Illusions of Containment

The history of Hamas​ is unintelligible without reference to the remarkable life of its founder, Ahmed Yassin. He was born in 1936, the year of the Great Revolt against the British, and his life followed a trajectory which in many ways reflected that of Palestine itself. In 1948 the village of his birth, near Ashkelon, was ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces and his family was driven into Gaza, where he was paralysed in a childhood accident. He became a clergyman rebel and a charismatic preacher of national liberation. When not giving sermons at the al-Abbas mosque in Gaza City, Yassin ran a civic religious organisation to provide social services the Israeli occupation neglected or destroyed. But life under the occupation led him to conclude that the logic of Gaza was that of war, not of alleviating hardship. He was first arrested by Israel in 1984, when the state security forces discovered that his charitable organisation was stockpiling weapons. He founded Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, after he was released in 1985 in exchange for some captured Israeli soldiers.

The founding meeting of Hamas was held at Yassin’s home in Gaza in 1987, at the start of the first intifada. In attendance were professors, doctors, engineers and would-be revolutionaries who nursed memories of 1936 and the wounds of 1967. Rather than the elusive political settlement with Israel sought by Yasser Arafat and the PLO, Hamas’s tools would be the bomb and the knife. After the first intifada Yassin was arrested again and sentenced to life imprisonment, kept in solitary confinement for long stretches. He wasn’t freed until 1997 (as fallout from Israel’s assassination attempt on Khalid Mishal, head of Hamas’s political bureau in Amman), long after the Oslo agreement, which was viewed by Hamas and many others as a capitulation.* By the time of his release, Yassin was better known than perhaps any Palestinian political figure apart from Arafat himself. In Gaza he received a hero’s welcome. But years of imprisonment had taken their toll. Wheelchair-bound and nearly blind, he would remain Hamas’s spiritual leader, but his capacity for practical leadership was limited. His infirmities didn’t protect him: in 2004 he was assassinated in Gaza City by an Israeli helicopter gunship.

Since Yassin’s death, Hamas has had three generations of leaders. The natural successor was Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, a doctor prevented by Israeli authorities from practising medicine who turned instead to drumming up political activity among medical professionals. Born at the start of the Nakba, Rantisi was a decade younger than Yassin and had been present at the movement’s founding. But his tenure lasted just a month before he too was assassinated. Mishal, born in the year of the Suez Crisis, was the first Hamas leader to live, as a precaution, outside the occupied territories. From Amman, Doha and Damascus, he led Hamas to a resounding victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections. In 2017 he was succeeded by Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar, both born in Gaza in 1962. Haniyeh lived for most of his life in a modest house in Al-Shati, in the north of Gaza. When he took over as head of Hamas’s political bureau he followed Mishal’s example and moved to Doha, leaving Sinwar to manage affairs inside the strip. Last July, Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran, probably by a remotely detonated bomb. Three months later Sinwar was killed by an Israeli tank in southern Gaza, less than five miles from where he was born.

For all the success Israel has had in killing Hamas leaders it has had very little in stopping the movement’s spread. In part this is because there is not one Hamas – there are three. There is the political movement, shaped by religious ideology and committed to ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine through armed struggle. It was founded by a man (Yassin) in a particular place (Gaza) at a particular time (the late 1980s). It has a hierarchy and internal politics. It has a history. Then there is the Hamas that exists in the minds of the Israeli political and security establishment. This is an imagined Hamas, but the imagination is informed by knowledge – this Hamas is despised but also grudgingly respected. There is also the third Hamas, which exists only in Israeli politicians’ public pronouncements and, crucially, in the West. This isn’t an organisation so much as an example of primordial Middle Eastern savagery, one of the West’s many caricatural enemies. It is a Hamas without a history, one that emerged fully formed.

