Hamas proclaims: Israel must be destroyed!
October 7, 2023, will forever be etched in the history of the Middle East as the day one of the bloodiest attacks on Israel was launched.
This moment not only triggered a devastating war in Gaza, but also plunged the entire region into ongoing political and humanitarian chaos. Behind this unprecedented attack stands the Hamas movement, whose strategic moves and radical motivations continue to shape global politics to this day.
Unassuming Beginnings
To understand this complex conflict, it is essential to take a closer look at the perpetrator of the attack itself. Who exactly makes up Hamas, what are its true goals, and how did it manage to establish such a dominant position? Let’s lift the veil together on the history and inner workings of this tightly structured organization.
The Hamas movement—an Arabic acronym meaning “Islamic Resistance Movement”—was founded in December 1987 [34,63,68]. This occurred during the outbreak of the First Intifada, a mass Palestinian uprising directed against the Israeli occupation at the time [14,28,33,34].
Hamas was originally established as a new political wing and a direct offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood operating in the Gaza Strip [30,34,63].
The Palestinian cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is historically regarded as the movement’s principal founding father [30,34,47,63].
Along with him, a close circle of other leaders contributed to the movement’s founding, including prominent figures such as Abdel Aziz Ali Abdul Majid al-Rantisi, Muhammad Taha, and Ibrahim Al-Yazouri [11,12,13,30].
Yassin and his associates succeeded in transforming the underground networks of the Muslim Brotherhood into an entirely new, autonomous organization that combined religious fundamentalism with a military wing [47,57].
The goal is clear
From the very beginning, Hamas’s political goals have been exceptionally clearly and radically defined. In its founding charter of 1988, the movement declared that its ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic society throughout the historic territory of Palestine [34,63,66].
The movement’s charter rejected any peaceful solutions and asserted that the Palestinian question could be resolved exclusively through armed jihad [18,30].
Over the years, Hamas has sought to make certain tactical improvements to its international image.
In 2017, it issued a new political document in which it conditionally accepted the idea of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, but continued to staunchly refuse to formally recognize Israel’s right to exist [15,35,48,57].
Despite these cosmetic changes and its distancing from the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement has never abandoned its long-standing ideological vision of establishing a single Islamic state [16,17,48].
Terrorists Want to Restore the Caliphate
In its fundamental theology, Hamas is in complete agreement with other Islamist groups that yearn to restore the medieval Islamic caliphate in the Middle East. It differs from them only in that it views the destruction of the State of Israel as a necessary and first phase of this global effort [1].
For this organization, armed resistance is a key element of its identity and the only relevant tool for achieving Palestinian self-determination [28,48].
Given its extreme ideology and long history of bloody attacks, including suicide bombings targeting civilians, the international community has responded very unequivocally.
Dozens of countries around the world have officially designated Hamas as a dangerous terrorist organization [19,34,65].
The United States did so as early as 1995 and 1997, and was gradually joined by key players such as the European Union, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom [20,21,33,59,70].
Many other countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, Paraguay, Costa Rica, and Ecuador, have imposed similar strict sanctions. However, some of these countries had previously designated only the military wing of the movement—known as the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades—as a terrorist organization [19,21,22,33,59].
It remains noteworthy, however, that the United Nations (UN) does not designate Hamas as a terrorist group, while countries such as Qatar and Turkey have in the past provided it with valuable sanctuary and support [27,56,69].
Taking Control of Gaza
Hamas’s path to absolute political power in the Gaza Strip began rather unexpectedly with its entry into official politics. In January 2006, the movement shocked the entire world when it won the Palestinian parliamentary elections by a landslide, defeating its longtime secular rival, the Fatah party, which had been led by Yasser Arafat from 1959 to 2004 [3,23,28,49].
Hamas won as many as 74 of the 132 parliamentary seats, which immediately triggered enormous security and political tensions throughout the region [49,64].
This fragile and unstable situation did not last long, as it quickly culminated in an extremely bloody civil war in June 2007.
In the course of a single week of brutal street fighting, Hamas completely crushed Fatah’s security forces and assumed absolute military and political control over the Gaza Strip [4,30,34,50,58].
The remaining Fatah leaders and fighters were driven out of Gaza, and their formal power has since been limited to the occupied West Bank [4,28,58,62].
The speed, precision, and brutality of this strategic victory were staggering to many analysts. The operation had been carefully planned by Hamas months in advance and even involved secretly tunneling under Fatah’s strategic buildings [60].
This marked a crushing defeat not only for Fatah but also for the United States and Israel, which had previously sought to heavily arm and train their secular Palestinian allies [60].
The Fateful Attack
Less than two decades later, Hamas pulled off another, far more shocking feat, specifically on that fateful October 7, 2023. Overcoming Israel’s state-of-the-art defense system, known as
“Iron Wall,” was the result of a well-planned, two-year deception campaign [2,10].
Hamas successfully convinced Israeli intelligence agencies that its sole priority was now the economic development of Gaza and that it wanted to avoid any major war [10,40].
The operational secrecy surrounding this massive attack was absolutely crucial to its success and unprecedented.
