions. He played a central role in negotiating the Shalit 
deal and has continued to work behind the scenes on hostage issues since 
October 7. Hamas, he said, knew the only chance to free the 
“impossibles”—high-value Palestinian prisoners including those who had 
been convicted of killing Israelis—would be to take large numbers of 
military personnel hostage. “For the soldiers, they wanted to free all 
the Palestinian prisoners in Israel, those serving life sentences,” 
Baskin said. “At that time, there were 559 Palestinians serving life 
sentences. That was their main target, getting all of them.”

Eventually, under both domestic and international pressure, Netanyahu 
agreed to a limited exchange deal. During a brief truce last November, 
Hamas released 105 civilian hostages to Israel in return for 240 
Palestinians—mostly women and children—held captive by Israel. “[Hamas] 
made a quick deal with the Israelis,” said Baskin. “It was three 
prisoners for every hostage. I think that was an amazingly low price.”

Ghazi Hamad, the Hamas official who worked with Sinwar, was emphatic 
that Hamas did not intend to take Israeli civilians hostage. “What we 
planned was just for military purposes, just to destroy this part of the 
Israeli army who controls the situation in Gaza and to take some 
hostages from the military—soldiers—in order to make a kind of 
exchange,” he said. “I don't deny that there were some mistakes done by 
some people, but I am talking about the decision of Hamas, the policy of 
Hamas.”

Baskin told me it was immediately clear that Hamas did not prepare for 
holding so many civilians and was caught off guard when other 
Palestinian groups and individuals who flooded into Israel that day took 
large numbers of hostages, including senior citizens and children. “They 
ended up simply taking people back into Gaza without thinking about the 
logistics, about what price they wanted for them,” Baskin said. “From 
day four of the war, I was talking to Hamas already about a deal for the 
women, the children, the elderly, and the wounded, which I thought was 
the low hanging fruit, because Hamas would not have been set up to deal 
with them. They wanted to get rid of them.”

Israel has used the civilian hostages as the primary justification for 
their continued siege. Hamad confirmed that negotiations began almost 
immediately after the October 7 attacks. He told me that “from the first 
week, we talked to some people, some mediators, that we want to return 
the civilians, but Israel refused.”

Hamad added that Hamas informed international mediators last November 
that it was working to track down more civilian hostages taken by other 
groups or individuals so it could return them to Israel. “We asked them, 
‘Please give us time now to look for people,’” Hamad said. “But Israel 
did not listen to us and they continued to kill people.”

A major point of contention in the current negotiations, Hamas 
negotiators told me, is**Israel’s continued refusal to free Palestinians 
it characterizes as terrorists with “Jewish blood on their hands.” Hamas 
has insisted that if Israel wants its soldiers returned, it must free 
Palestinian resistance fighters, including those convicted of murdering 
Israelis. In the negotiations, Israel has insisted it maintain veto 
power over Hamas’s list of Palestinian prisoners it wants freed in any 
deal.

Hamas negotiators told me that the fact that their forces have managed 
to sustain a nine-month armed insurgency against Israel in Gaza despite 
being outgunned and subjected to large-scale attacks with powerful 
weapons provided by the U.S. has sent a message to the negotiators that 
Hamas has its own red lines. “Nine months have passed and our resistance 
has not been exhausted, nor has it relented, nor has it subsided,” said 
the spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, known by his nom de guerre Abu 
Obeida, in a July 7 audio message. “We are still fighting in Gaza 
without support or external supply of weapons and equipment, and our 
people are still persevering without food, water, or medicine, and under 
a criminal, unjust genocide war.”

Last weekend, Netanyahu released a list of what he called 
“non-negotiables” in any agreement with Hamas. Among these was 
preventing the smuggling of weapons from Egypt, the return of a maximum 
number of living Israeli captives held in Gaza, and barring Hamas 
fighters from returning to northern Gaza. The most contentious aspect of 
Netanyahu’s list is his insistence that Israel reserve the right to 
resume its full-scale war in Gaza, a notion that Hamas has consistently 
rejected.

Hamad believes the mediators, including those from the U.S., are aware 
that Netanyahu views the continuation of the war as linked to his own 
political survival. While a preliminary agreement may be reached for 
another exchange of captives, Netanyahu has reiterated his vow to 
destroy Hamas militarily.

“He wants to prove that he is [continuing the war] in order to achieve 
his big goals or what's called the ‘total victory’ in Gaza. But I think 
he could not convince even the Israeli community, the Israeli parties 
and his partners in the coalition,” Hamad said. “Every day that he is 
losing soldiers and tanks, what’s the big achievement of Netanyahu? To 
kill civilians. So I think that the negotiation is stuck on this point, 
that there is no seriousness, strong will from the Israeli side to have 
an agreement with Hamas.”