Israel has tended to fight the Hamas of its own creation rather than the Hamas known to serious scholarship, although for many years the landmark study of the movement was by two Israelis: Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela’s The Palestinian Hamas, published in 2000. Mishal and Sela described a social movement with deep roots among ‘the common people’. Intellectually it borrowed from the leading political religious thinkers in the Islamic reformist tradition: Rachid Ghannouchi in Tunisia and Hassan al-Turabi in Sudan. Hamas wasn’t a band of criminals but a well-organised political and social force. It divided the Gaza Strip and the West Bank into districts and subdistricts, and subdivided those into local units headed by members of the movement. It exercised ruthless pressure to enforce conservative religious norms, with the goal of a pure, and therefore strong, resistance, purged of doubters and opponents, including supporters of Fatah, the most powerful party within the PLO. Hamas’s presence at every level of society, providing welfare and medical provision as well as religious education, ensured a baseline level of support.

Hamas’s appeal combined ideology and political pragmatism. While the PLO trundled to an acceptance of partition, inscribed in the Oslo Accords, Hamas remained committed, in principle at least, to the liberation of the whole of historic Palestine. Its original charter, published in August 1988, supported political goals very similar to those of the PLO, but cast in explicitly religious language, reinforced with antisemitism. Mishal and Sela argued, however, that, despite its image as a dogmatic fundamentalist organisation, Hamas was in fact impeccably pragmatic. Its internal documents were characterised by ‘political realism’. It could be communal and reformist when the moment demanded and switch to violent rebellion when the opportunity arose. Its methods were ‘controlled violence, negotiated coexistence and strategic decision-making’. Hamas was not a secular national liberation movement: its definition of victory was a Palestine restored to Islamic as well as Palestinian dominion. But that was understood to be far away. The movement worked to promote religious conservatism from below through its social projects. It often framed political questions using religious references – unorthodox or controversial political decisions, in particular, were justified with recourse to religious language. But very little about Hamas was explained by religious zeal. The main practical function of its religiosity, Mishal and Sela argue, was to galvanise a mobilisation across all classes.

Hamas’s armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, was formed in 1991. But for the first decade of its existence the reality was rather different from the image of paragliding militants with which it is now associated. Poorly armed cadres spent most of their time moving between the countryside and their mothers’ apartments. If they were lucky they had access to a few intercepted submachine guns (mostly Uzis and Carl-Gustaf m/45s), but little more. Israel hoped that the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank would provide a facsimile of self-government and a safe but ineffectual outlet for Palestinian demands for liberation. But the PA’s shortcomings kept generating justifications for more active forms of struggle, which Hamas seized on. In 1994 it conducted its first suicide bombing inside Israel after the massacre of 29 Palestinians by a far-right Jewish extremist at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Once the Rafah tunnels came into operation in the 2000s, Hamas’s armaments improved and it began producing locally workshopped explosives and munitions. Under the supervision of Adnan al-Ghoul, Yahya Ayyash and Mohammed Deif this eventually became a major industry pumping out ‘Yassin’ rocket-propelled grenade launchers and ‘Qassam’ missiles.

Hamas was founded to pursue armed resistance against the occupation, but in practice violent confrontation was always in tension with political calculation. To strike a balance between them, the movement resorted to the religious concept of sabr, or ‘patience’. The outbreak of the second intifada, in response to failed peace talks at Camp David in 2000 and Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Temple Mount, wrong-footed Hamas. The leadership reacted by ramping up suicide bombings, but it was being led by events rather than leading them. The movement had been founded on a rejection of partition and political settlement with Israel. But in practice its leadership was coming to terms with the idea of two states on the 1967 borders. In June 2003, Ismail Abu Shanab, a founding member of Hamas, argued for a two-state settlement (two months later he was assassinated by an Israeli Apache helicopter missile strike). In 2006 Ismail Haniyeh called for ‘a sovereign Palestinian state encompassing the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with its capital in East Jerusalem’. The flailing efforts of the US in the Middle East after 9/11 created dilemmas for Hamas too. In the middle of the second intifada it condemned al-Qaida’s attacks, de-escalated its military operations against Israel and offered a unilateral ceasefire. By contrast, Israel successfully turned the occupation into another battlefield in the global war on terror. In the US, Hamas quickly became a co-ordinate on the axis of evil (the suicide bombers hadn’t helped) and was conflated with al-Qaida.

