From Occupation to Resistance: Understanding Hamas’ Origins and Actions
by Micki Luckey
Part I
“Hamas must be eradicated.” “Destroyed.” “Annihilated.” “Eliminated.”
The Israeli government often repeats their goal to destroy Hamas — for Netanyahu a “total victory” for “peace” requires total obliteration of Hamas. This is the rationale for bombing cities, flattening hospitals, destroying universities, schools, and all other infrastructure, killing tens of thousands of civilians, arresting thousands more without charge, and now threatening the survivors with a full-scale invasion of Rafah, to where most of the population of Gaza have fled. And yet Hamas has withstood the onslaught for 6 months and continues its resistance. Recently the former British Foreign Secretary William Hague opined that Hamas could not be defeated militarily. (The Guardian, April 6, 2024)
To understand how the goal of eradicating Hamas is unreasonable, it is important to learn more about Hamas. In addition to carrying out the militant resistance the world is now watching, Hamas has been running civil society in Gaza since 2006.
How did Gaza become “the crucible of the resistance of Palestinians” (Rashihd Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, p.94)? During the 1948 Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians from the territory of the new state of Israel, many thousands of them fled to Gaza. Since then this crowded sliver of land (only 141 square miles, or half the size of the city of New York) has been blockaded by air, sea and land and has endured four previous bombing campaigns from Israel. Hemmed in by border walls with heavily armed guards, Gaza has been under constant siege.
Origin of Hamas
Hamas, whose name in Arabic stands for Islamic Resistance Movement, was founded in 1987 as a Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt. This was during the Palestinian uprising known as the First Intifada, a sustained period of civil disobedience when Palestinians threw stones and Molotov cocktails and received hails of live bullets in response. The role Hamas played in the struggles, as well as its clear goal of a Palestinian state on all the territory of historical Palestine, increased its popularity during the five years of the Intifada.
In spite of its goal to liberate all of Palestine, Hamas has been supported (and even funded) by Israel as a means to weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO had set up the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a parliament for the Occupied Territories. The PLO is a coalition of different parties, the largest of which is Fatah, a party founded in 1957 and led by Yasser Arafat until his death in 2004. The PLO has been weakened over the years by Israel’s assassination of many Palestinian leaders, including important figures such as Abu Jihad. In 1993 the Oslo Accord negotiated an end to the First Intifada and established the PLO as a subcontractor for the occupation, effectively a police force over the Palestinian population with no effective political or economic power. Edward Said wrote that it was “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” because while Arafat agreed to give up armed struggle against Israel, Israel conceded nothing (The London Review October 21, 1993). Indeed Israel further militarized the occupied territories — establishing more illegal settlements, building more checkpoints and walls, even allowing attacks on worshipers at mosques.
Hamas held that only the use of force could liberate Palestine (Khalidi, p. 209); therefore it opposed the Oslo Accord with its false promises of Palestinian Independence. When Israel rejected the possibility of statehood, Palestinians carried out a Second Intifada starting in 2000, in response to which Israel shot and killed thousands of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. During this period both Hamas and Islamic Jihad carried out retaliatory suicide bombings. The violence and lack of political results further weakened the PLO. After the Second Intifada (2005) Israel “withdrew” from Gaza while it kept control of the borders, water supplies, air space, surrounding waters, and continued to engage in periodic deadly forays into Gaza.
Election
Hamas decided to participate in the Palestinian election of 2006 and won throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Because of frustration with the PLO, large swaths of the secular Palestinian population and even Christian villages voted for this Islamic group, giving them a clear majority of seats in the PA assembly (74 seats out of 132). (Khalidi, p. 219) However, Israel vetoed their participation in the PA (Khalidi, p. 220), and the U.S. labeled Hamas a terrorist organization and enacted a devastating boycott. Further conflict between Hamas and Fatah led to Hamas setting up its own Palestinian Authority in Gaza. While the PLO runs the PA in the West Bank, it left Gaza to be governed by Hamas.