Palestinian militants avoided using cell phones and coordinated their plans exclusively via handheld radios, which Israel’s elite Unit 8200 had previously stopped monitoring as a priority [10].
Although Israel had access to a secret Hamas document titled “Jericho Wall,” which described the invasion in detail, intelligence analysts fatally misjudged it as unrealistic and exaggerated [51,52].
The early morning attack itself began with a brilliantly timed phase that the movement’s internal videos refer to as the “blinding plan.” The militants made massive use of inexpensive commercial drones equipped with explosives to methodically destroy Israeli communication towers, sensors, and automated machine-gun systems along the fence [2,51,54].
With this innovative move, they virtually completely paralyzed the Israeli army’s command system and literally blinded its otherwise robust defenses [2,54].
Subsequently, Hamas forces rapidly used explosives and bulldozers to breach the smart border fence at dozens of different locations [2,36,53]. In less than a few minutes, thousands of militants poured into southern Israel—not only on motorcycles and in vans, but also from the air using motorized paragliders [2,36,51].
The extremely expensive, billion-dollar barrier was simply not designed to withstand the massive onslaught of such a large and coordinated terrorist army [2].
What did Hamas ultimately hope to achieve with this unprecedented and brutal attack? At the tactical level, their immediate goal was to kidnap hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians and take them to Gaza in order to secure the future release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners [24,25,37].
Strategic Failure
At the same time, they justified this bloody attack to the world as a legitimate response to Israel’s policies toward the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the expansion of Jewish settlements [26,55].
At the highest strategic level, however, the movement’s leaders were hatching far more ambitious and apocalyptic plans. As declassified internal documents clearly show, Hamas sincerely hoped to provoke a massive, multi-front war in which Hezbollah, Iran, and other radical allies from the so-called Axis of Resistance would become fully involved [10,37,41,55].
The ultimate strategic goal of this chaos was to bring about the immediate collapse of Israel and definitively end its power in the region [37,38,39].
At the same time, the movement in Gaza felt a desperate need to revive its faded “image of resistance,” as its own civilian government was failing to bring any prosperity to the population [29].
Last but not least, the radicals sought to deliberately sabotage Israel’s historic diplomatic rapprochement with Arab states, particularly the key normalization with Saudi Arabia [29,55]. It was an all-or-nothing gamble on their part, in which they risked a devastating backlash in the hope of permanently changing the political rules of the game [29].
Looking back from today’s perspective, can we say that Hamas actually achieved its long-sought goal?
On the one hand, it succeeded in brutally shattering the previous sense of Israeli invincibility, thereby shifting the regional discourse in favor of a radical narrative [29,55]. Israel suffered a massive national shock and loss of life that day, while the militants successfully abducted approximately 250 hostages [24,34].
However, the movement failed catastrophically in its most fundamental and important strategic objective.
The expected devastating regional war did not break out immediately, as both Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah were genuinely taken by surprise by the attack and opted only for limited, carefully calibrated responses [42,43,47].
According to available sources, Hezbollah leaders described this operation as a so-called “catastrophic success,” which merely selfishly imposed an unexpected fait accompli on all of its allies [44,45].
The fatal and devastating consequences of the massive Israeli military operation ultimately likely far exceeded even the expectations of Hamas’s own leaders. The movement found itself in a war for sheer survival, and its long-standing governing infrastructure in Gaza was practically razed to the ground [10,46,47].
Instead of a celebrated triumph and the collapse of its enemy, this terrorist group is now literally fighting for its very physical existence [10].
Will Hamas survive the retaliation?
This logically brings us to the final and crucial question: Does Hamas even have a chance to survive this devastating war as a functioning organization?
The answer from military and intelligence experts is surprising but very clear—Hamas will undoubtedly survive, though the question remains as to exactly what form it will take [1].
Although Israel has killed thousands of its fighters and destroyed strategic tunnels, the movement no longer has the strength to repeat its attacks, but it will not disappear entirely [1,61].
Hamas’s conventional military strength will likely never again be as formidable as it was before October 2023. Nevertheless, the movement—as an ideology and a deeply rooted social network—will most likely continue to thrive within Palestinian society without difficulty [1,32].
Analysts agree that the organization is intertwined with the general population in Gaza through a vast network of charities, schools, and mosques that Israeli bombs cannot erase from people’s minds [32,56].
Radical peace plans seeking the permanent disarmament of the movement have also appeared on the diplomatic table. For example, a plan reportedly announced by U.S. President Donald Trump in July 2026 required Hamas, following Israel’s withdrawal, to hand over heavy weapons and relinquish administrative power in Gaza [5,6,7,8,34].
According to peace envoys at the time, Hamas could theoretically remain politically active, but only on the absolute condition that it renounce any armed conflict [9,67].
The future and ultimate form of Hamas thus depend most on whether a truly functional and competent institutional alternative emerges in Gaza after the war.
Such an alternative would have to be able to ensure daily order and security far more effectively than the radicals have done [67]. If Israel does not end this war with a clear political solution, Hamas will simply transform into an indestructible guerrilla network and will continue to loom as a bloody shadow over the ruins of the Gaza Strip [31,61].
List of References
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