The second intifada, between 2000 and 2005, claimed the lives of much of Hamas’s senior leadership, including Yassin, Rantisi and Salah Shehadeh, the first leader of the Qassam Brigades, who was assassinated in an airstrike that killed fourteen other people including seven children. Yet within a year of the intifada’s end Hamas had taken part in and won fair elections and was remoulding its relations with the Palestinian Authority. With its political headquarters abroad, it was open to the accusation that its leaders were sheltered from the realities of life in Gaza. But remote leadership had practical benefits. From his offices in Doha and Damascus, Mishal cultivated better relations with Iran, which had fallen out with the PLO in the 1980s and cut ties with it after Oslo. Even more than Mishal, the movement’s deputy chairman, Mousa Abu Marzouk, who had for a time been based in the US (Hamas’s main publishing operation was once run from Dallas), epitomised the new strategy of international outreach.

Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections took almost everyone by surprise. Israeli intelligence had been confident that Fatah would win. The US State Department under Condoleezza Rice agreed. Arafat’s death had weakened the PLO, and the return of its leaders from abroad after Oslo to live in luxury had discredited it. But this was far from the full story. In 2009 the Italian journalist Paola Caridi published an invaluable account of the run-up to the elections, Hamas: From Resistance to Government. She began by considering how Hamas had gained such strong support among ordinary Palestinians. The movement had engaged in traditional electioneering and its campaign slogan, ‘Change and Reform’, was conciliatory. But Caridi argued that the vote was not simply ‘a protest against the corruption, cronyism and inefficiency of Fatah’. Hamas won because it ‘provided an alternative to the secularists that was considered more than simply plausible’.

The US and Israel’s response to Hamas’s victory was stinging. Abu Marzouk wrote a piece in the Washington Post, appealing to ‘America’s long-standing tradition of supporting the oppressed’s rights to self-determination’. Hamas’s foreign minister, Mahmoud al-Zahar, wrote to Kofi Annan. It made no difference. When Hamas attempted to form a coalition government with Fatah, the US prevented it. A US-Israeli blockade soon produced bread shortages in Gaza. The US applied sanctions in an attempt to force President Mahmoud Abbas, who regularly received Condoleezza Rice in Ramallah, to call new elections. Meanwhile the CIA was working directly with the Fatah security forces led by Mohammed Dahlan – an open secret in the occupied territories at the time. The consequence was a civil war between Fatah and Hamas which ended in June 2007 when Hamas forces captured the Fatah security and intelligence building in Gaza City, known as the ‘Ship’. This left Hamas frozen out in the West Bank but in sole control of Gaza.

Ministries more or less functioned, rubbish was collected, and internet access established. Portraits of Arafat were replaced with Hamas paraphernalia. The former Israeli settlement of Neve Dekalim was turned into a training ground. The blockade was a more difficult problem to solve. Gaza’s borders were sealed, its airspace controlled and it would soon be under constant attack. In response to Hamas’s capture of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in June 2006 (Shalit would later be traded for Palestinian detainees), Israel had destroyed Gaza’s power plant. Hospitals often had to be run on emergency generators and sometimes had electricity for just a few hours a day. Israel’s first major attack on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, was launched on 27 December 2008. It began with massive bombing from the air and led to 1400 killed and 46,000 houses destroyed. There would be an attack of this kind, if not always of such magnitude, every couple of years until October 2023. Hamas’s main defensive response was to extend the tunnel network to alleviate the blockade and to provide shelter from air attack – the move anyone would make if placed in charge of a besieged Gaza.