Governing Gaza
Hamas became responsible for the internal affairs of Gaza with ministries of education, health, finance, as well as security and providing vital services to the residents. However, the task to maintain Gaza was not easy, as the Israeli government immediately stopped exports and greatly limited imports, cut off fuel supplies, and greatly reduced transportation in and out of the territory. This meant that fishermen could no longer reach the sea, farmers could not export their crops, and workers could not get to jobs inside Israel. As a result of Israel’s blockade, unemployment, poverty, hunger, and ill-health increased dramatically. Just to survive, many residents relied on food aid from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and other aid organizations: from January to June 2023 UNRWA provided food to 1,136,007 refugees in Gaza. Border walls turned Gaza into an open-air prison.
Furthermore, Gaza suffered four Israeli bombing campaigns in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, leading to destruction of neighborhoods, rolling blackouts, contamination of water, destruction of vital infrastructure such as power plants, and many deaths. These assaults used US-provided Apache helicopters, drones, Hellfire missiles, and even 2,000-pound bombs. Hamas often responded by firing missiles into Israel, but with limited range and small warheads they were not very damaging. For example, in the 2014 conflict such rockets killed six Israeli civilians while Israel killed over 2,000 Palestinians and injured over 10,000 in that year alone [Khalidi, p. 227]. Israel’s pattern of countering with disproportionate force was articulated by Israeli Major General Gadi Eisenkot in 2008: “What happened in the Dahiya quarter [the Shiite quarter of Beirut that was leveled in 2006]…will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on… We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there” [Khalidi, p. 225].
Resistance
For many years Palestinian civil society has carried out local nonviolent protests, holding marches and attempting to defend homes, village water supplies and olive trees. They organized Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as a global tool of nonviolent resistance. In the U.S. the BDS campaign for Palestine has had over 200 victories over the years. In spite of laws to penalize boycott actions in 27 states, it continues to this day. (Remember, it took years for the BDS strategy to help bring down apartheid in South Africa.)
Meanwhile, occasional protests and actions such as Hamas’ suicide bombings have gotten a lot of attention. To build international sympathy and support for its occupation of Palestine, Israel spends millions of dollars a year maintaining an international media campaign justifying or distracting attention from its actions and always blaming Palestinians.
Over time Israel has accelerated its appropriation of land and control over all of Palestine. With different rules governing even Arab citizens of Israel, Palestinians have experienced deaths of many loved ones and imprisonment of thousands more, loss of land and water, restrictions of livelihood, restriction of access to holy sites, increased levels of food insecurity, deteriorating health, and a total lack of safety in their homeland. These conditions meet the definition of apartheid, a system of segregation and discrimination in which one racial group is deprived of political and civil rights.
International law recognizes the right of an occupied people to resist colonial domination, foreign occupation and racist regimes that deny them basic civil and human rights and political participation (Fourth Geneva Convention as well as UN General Assembly Resolution 2625). History of resistance movements includes the examples of Algeria, South Africa, Ireland and other liberation struggles. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon described how violence is sometimes necessary to break free from violent oppressors.
It is important to recognize that when Palestinians have organized nonviolent resistance, they have been met with violence. For 18 months in 2018–19 the Great March of Return held weekly mass demonstrations in Gaza. Thousands of unarmed men, women and children walked along the northern border, only to be fired on by Israeli snipers. Israeli bullets killed 189 Palestinians and wounded more than 13,000, most of them severely. Meanwhile only 1 Israeli soldier experienced a minor injury. After attempts at nonviolent resistance were met with such extreme violence, is it really that surprising that, on October 7, 2023, Hamas would attempt a violent form of resistance by breaking through their prison wall and attacking Israel?
Part II
October 7
Every report on the on-going devastating assault on Gaza, even in progressive sources, starts with a disclaimer to the effect that it is a response to a savage attack by Hamas on October 7. The Israeli government repeatedly stresses this: Netanyahu said, “It’s the battle of civilization against barbarism.” “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” said Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9.
