Hamas is a Palestinian political and militant organization that has been active in the Gaza Strip. The October 7, 2023, attack conducted by Hamas resulted in approximately 1,200 Israeli deaths, including around 800 civilians and 400 military personnel, and the taking of approximately 250 hostages into Gaza. This attack, which included documented atrocities against Israeli civilians, was a serious violation of international humanitarian law. However, the author emphasizes that Hamas was not an unprovoked assault by “Islamic barbarism” but rather a predictable consequence of Israeli policies that had actively facilitated its development for strategic reasons.
The Israeli government had spent years before October 7, 2023, actively facilitating the transfer of Qatari funding to Hamas in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reported by multiple Israeli sources as having argued that supporting Hamas was strategically valuable because it kept Palestinian politics fragmented between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, preventing the emergence of a unified Palestinian political movement that could generate international pressure for a two-state settlement. This strategic rationale was explicitly articulated in Israeli political discussions and implemented through documented policy choices.
The Hamas military capacity that conducted the October 7 attack was built up across years during which the Israeli government had been actively permitting its development for the strategic reasons described above. The attack was therefore the predictable consequence of policies the Israeli government had been pursuing for its own strategic reasons. The framing presented to Western audiences after October 7, in which the attack was characterized as an unprovoked assault by “essential Islamic barbarism” against an innocent Israeli society, required the erasure of the documented record of how Hamas had been allowed and encouraged to develop the capacity it then used.
Hamas’s actions on October 7 were conducted by individuals who had grown up under the conditions of a 16-year-long Israeli blockade of Gaza, which had produced documented humanitarian catastrophe for its civilian population. The attack emerged from these conditions, which were the responsibility of the Israeli government and the broader international community that had permitted the conditions to continue across sixteen years.
Related: gaza.md, foreign-policy.md, Hamas, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, United States
See Also
hamas.md, gaza.md, foreign-policy.md, iran.md, lebanon.md, syria.md, yemen.md, usa.md