For Israel​ and its supporters, Hamas, like the PLO, was always a terrorist organisation – following the logic that any violence committed by Palestinians justifies all violence by Israel, and no violence committed by Israel justifies any by Palestinians. In 2016, on its official website, under the corporate-sounding heading ‘About the Movement: Who We Are’, Hamas claimed to be ‘a national liberation movement with a moderate Islamic ideology’ which ‘confines its struggle and work to the Palestinian cause’. It’s worth taking self-description into account, particularly when it is routinely overlooked. But self-description is necessarily partial. To say that Hamas is simply the zealous champion of a righteous struggle against a brutal military occupation, exercising legal right to armed resistance, is to pass over quite a lot.

Hamas was founded as an underground militant organisation. In governing Gaza, it was faced with a fundamentally different dynamic from anything it had experienced before. The most significant study of Hamas in this period was Tareq Baconi’s Hamas Contained, published in 2018. Baconi took aim at the fact-free categorical condemnation of the movement, which he argued was only another way of ‘making acceptable the demonisation and suffering of millions of Palestinians within the Gaza Strip’. Whatever else it was, Hamas, like the PLO in the 1960s and 1970s, was the Palestinian faction ‘most representative of the notion of armed resistance against Israel’. From the outset it had sought to present itself more as a formalised expression of resistance than as a traditional political party. As a result, even to Palestinians who despised Hamas in government, the armed struggle it embodied remained a point of pride.

Baconi’s work was informed by rigorous study of Hamas’s main publications, the journals Al-Resalah, published in Gaza City and distributed locally, and Filastin al-Muslima, the movement’s intellectual organ. His analysis captured what many others had missed, namely what had happened to the movement between its election in 2006 and 2023. Within the Israeli security establishment there had long been a view that a Hamas-run Gaza was a known quantity. Hamas could easily be labelled a terrorist group, setting up Gaza as a whole for condemnation. Yet faced with the responsibilities of government, Hamas found itself limiting its armed operations against Israel. Rocket fire was mostly reserved for responding to serious Israeli infringements. The power it had been given began to feel less like an advancement of the struggle and more like a constraint on it. Was a Hamas-run Gaza an asset to Israel, as Netanyahu said in 2019?

There were signs that Hamas realised it had been backed into a corner. When Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s junta in Egypt attacked the tunnel smuggling system from Sinai in the winter of 2013-14, Hamas decided to resurrect efforts at reconciliation with Fatah. But the unity government formed in June 2014 proved short-lived, thanks to another major Israeli attack on Gaza, Operation Protective Edge. In 51 days of bombardment in the summer of 2014, 2220 Palestinians were killed (some of the arms used were supplied by Britain). Hamas had wanted to share the burden of administrative responsibility for Gaza, and Israel and its supporters had refused to allow it. Underlying this was a familiar pattern, Baconi noted, ‘whereby Israeli provocations, often after Palestinian unity deals are signed, trigger opportunities for Israel to claim self-defence and launch spectacular attacks on Gaza’. Hamas had been able to take power in Gaza because Israel had failed to circumscribe Palestinian politics within the Oslo boundaries. But in the event, Hamas was useful to Israel’s larger strategy of occupation. ‘Through a dual process of containment and pacification,’ Baconi wrote, Hamas was ‘forcefully transformed into little more than an administrative authority in the Gaza Strip, in many ways akin to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank’. There would be no return to the suicide bombing strategy of the second intifada. Hamas appeared to have been co-opted.

Yet there was an unanswered question: how long could Gaza remain contained? When Haniyeh and Sinwar took over the leadership in 2017 the early signs were of further pacification. That year, Hamas published its new covenant, which dispensed with the antisemitism of its founding charter and officially recognised the possibility of a settlement on the 1967 borders. Hamas had essentially accepted the possibility of a two-state solution for a decade, but it was another thing to have it written down. Sinwar had a reputation for ruthlessness (in the 1980s he had been tasked by Yassin with running counterintelligence in the southern half of Gaza) but now he appealed personally to Netanyahu for a ‘new phase’. In 2018, instead of a general resumption of hostilities, Hamas opted for civil disobedience, the Great March of Return, with largely peaceful demonstrations held every Friday along the border fence with Israel. Israel responded by killing hundreds of demonstrators and injured thousands. Mohammed Deif, head of the Qassam Brigades, argued for an armed reaction; Sinwar overruled him.