That Hamas committed war crimes when they attacked, killing Israelis and taking hostages, is not disputed. Were they brutes, savages out to kill as many as possible? Or were they resistance fighters, seeking to end the oppression of their people? Most people only know what the Israelis said about October 7 — and believe it despite the retractions of lie after lie of propaganda. As described below, Israel has spread false reports, killed journalists, and eliminated the access of most foreign journalists to Gaza in its effort to control the information about the conflict.
When they commandeered a bulldozer to break through the wall in the early hours of the 7th, the military wing of Hamas attacked the Israeli bases that had confined them in an ‘open-air prison’ for fifteen years. Their goal: to take as many live hostages, both soldiers and civilians, as they could. They hoped to negotiate a prisoner swap designed to release many of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, a strategy which had succeeded in many previous cases.
The Hamas attack was unprecedented and unexpected, even though border agents had sent warnings to their higher ups in the Israeli military. The Israeli public was in a state of shock and grief as the numbers of victims and hostages became known.
But did Hamas carry out a “wholesale slaughter of civilians”? The 1,139 victims on October 7 did include 695 Israeli civilians, as well as 71 foreign workers, according to the Israeli social security agency. The total included 36 children, as well as some 373 members of Israeli military and security forces. However, as documented below, the Israeli forces were responsible for some of their own civilian deaths.
These numbers were not available in the early days after the attack, when the Israeli military organized a tour for journalists and spread rumors about beheaded babies. Then there were stories about babies burned in ovens. The Israeli propaganda was widely quoted, and even President Biden claimed to have seen a photo. However, it is now clear that the sensationalized stories were fabrications, outright lies: only one infant was killed on October 7, and seven children between the ages of 2 and 9 years (reported in Haaretz, a mainstream independent Israeli newspaper).
The claims of civilians burned alive by Hamas that were “documented” with gruesome photos could not be verified as Hamas victims. Many of the dead were actually killed by friendly fire from Israeli guns, tanks and missiles, as is documented at three sites. 1) At the Be’eri Kibbutz [near the Gaza border], Yasmin Porat testified that after she exited a home as a human shield, Israeli fighters killed everyone remaining in the house— Palestinians and Israelis alike. Other houses in the Kibbutz were shelled, killing Israelis and Palestinians inside while destroying whole portions of the buildings. An ABC reporter photographed artillery pieces resembling Israeli munitions outside one bombed-out home. A member of the security team for Be’eri told Haaretz that desperate commanders made difficult decisions, “including shelling on their houses in order to eliminate terrorists along with hostages.”
2) At the Nova music festival, which Haaretz reported that Hamas did not know was taking place, concert goers were caught in crossfire between Hamas and the Israeli forces. Hamas fighters shot many of the 364 people who died at the concert, yet no one knows how many were killed by “friendly fire.” As reported in Haaretz, an Israeli police report concluded that an Israeli combat helicopter killed an undisclosed number of civilians at the concert. The Apache helicopter pilots admitted lacking directives or clear targets as they carried out heavy and indiscriminate bombing. “’Shoot at everything’, one squadron leader reportedly told his men. It is also clear from personal testimony that Israeli soldiers fired on people trying to escape in their cars.
3) When the Israeli base at the Erez crossing to Gaza was overrun with Hamas fighters, Israeli command made a decision to kill everyone inside. Although the base was filled with Israeli civil officers and soldiers, “the Israeli military was forced to request an aerial strike against its own base… to repulse the terrorists.” A photo of the damage made it clear it was bombed from the air, while its commander retreated with a few others to safety in an underground bunker. (Note: this damning photo has disappeared, although it was widely viewed on social media.)