“If you look to the text on both sides, it is easy to bridge the gaps,” 
Hamad added. “Israel is working very hard in order not to achieve an 
agreement, because I think that this agreement will dismantle the 
coalition in Israel. I think this will be the end of the political 
career for Netanyahu.”

<https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9f960789-4031-46c1-aaaa-95749f35b08b_5472x3648.jpeg>A 
tuktuk driver rushes to transport casualties after Israeli bombardment 
at al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on July 8, 2024. 
Photo: Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty.

The October 7 attacks are often portrayed by U.S. leaders as having 
occurred in a historical vacuum—an alternative reality where Hamas, 
unprovoked, obliterated the peace. But for the people of Gaza, there has 
been no true peace. For 76 years, only a morsel of freedom has ever 
existed and for most of the past two decades it was restricted to the 
imaginations of a people confined to an open air prison surrounded by 
the occupation’s military bases and dotted by gated communities housing 
Israelis enjoying life in a bucolic setting.

In the years preceding the October 7 attacks, under presidents Trump and 
Biden, Hamas watched as Israel became more emboldened as prospects for 
Palestinian liberation receded to the footnotes of Washington-led 
initiatives aimed at normalizing relations between Israel and Arab 
nations like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. 
Netanyahu’s position was: “We must not give the Palestinians a veto over 
new peace treaties with Arab states.”

Just two weeks before the October 7 attacks, the Israeli leader 
delivered a speech at the UN general assembly in New York, brandishing a 
map of what he promised could be the “New Middle East.” It depicted a 
state of Israel that stretched continuously from the Jordan River to the 
Mediterranean Sea. Gaza and the West Bank, as Palestinian lands, were 
erased.

During that speech, Netanyahu portrayed the full normalization of 
relations with Saudi Arabia as the linchpin of his vision for this “new” 
reality, one which would open the door to a “visionary corridor that 
will stretch across the Arabian Peninsula and Israel. It will connect 
India to Europe with maritime links, rail links, energy pipelines, 
fiber-optic cables.”

“When Palestinians look at the region, they feel genuinely abandoned by 
their own leaders.”

Hamas monitored these developments carefully and saw the U.S. moves 
toward circumventing a Palestinian resolution in its normalization 
campaign as an existential threat. “If Saudi Arabia signed, it means the 
whole region, when it comes to the Palestinian question, will collapse. 
It is not a plan. It is not a peace process. It is an integration of 
Israel in the newly created Middle East. They have started to talk about 
Middle East NATO,” Naim said. “It is a coup against the heritage, the 
history, the values of this region and against the future, all this 
together.”

According to Abulhawa, “The status quo was unsustainable and untenable, 
especially when Arab leaders began normalizing and the writing was on 
the wall for our total disappearance and total destruction.”

While Netanyahu’s vision for a new silk road through a Middle East 
without Palestine was certainly a concern, Rabbani doubts that Hamas 
believed it could derail the Abraham Accords. The desired impact, he 
said, was likely to send a message to the Arab public about the 
complicity of their rulers in crushing Palestinian aspirations as they 
carved out agreements with Israel. “If you look at the history of 
Arab-Israeli normalization agreements, Palestinian blood has never 
undermined them,” Rabbani said. “When Palestinians look at the region, 
they feel genuinely abandoned by their own leaders, by those who they 
consider to be their natural allies and natural champions, by the 
international community as a whole.”

Arab nations have “to play this sort of balancing act between not 
upsetting their domestic population and being just the right amount of 
critical of the Israeli regime,” said Hawari, the political analyst at 
Al-Shabaka, adding that she has “no expectations from these despotic 
regimes” to defend Palestinians. “I think the Saudis will push for 
certain conditions not because they particularly believe very strongly 
in Palestinian sovereignty, but because also they know that, 
domestically, Palestine is still a popular cause in Saudi Arabia.”

Abulhawa said that while she understands the value of the quest to fully 
understand the specific motivations and objectives of Hamas’s operations 
on October 7, it is essential to view it as a logical consequence of 
history. “Palestinians have, for decades, tried every possible avenue to 
shake off this oppression, this unrelenting, violent colonizer. So this 
was going to happen sooner or later. It was inevitable that something 
was going to come to a head, particularly in Gaza,” she said.

“If you go back to the 1940s after the Nakba, there was a decade or so 
when Palestinians were just pleading with international bodies, going 
from one place to another, trying to negotiate for justice, trying to go 
home, trying to figure out a way. And there was no movement. We were 
completely irrelevant. Nobody even acknowledged us,” Abulhawa added. “It 
was only until Palestinians resorted to armed resistance that the world 
finally admitted that, ‘Oh wait, this is an indigenous population that 
does exist.’ It was only after we started hijacking planes and resorting 
to guerrilla warfare in the spirit of leftist guerrilla movements of 
that era that there was any movement towards liberation.”