In retrospect, this flirtation with civic resistance looks like Hamas’s first effort to break out of the bind in which it found itself. Sinwar had spent more than twenty years in Israel’s prisons between his arrest in 1989 and his release in 2011 in the Shalit prisoner exchange. The Shalit operation was in many respects a success. But Sinwar had opposed it on the grounds that too few Palestinians were freed. When not in solitary confinement or trying to tunnel out of his cell, Sinwar had spent his time in jail in diligent study and wrote two books (in the first, a novel, the protagonist watches his father dig a makeshift shelter under their home in a refugee camp). He was arrested before Gaza was besieged, and had not witnessed Israel’s gradual development of the strip into a surveillance camp. Still, when he returned to Gaza in 2011 his rise to the leadership was swift. Many of the new generation of leaders were veterans of Israel’s prisons – Rawhi Mushtaha became Gaza’s de facto prime minister; Tawfiq Abu Naim became head of internal security – yet under their leadership the platform was, at first, one of ‘peaceful popular resistance’.

In 2018, in an interview with the Italian journalist Francesca Borri, Sinwar spoke of the need for a ceasefire. ‘What matters is that you finally realise that Hamas is here … we are part and parcel of this society, even if we lose the next elections,’ he said. ‘More than that, we are a piece of the history of the entire Arab world, which includes Islamists as well as seculars, nationalists, leftists.’ Yet by 2021 there were clear signs of a change. ‘For a long time we tried peaceful civil resistance,’ Sinwar told the journalist Hind Hassan. ‘We expected that the world and international organisations would stop the occupation committing crimes and massacring our people. But unfortunately the world stood by while the occupation killed our sons.’

The failure of these tactics may well have resulted in Operation al-Aqsa Flood. The attack launched on 7 October followed the bloodiest period of settler violence in the West Bank in years. Israeli intelligence claims to have discovered documents showing that Hamas began planning a ‘big project’ in early 2022, though it is very hard to evaluate that claim. By December 2022, Sinwar was talking of coming to Israel ‘like a roaring flood’. What is clear is that the operation was well planned. The attack was led by the Qassam Brigades, but supported by five other armed groups in Gaza: the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s National Resistance Brigades, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and the Mujahideen Brigades. Despite the involvement of so many factions, information about the operation was closely guarded and revealed to the individual units simultaneously at the last minute. Digital communication was kept to a minimum. Drones and missiles were used to destroy surveillance sites and command and control posts while the wall was breached with bulldozers and explosives. Most striking was the adoption of both the tactics and the aesthetic of US and Israeli special forces (the Qassam Brigades referred to its Nukhba units as ‘commandos’). All told, the attacks left 725 Israeli civilians, 36 of them children, 71 foreign nationals and 379 Israeli security personnel dead.

The revised version​ of Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell’s book Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement has the great advantage of offering an analysis of events in the first months after October 2023. In the original edition, published in 2010, Milton-Edwards, an academic specialist, and Stephen Farrell, formerly Reuters bureau chief in Jerusalem, provided a good survey of Hamas which differed relatively little from established accounts. Like other writers, they interviewed plenty of Hamas leaders. Among them were some who have since risen in prominence – in particular, Abu Obaida, the spokesman of the Qassam Brigades, and Saleh al-Arouri, who was deputy chairman of Hamas’s political bureau until his assassination last year. Farrell also interviewed Sinwar in Khan Younis in 2011, soon after his release.