Other reports of Hamas war crimes have since been retracted. The most sensationalized were the reports that Hamas weaponized rape. While this accusation appeared in a front-page story in the New York Times, the author found no documented evidence to back up the story, and it has since unraveled. (The author, an Israeli who was inexperienced in investigative journalism, admitted her inability to get any confirmation of rape from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery centers or sex assault hotlines in Israel, so she turned to eye-witness accounts, most by people who made outrageous claims later proven false.) The family of Gal Abdush, whose alleged rape was featured in the article, denied she had been raped. And a spokesperson for Kibbutz Be’eri has testified that the victims cited in the NY Times article were not victims of sexual assault.
The headline of the NY Times story referenced a gang rape at the Nova festival attributed to Hamas, in spite of the witness’ statement that the men were “regular guys, not fighters” in uniform. It is likely they were some of the many Palestinians who crossed the border once the fence was down. Horrific as these acts are, they are not part of a policy of weaponized rape. Sexual violence is common in warfare, and goes both ways. The UN investigation of these claims acknowledged that some Israeli women were likely raped, as were Palestinian women abused by Israeli soldiers.
However, the timing of these unsubstantiated reports was not accidental. For example, the first report of “weaponized rape” was published in late November at a time when Israel faced intense criticism due to the large numbers of civilians killed in Gaza: the Israeli government needed to shift the focus back on Israeli victims.
These reports give a different picture of what happened in the Hamas assault. Yes, Hamas carried out the attack in which innocent civilians were killed, along with soldiers and guards. While the loss of lives was devastating, it is now clear that the ~1200 victims were not all killed by Hamas. Israeli propaganda used lies and distortions to portray Hamas fighters as brutes, savages, animals. When the Israeli government’s lies are refuted, they simply come up with new fabrications designed to justify its genocidal attacks on the population of Gaza. Time and time again Israeli government statements and “reporting” have been shown to be false, self-serving and used to distract us from the reality on the ground.
The horrific aftermath
To “guarantee that October 7 will never happen again” by eliminating Hamas, Israel has now destroyed much of Gaza. The figures are familiar: to date over 34,000 killed, almost half of them children, over 75,000 injured, 500 schools and universities destroyed, whole cities uninhabitable. The residents remaining in the north have no food or clean water; those who fled to the south are also starving and still under constant bombardment. And yet Hamas has not given up. In negotiations taking place in Egypt the Hamas representatives refuse to surrender the remaining hostages for a short-term ceasefire and instead are holding out for a lasting ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal.
In Gaza the care of the injured and ill is nearly impossible as Israel has denied entry of medical supplies and bombed all hospitals. Israel falsely claimed the Al-Shifa hospital contained a Hamas headquarters, and proceeded to bomb it for two weeks, leaving bodies in the rubble when they finally withdrew. Eyewitnesses report the Israeli troops shot patients in their beds and summarily executed hundreds of hospital staff.
The atrocities continue… the video of the handcuffed young man delivering the message to evacuate Nassar Hospital who was shot dead upon returning; the killing of seven international workers of the World Central Kitchen, which brought wide condemnation, even outrage from President Biden (revealing a racism that a few white victims matter more than tens of thousands of Palestinians!); and amputations of prisoners’ legs at a “field hospital.”
Israeli justifications of the obliteration of cities in Gaza included reports that Hamas used human shields. Hamas was loudly condemned in the US Congress and the EU for using human shields, although it was refuted by on-the-ground observers. Much of the conflict takes place in densely populated urban areas where militants blend into the population. But the Israeli leaders have made it abundantly clear that all people in Gaza are their enemy. They proclaim “there are no civilians in Gaza… they are either militants or human shields,” as stated by Neve Gordon, a British professor of International Law.
Starvation, long a tactic applied to the population of Gaza, has become a weapon of genocide. Since October 7th, delivery of food aid was reduced to a trickle as thousands of trucks were blocked entry to Gaza by the Israelis. Civilians lining up for food were massacred. The claim that 12 UNRWA personnel participated in the October 7 attack prompted foreign governments to stop funding their work. (Note that this unsubstantiated claim came almost immediately after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling — another example of Israel trying to divert attention from the perpetrators of genocide.) When the first ship docked to deliver food, Israel destroyed the World Central Kitchen workers who were to deliver it, causing a second ship to turn around. Recently, Israel blocked the passage of a Freedom Flotilla carrying 5000 tons of humanitarian aid.