It was that armed resistance that created the space for the peace 
negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser 
Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that many Western 
leaders hailed as a breakthrough. The 1993 and 1995 signings of the Oslo 
accords, brokered by the Clinton administration, were opposed not only 
by Hamas and Islamic Jihad and other armed resistance factions, but also 
by prominent intellectuals. “Let us call the agreement by its real name: 
an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles,”wrote 
<https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n20/edward-said/the-morning-after>Edward 
Said in a prescient 1993 essay 
<https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n20/edward-said/the-morning-after>for 
the London Review of Books. "It would therefore seem that the PLO has 
ended the intifada, which embodied not terrorism or violence but the 
Palestinian right to resist, even though Israel remains in occupation of 
the West Bank and Gaza.”

Those agreements led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority and 
the concept of limited Palestinian self-governance embedded within the 
fabric of Israel’s apartheid regime that enforced the pre-October 7 
status quo.

In the aftermath of Oslo, both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad 
engaged in periodic campaigns of armed struggle against Israel, 
including through suicide bombings and attacks on civilians. This 
culminated in the launch of the Second Intifada in September 2000 that 
lasted more than four years. The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a network of 
paramilitary forces aligned with Arafat’s ruling Fatah movement, joined 
the armed uprising. In the two decades following the intifada, much of 
the armed resistance has consisted of intermittent rocket attacks 
launched by Hamas and Islamic Jihad from Gaza and occasional, 
small-scale attacks against Israelis.

The post-intifada era of largely symbolic armed confrontation of Israel 
has unfolded in the midst of a political wasteland where the PA, Israel, 
and the broader international community led by the U.S. have presided 
over the decay of the dream of Palestinian self-determination. “After 
Oslo, we are talking about a disastrous political track,” said Naim. 
“After 30 years, the West Bank is annexed. Jerusalem is mostly Judaized. 
Al Aqsa is nearly totally controlled. Gaza is totally separated, 
isolated and besieged for 17 years, a suffocating siege.”

Israel has mastered the exploitation of the specter of armed Palestinian 
resistance to justify its own wars of conquest and annihilation. And it 
has done so with the backing of the U.S. and a refusal by successive 
administrations to apply international law to Israel or to respect UN 
resolutions.

“The problem that the West has with Palestinian resistance is not 
terrorism. It's not the targeting of civilians. It's not armed 
resistance. It's resistance full stop,” Rabbani said. “Whether it's 
massacring civilians or successfully hitting military targets or popular 
mobilization or boycott campaigns, there is not a single form of 
Palestinian resistance that the West is prepared to accept.”

The October 7 attacks and the subsequent guerrilla war in Gaza against 
the Israeli military has undoubtedly raised Hamas’s political standing 
among many Palestinians. This support, though, may not necessarily 
translate into political and electoral victory down the line. “Whereas 
they clearly are in a stronger position politically than the PA, which 
is seen as a subcontractor for the occupation and as clapped out, 
exhausted, corrupt and so on by most Palestinians, that doesn't mean 
that there are not criticisms which many people are not willing to voice 
right now because they are standing up to the Israelis,” Khalidi said. 
“Their resistance, the fact that they're still fighting the Israelis on 
the one hand makes a lot of Palestinians, especially the ones farther 
away from Gaza, heartened. On the other hand, what has happened to the 
people of Gaza leaves a lot of Palestinians, especially the ones in 
Gaza, not so happy.”

Rabbani agreed that how people in Gaza will ultimately judge Hamas’s 
responsibility for the apocalyptic devastation they’ve endured remains 
unpredictable. “I think there will also be many Palestinians who will 
look and say, ‘Okay, the Gaza Strip has been reduced to rubble. You've 
left the people of the Gaza Strip defenseless and subject to genocide. 
And yes, Israel did it. Israel is responsible. But that's on you as 
well.’” At the same time, Rabbani says the attacks of October 7 
represent a historic chapter in the cause of Palestinian liberation and 
compared it to other pivotal moments in anti-colonial struggles in South 
Africa and Vietnam that came with significant death tolls among 
civilians. “There's no denying the catastrophic consequences,” he said. 
“But my sense is that the changes in the longer term—of course without 
in any way trying to minimize the enormously unbearable damage that has 
been inflicted on an entire people—will, in the end, be seen as a 
critical turning point akin to Sharpeville, Soweto, Dien Bien Phu.”

Abulhawa said that during her trips to Gaza she talked with people about 
how they viewed Hamas and encountered what she described as complex, 
nuanced, and sometimes contradictory perspectives. “The trauma is 
profound. And they'll tell you two conflicting ideas in the same breath. 
On the one hand, they're angry. And sometimes some people will blame 
Hamas, but everybody knows who's bombing them. Everybody.”
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