What Hamas achieved on 7 October was finally to puncture the illusion of containment that Israel believed it had achieved. ‘The unimaginable sight of motorised paragliders soaring over the gates of Gaza’ was in itself a victory of sorts. The seizure of the Erez crossing, where 21st-century methods of repression (drones, electronic surveillance towers, biometric databases) were combined with old-fashioned strip searches, was an enormous symbolic coup. Hamas’s first targets were Israeli military installations including Reim, the headquarters of the Israeli army’s Gaza Division. But the outward form of a special forces operation quickly devolved into uncontrolled violence (a pattern not unfamiliar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the actions of British special forces in Afghanistan). Milton-Edwards and Farrell list the worst of the crimes. Gazan militia shot up cars and executed the non-combatants pulled from them. Hamas hadn’t expected a trance music festival to be taking place minutes from the fence. When its fighters arrived there, they ‘emptied magazines into tents and toilet cubicles’. Inhabitants of kibbutzim near the border were kidnapped or killed and their houses ransacked and burned down.

In January 2024 Hamas published its own account of the operation, which it presented as an explanation of its motives and ‘a refutation of the Israeli allegations’. Milton-Edwards and Farrell mention the document but don’t really describe it. According to Hamas’s account, titled ‘Our Narrative’, al-Aqsa Flood ‘targeted Israeli military sites, and sought to arrest the enemy’s soldiers to pressure the Israeli authorities to release the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails through a prisoner exchange deal’. It claimed the principal targets were the Israeli army’s Gaza Division and military sites ‘near the Israeli settlements around Gaza’. Hamas dismissed the idea that its fighters had targeted civilians as ‘lies and fabrications’ and claimed they had ‘only targeted the occupation soldiers and those who carried weapons’. Any civilian deaths were accidental or a result of crossfire. ‘Some faults’ occurred during the operation, it said, ‘due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and the chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza.’

This account doesn’t stand up, of course. It’s true that some of those killed by Qassam units in the kibbutzim were armed Kitat Konenut – local rapid response reservists – who died fighting. Some deaths can also be ascribed to the Hannibal Directive, which Israel invoked early that day, ordering its forces to fire on vehicles moving in the direction of Gaza with drones, airstrikes and mortar, in order to kill hostages rather than have them held for ransom. Some civilians were killed by the Israeli army at both the festival and in the kibbutzim. In kibbutz Be’eri an Israeli tank fired on a house known to contain Hamas fighters and civilians, resulting in thirteen civilian deaths. But this doesn’t address the clear evidence that serious war crimes were committed by the Qassam Brigades and other Gazan militia.

Israel and its supporters exaggerated and manufactured what needed no exaggeration or manufacture. Qassam fighters threw grenades into shelters and shot RPGs at houses. In Be’eri, a fragmentation hand grenade was thrown into a dental clinic. Qassam units shot dead unarmed women who were fleeing on foot. There is evidence that the Mujahideen Brigades and the Al-Quds Brigades (though not Qassam fighters) beheaded Israeli soldiers. In kibbutz Alumim, Nepali and Thai workers were indiscriminately killed. In a subsequent statement, Hamas acknowledged that residents of Gaza ‘rushed in without c0-ordination with Hamas’, which ‘led to many mistakes’. But to say that Hamas ‘lost control’ of the operation due to the rapid collapse of Israeli security forces is to deny the responsibility that comes with military action. In a leaked message to Hamas officials, Sinwar seemed to acknowledge this. ‘Things went out of control … people got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.’

Milton-Edwards and Farrell argue that Hamas’s core objective on 7 October was to take hostages. They estimate that since 1983 Israel has traded 8500 Palestinian detainees for nineteen Israelis and the remains of eight more. That’s not a bad rate of exchange (though it is a drop in the ocean given that four in ten Palestinian men are ‘imprisoned at one point or another in their lives by Israel’). They also argue that a secondary objective was to derail the Israeli-Saudi diplomatic normalisation process sponsored by the US. Milton-Edwards and Farrell present no real evidence for this and it’s unclear why the underlying pressures in Gaza wouldn’t have produced a 7 October even if the US hadn’t been engaged in a botched attempt to renew its vows with Saudi Arabia. In interviews Milton-Edwards has argued, with more subtlety, that Hamas was reacting to the sidelining of the Palestinian cause internationally. She and Farrell write that Deif saw the operation as a way to inspire a ‘revolution that will end the last occupation and the last racist apartheid regime in the world’. There is an international dimension to the thinking there, but not one reducible to a diplomatic agenda.

