What is Hamas and what does it want?

The radical Palestinian militant organization that has ruled the Gaza Strip for more than fifteen years harbors a bitter, deadly hostility toward Israel that goes far deeper than the sentiments found in the region’s other main ruler of Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas is a Sunni Islamist group that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and whose objectives from the beginning have been to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation by any means necessary.

The group was born in the dire poverty of the Gaza Strip, under the suffocating Israeli military occupation in the 1980s and 1990s, and eventually built an active and well-armed military wing with help from neighboring countries such as Iran.

From its inception, Hamas was seen as a challenger to the Palestine Liberation Organization and its successor, the Palestinian Authority, and to Fatah, the political party of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. These largely secular groups were more willing to discuss peace with Israel. Hamas enjoys enthusiastic moral and material support from Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, despite their adherence to Shia Islam rather than Hamas’ Sunni doctrine.

Unlike the Palestinian Authority, Hamas does not support the so-called two-state solution, the creation of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel, as a permanent solution. It advocates a Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, without Israel. (Some extremists in the current right-wing Israeli government similarly believe in an Israel from the river to the sea, without Palestine. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month brought a map to the United Nations General Assembly that seemed to formalize that vision .)

Hamas is thought to have 10,000 to 40,000 fighters in Gaza, which has a population of 2.2 million, and has resorted to brutal tactics such as suicide bombings and commando raids, as evidenced by the kidnappings and killings of Israelis in past days. The Israeli military and intelligence community have long claimed that Hamas is willing to use civilians as human shields.

Hamas leaders launched the unprecedented attack on Saturday knowing that the Israeli army would exact painful revenge. They may have calculated that it was worth embarrassing the Israeli government and its intelligence services by infiltrating and killing so many Israelis. The group may also believe that large numbers of Palestinian victims could gain it, at least temporarily, sympathy in the Arab and Islamic world.

“Those terrorists launched this activity knowing that there would be retaliation, knowing that Israel would have to defend itself as any country did, knowing that this would unfortunately lead to the loss of life among Palestinian civilians, and they did so anyway,” he said. the US Department of State. Spokesman Matthew Miller said this on Tuesday.

Hamas was founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Muslim Brotherhood graduate who was assassinated by Israeli forces in 2004.

The 1988 charter

advocates the killing or expulsion of all Jews and Zionists. Hamas “shall not act against the sons of Muslims or against those who are peaceful towards it among non-Muslims,” the charter says. “It will only serve as support for all groups and organizations operating against the Zionist enemy and his lackeys.”

The United States, Israel and the European Union have designated Hamas as an international terrorist group. A senior Pentagon official described Hamas on Monday

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actions as ISIS-level atrocity.

After a series of telephone consultations, Biden and the leaders of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom reiterated that they “recognize the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people and support equal measures of justice and freedom for both Israelis and Palestinians.

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“But,” they continued, “make no mistake: Hamas does not represent these ambitions, and it offers the Palestinian people nothing but more terror and bloodshed.”

Palestinians held parliamentary elections after Israel partially ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005 and withdrew. To the surprise of American and other international observers, Hamas won, defeating the Palestinian Authority. Within two years, the group had seized full power in Gaza, although it remained surrounded and besieged by the Israeli army.

Hamas and Israel have clashed in the years since, including during a two-month war in 2014. Meanwhile, Israel has eased some restrictions, allowing thousands of Gazans to enter Israel for work.

There is a school of thought in Israel that successful leaders, starting with the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the early 2000s and continuing through the Netanyahu years, quietly supported Hamas as a way to undermine the Palestinian Authority, which enjoyed international support in pursuit of a Palestinian state. If true, the strategy was a miscalculation that many analysts believe enabled the creation of a Frankenstein monster.

As Hamas consolidated its power over the years, the Palestinian Authority became weaker, more corrupt and less respected. Led by 87-year-old Mahmoud Abbas for the last 18 years after his election in 2005 for a four-year term, the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank has little authority and has been widely criticized for its failure to act. come against Israel and Israel. to provide basic services to its citizens. Israel has only deepened and expanded its occupation of the West Bank, seizing Palestinian homes and property and failing to stop Jewish settlers who have attacked Palestinian families.

Abbas and the Palestinian Authority have also failed to halt the proliferation of other Palestinian militias, which have taken control of parts of the West Bank and attacked settlers.

Despite the groups’ differences in tactics and strategy, many Palestinians, whether supporters of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority or non-aligned countries, see the decades-long Israeli occupation from a similar perspective that transcends ideology, said Hafed al-Ghwell, a former World Leader. Bank manager now at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

While the offensive cannot be justified or excused, he said, it is the natural, logical consequence of Israel’s victory over Gaza.

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They have reached absolute desperation and think: we have nothing to lose, he said of Hamas.

The danger lies in the pervasiveness of these feelings.

There are some Palestinians and Arabs who say they do not believe there is such a thing as an Israeli citizen, in part because most Israeli men and women have to do military service.

Seeing the dramatic actions of Hamas, which has received some praise in parts of the Arab world and Iran from people angry about the Israeli occupation, is making Palestinian Authority officials nervous.

“They’re in a dire situation. They’re scared,” said Shira Efron, a former Rand Corp. Middle East expert and research director at the Israel Policy Forum. “They fear a security explosion in the West Bank. How do you really get the PA involved? [given] the current state of the PA?”

Al-Ghwell said the Palestinian Authority is “walking a tightrope. They can condemn the barbaric actions, but they cannot be seen as support for Israel or the occupation.”

Ned Lazarus, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University and an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said Hamas’s deadly offensive has “further weakened and discredited the PA” in the eyes of the Palestinian public. because they have seen [armed] ‘Resistance’, as Hamas defines it, is effective.”