Reflecting on 6 months of these horrors, Columbia Professor of Modern Arab Studies Rashid Khalidi writes, “Palestinians are haunted by historical memories of the Nakba, and by the question of when and whether this war will end, and how Gazans can ever have a normal life again.” And yet even after Israel’s assault destroyed much of Gaza, Hamas gained popularity among Palestinians. A survey conducted in December 2023 found 75% of Palestinians in Gaza and the West bank believed Hamas was correct in launching the attacks on October 7. As late as March, 2024, a Palestinian poll found “wide popular support for October the 7 offensive remains unchanged.” After being seen for years as victims unable to assert their rights, many Palestinians felt the military initiative by Hamas showed that they could no longer be discounted.
It is clear that when the Israeli government vows to “wipe out Hamas,” it is attacking the entire population and infrastructure of Gaza. Israel cannot eliminate resistance to the illegal and immoral Occupation of Palestine without complete genocide of the Palestinian people.
The world responds
To make their point of view dominant, the Israeli government invests millions of dollars in propaganda (see “Occupation of the American Mind” and “The U.S. Media Has A Palestine Problem”.) It times the release of fictitious news to counter events that put them in a bad light, such as their claims that Hamas weaponized rape and UNWRA personnel participated in the Hamas attack. Established media outlets, such as the New York Times, carry the Israeli story as front-page news, and bury its retraction (if they print one) a few days later.
Recently the New York Times instructed staffers to avoid using the terms ‘Palestine’ ‘occupied territories’ and ‘refugee camps’ while indicating that it is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and to describe October 7 as ‘the deadliest attack on Israel in decades.’ Much of the mainstream press reflects this bias. Fairness and Accuracy in News and Reporting found the word ‘brutal’ was applied to Palestinians 73% of the time it was used by the NY Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal between October 7 and March 7, while ‘slaughter’ and massacre’ were used 60 times more to describe Israeli deaths than Palestinian deaths.
In addition, the Israeli state has tried to ensure that other voices don’t get heard by removing journalists from the scene. In 2022 Israel assassinated Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and in the present assault has killed at least 140 journalists in Palestine (and two in Lebanon). Recently the Israeli government raided the Jerusalem office and banned Al Jazeera, the global media company based in Qatar that employs most of the only international journalists left in Gaza. They want to suppress all coverage of their war on Hamas except their own. However, their own soldiers have released videos celebrating their horrific acts.
And yet, despite Israel’s attempts to control coverage of its violence, the whole world is watching the current ethnic cleansing in Gaza, following the genocide on social media, alternative news sources and even some retractions on the major outlets. Widespread rallies, marches and mass demonstrations continue around the world, along with disruptions and civil disobedience to demand a permanent ceasefire, a stop to the flow of weapons, and an end to the Occupation. University students in the U.S. and elsewhere are occupying their campuses to demand their schools divest from Israel.
It is still rare to see an acknowledgment of Hamas’ critical role. As Khaled Elgindy, a former adviser to the PA leadership and now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank, stated recently, “Hamas is a fact of political life in Gaza and in the Palestinian scene in general. And if anything, it is much more relevant today than it’s ever been.” Hamas will need to be a partner in any negotiations for a lasting resolution to the conflict.
Hopefully there will be a lasting shift as most of the world comes to see Hamas as a leading force in Palestinian resistance to Israel’s 75 year-long occupation as well as the party elected to administer civil affairs in Gaza. Their resistance to Israeli apartheid and occupation on October 7 may herald a turning point in the conflict and even come to be considered an historical resistance event similar to the Tet Offensive by the Vietnamese, the Soweto Uprising in South Africa, or the Battle of Normandy in World War II.