Another question is whether Hamas foresaw how brutal Israel’s retaliation would be. Milton-Edwards and Farrell argue that Hamas believed it would have home advantage were Israel to invade. They quote al-Arouri to the effect that an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza was viewed as ‘the best scenario to end this conflict and defeat the enemy’. Hamas did take advantage of the razing of Gaza by the Israeli air force. Its fighters used hit-and-run tactics and made good use of the tunnels, which slowed the Israeli advance and made it impossible for them simply to clear streets and move on. Instead, special forces had to go into the tunnels, or force civilians to enter to check for traps. Hamas fighters also returned to areas Israeli forces thought they had cleared. But over time Israeli forces appear to have got better at defending against ambushes, at least on armoured units. More than four hundred Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza. That’s more than double the number of British forces killed in Iraq, but many fewer than Hamas wanted.

Nothing Hamas did on 7 October approaches what Israel has done in Gaza. And yet anyone who saw the videos of the Qassam Brigades in the kibbutzim that morning and knew anything at all about Israel must have had images of a soon to be flattened Gaza flashing through their mind. Why didn’t Hamas opt for a purely military operation? Why take child hostages? It is tempting to say that if it had carried out a disciplined military operation – the kind its leaders claimed al-Aqsa Flood was – which scrupulously targeted military forces and didn’t involve war crimes, it could have avoided criticism and could even have attracted support as an act of legitimate resistance against terrible and ongoing Israeli crimes. But the reaction from Israel and the US might well have been the same. In the absence of real atrocities, false ones would have been invented, and military action would have been characterised as terrorism. Everything Israel has done was predictable from the moment Hamas paraglided over the barrier. The support it received in Washington, New York, London, Berlin and Brussels was preordained. Gaza would still have been destroyed.

For Hamas the great value of 7 October was as a symbolic attack on the system of confinement and partition on which Israel’s apartheid relies. Al-Aqsa Flood definitively refuted the idea that Israel could simply cage the primitives and proceed with life as normal. But if taking hostages was Hamas’s main tactic, as Milton-Edwards and Farrell argue, it was clearly flawed. However much it talked up the importance of retrieving the hostages, Israel consistently chose retribution over bargaining for their lives. Hamas also seems to have seriously overestimated the support it would receive from Hizbullah in Lebanon, from Iran and – critically – from Palestinians in the West Bank. If the attack was a desperate attempt to revive regional support for Palestine then with the notable exception of Yemen it failed. Milton-Edwards and Farrell argue that 7 October revealed the hollowness of the ‘axis of resistance’. The responses from Hizbullah and Iran were muted. Israel ended up attacking Lebanon, and devastating Hizbullah, not the other way round. ‘Support Palestine, contain Israel: that was the true limit of the axis,’ they conclude. ‘All talk of revolutionary fervour in the Middle East was just that – talk.’

If 7 October marked a strategic turn for Hamas, the obvious question is: hasn’t it made the chance of any improvement in the Palestinians’ situation even more fantastically remote? Gaza has been destroyed. Israel claims to have eliminated 23 of the Qassam Brigades’ 24 battalions, though it’s a mistake to conceive of Hamas’s capacities in the same way one would a standing army (an assessment by the Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project suggests only three of the battalions are in fact now ‘combat ineffective’). Sinwar described Gazan deaths as ‘necessary sacrifices’ in the cause of liberation. The Palestinian historian Yezid Sayigh judges that 7 October set back the cause of Palestinian liberation by thirty years. Who is right? It’s the classic revolutionary’s dilemma: by violently breaking the stasis one may unleash forces that retard or incinerate one’s designs.

It is in the nature of revolutionary violence to bring about insoluble problems. One must side with the people breaking out of a concentration camp. Yet one must also side with the non-combatant against the man pointing a rifle at him. It is understandable to want to insist that hideous Israeli violence be met only with non-violence, but when does that become what the great pacifist writer A.J. Muste called ‘preaching non-violence to the underdog’? Israel’s strategy has been consistent for decades: subjugation by violence to maintain control of the land and prevent Palestinian self-determination of any kind. It’s hard for an outsider truly to enter into the perspective of Gaza, where non-violence can only mean submission to superior force.

The chance that Israel wouldn’t provoke armed resistance from Gaza was always zero. Gazans were in effect under siege, and military action to break the siege can’t be dismissed as terrorism or classed as a pogrom. For Israel and its supporters, the crime of 7 October was ultimately that it violated the basic law of the Palestinian situation by directing a fraction of the violence of the occupation at Israel. Yet one need not fall into the trap of saying that armed resistance movements commit no crimes. The killing of non-combatants is indefensible, not just when it manifests as pointless cruelty (killing Nepali workers with grenades), but when it comes in the guise of military resistance (shooting dead a man on the grounds that he is of ‘military age’ and lives in the Gaza envelope).

In the US and Europe, the prevailing tendency is to accept the way Israel frames the situation. Any Israeli action, however unhinged, is automatically supported as part of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’. US support in particular has not wavered. In January, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, talked of Israel’s ‘duty’ to go after an ‘entrenched terrorist enemy’. Marco Rubio, Trump’s new secretary of state, has said that Hamas are ‘savages’ who have to be eradicated. The known death toll in Gaza stands at fifty thousand. The fiction of Hamas supporters as irrational demons is a crucial part of the organising ideology behind every death, every mutilation, every scene of destruction.

On​ 15 January, Qatari mediators announced that Hamas and Israel had agreed a ceasefire deal. The agreement stipulated a six-week truce during which 33 Israeli hostages would be released along with hundreds of Palestinians held in administrative detention in Israel. The second phase, which would include the release of all remaining hostages and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces, was left to be concluded later. So was the final phase, which in theory would involve the reconstruction of Gaza. Israeli military operations in Gaza continued after the deal was announced. The Israeli air force celebrated the news with a round of bombing sorties and a major airstrike on Jenin in the West Bank.

The agreement came after a full year of diplomatic farce, during which Israel and the US conducted pantomime talks with no intention of stopping the assault. Hamas had always been willing to release the remaining hostages in return for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the release of some Palestinian prisoners. Israel consistently rejected this. Had either the US or Israel wanted it, a very similar deal could have been reached a year earlier, when the estimated death toll was less than half the current total. Trump may have helped to force through a deal, but what alternative does the US government have to restoring Gaza to the status of a concentration camp? In response to news of the agreement Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, said: ‘Gaza has to be demilitarised, Hamas has to be destroyed … Israel has every right to fully protect itself.’ There is nothing to prevent Israel resuming attacks on Gaza whenever it wishes.

Israel’s stated goal was to eliminate Hamas. Milton-Edwards and Farrell don’t think that ‘destroying’ Hamas was ever a workable idea. Israel’s leaders surely knew this too. But then Gaza itself, not Hamas, was always the real target of a campaign which the former Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya’alon described as ‘ethnic cleansing’. Hamas has been weakened (it is currently unable to prevent the looting of aid trucks in Gaza), but it has not been destroyed. Mohammed Sinwar has replaced his brother as de facto leader in Gaza. Hamas is still part of Gazan society. Its administrative system is battered, but it has survived. On 14 January, Blinken said that, according to US assessments, ‘Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.’ The movement was born of the occupation, but the genocidal attack on Gaza exceeds the cruelty of its forming conditions. Hamas has transformed many times in the past, and it will do so again. The torture camps, the recorded rape of Palestinian detainees, the lines of stripped, blindfolded men, kneeling in the dirt among the rubble of what was once their homes: what will come from this? Israel may end up wishing for the return of the version of Hamas it once cursed.

24 January