What Hamas Really Wants: The Ideology of the Islamic Resistance Movement
This is an excerpt from a new book of essays, October 7: The War Over Words and Deeds, edited by Donna Robinson Divine and Asaf Romirowsky. Cole Bunzel is a historian and scholar and fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
If the horrific events of October 7, 2023, ought to have made anything clear, it is that Hamas never ceased to bear violent, annihilationist intentions toward Israel, contrary to what many over the years had claimed or suggested.
On that morning, approximately 4,000 Hamas militants, together with some 2,000 other Gazans, broke through the Gaza-Israel border and rampaged across Israeli villages and kibbutzim, killing some 1,200 innocent people, the majority of them civilians, and kidnapping some 250 others.
While Hamas would later try to distance itself from some of the worst atrocities against civilians, claiming that “the Palestinian fighters were keen to avoid harming civilians,” even as it acknowledged that “(m)aybe some faults happened,” evidence abounds that the intention was to commit a massacre.
On the body of one dead Hamas fighter in Kibbutz Be’eri, for instance, was found a notebook with orders reading, “Kill as many people and take as many hostages as possible.” Indeed, the pictures and videos posted to social media by Hamas that day bespoke exceptional cruelty and bloodlust motivated by profound hatred.
In addition to the photos and videos of slaughtered Israelis and foreigners, there was the infamous phone call between one Hamas militant and his parents back in Gaza, in which he boasted to them about his murderous deeds.
“Dad, I am speaking to you from a Jew’s phone,” he can be heard telling his father in the captured recording. “I killed her and her husband, I killed 10 with my own hands. … I am in Meflasim, father. I killed 10. Ten! Ten with my own bare hands. Their blood is on my hands. … Mother, your son is a hero.”
The verbal messages sent by the Hamas leadership that day lent clarity to the aims and ambitions of the October 7 attack, which Hamas called Operation Al Aqsa Flood. In an audio statement announcing the operation, Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif began by listing off a host of grievances against Israel, from the injustice of the Jewish state’s establishment to more Israeli policies toward the West Bank and Gaza, but he made clear that forcing change in Israeli policy was not the purpose of the assault.
“Today, yes, today,” he thundered, “our people resume their revolution, rectify their path and return to the plan of liberation and the establishment of the state through blood and martyrdom. … Today is the day of the great revolution that will end the last occupation and the last racist apartheid regime in the world.”
Deif then called on Palestinians in the West Bank and in Israel to rise up and join in the great revolution, and he further appealed to the so-called Resistance Axis that includes Iran, Syria, Lebanese Hezbollah, the Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen: “To the brothers in the Islamic resistance in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria,” he said, “the day has come when your resistance joins the people of Palestine.”
Indeed, according to well-sourced reports, the October 7 attack was intended not as a one-off but as a catalyst for a larger regional confrontation culminating in the destruction of Israel and the full “liberation” of Palestine. Planning for the attack went back years and was confined to a small circle of Hamas leaders in Gaza around Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in the strip from 2017 till his death in October 2024.
After a short confrontation with Israel in May 2021, Sinwar sought to give the impression that he wanted calm and quiet as he focused on Hamas’s governance project in Gaza. But this was a deception. In the meantime, Sinwar courted Hezbollah and Iran, urging them to join the fray once Hamas began its attack.
Yet the response of the Resistance Axis fell far short of his expectations. According to one report, Sinwar had misread “ambiguous pledges of support” from Iran and Hezbollah “as firm commitments to open secondary fronts.” Other reporting similarly indicates that the Hamas leadership in Gaza expected far more from the Resistance Axis than proved forthcoming.
Given the secrecy surrounding the plot, many of its details, including its timing, were withheld from these partners. Nor was most of the Hamas leadership made aware in advance. Of Hamas’s overseas leadership, only Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political office, had been briefed. Most were given notice only hours before, and some only learned about it from the news.
Yet, while Hamas’s leaders may not all have known about the operation in advance, and some even appear to have faulted Sinwar for launching such a brazen and grisly attack that was sure to invite massive Israeli retaliation, there was no sign of disagreement or dissension in public. Even as some denied that atrocities against women and children had taken place, all praised the attack as an act of righteous and divinely sanctioned violence, the ultimate goal of which was to destroy Israel.
As Haniyeh, in Qatar, stated in an address broadcast on Al Jazeera on October 7, “Our objective is clear: we want to liberate our land, our holy sites, our al-Aqsa, our prisoners. This is the goal that is worthy of this battle, worthy of this heroism, worthy of this courage.” Addressing Israel, he continued, “We have only one thing to say to you: Get out of our land. Get out of our sight. Get out of our Jerusalem and our al-Aqsa. We don’t want to see you on this land. This land is ours; Jerusalem is ours, everything is ours. You are intruders on this pure and blessed land. There is no place for you.”
Later that month, Khaled Meshaal, Haniyeh’s predecessor as Hamas’s political leader, similarly remarked that “October 7 paved a large highway toward the elimination of Israel.” Perhaps most notorious were the comments of Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas politburo member based in Lebanon, who affirmed in a late October interview that Hamas’s intention was to repeat the violence of October 7 attack until Israel was finally annihilated.
“Israel is a country that has no place on our land,” he stated. “We must remove that country, because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and must be finished. … We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight.”
Another senior Hamas official, the Lebanon-based Ali Baraka, boasted in an interview on October 8 about how Hamas had deceived Israel: “We made them think that Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians (in Gaza), and has abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack.”
Israel had indeed been deceived. The thinking among most Israeli politicians and intelligence officials was that while Hamas might initiate rocket attacks of limited scope every year or so, it did not seek a larger confrontation that could invite large-scale Israeli retaliation. As Israel’s national security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi stated in a radio interview just days before October 7, “Since the round of fighting in May two years ago, there is a decision by Hamas leadership to display unprecedented restraint and forbearance. For over two years there hasn’t been a single rocket fired under Hamas initiative from Gaza. Hamas is very, very restrained and understands the consequences of further defiance.”
The guiding belief was that Hamas was driven as much by self-preservation as by militant ideology. Beginning in 2018, Gaza began receiving millions of dollars in monthly financial assistance from Qatar, money intended to alleviate the humanitarian situation in Gaza but that also helped to prop up Hamas’s government. For Hamas to start a major war would be to put all that at risk.
Another group to have been deceived was the academic and analytical community. Many elements of this group believed not only that Hamas was deterred but indeed that it was evolving into a more moderate and pragmatic actor, one that Israel and the international community could profitably engage.
Such thinking went back years, beginning with Hamas’s decision to compete in the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 and its seizure of full control of Gaza the following year. For some analysts, the responsibilities of governance would inevitably have a moderating effect on Hamas.
The epitome of this line of thinking came in a Foreign Affairs article in 2009 titled “Hamas 2.0,” which argued that “Hamas’ decision to join the Palestinian government in 2006, and its subsequent takeover of Gaza, have led to a significant ideological softening. … In a surprisingly short time, Hamas has largely abandoned religious rhetoric and calls for the violent liberation of Palestine, in favor of the increasingly secular and pragmatic task of state building.” This was a “fundamental shift within Hamas” that gave the lie to “the movement’s supposedly inflexible ideology.”
In the same vein, the Harvard scholar Sara Roy, in a 2011 book about Hamas’s social services sector, observed that “Hamas has a history of nonviolent accommodation and political adaptation, ideological reflexivity and transformation, and political pragmatism that the West should welcome.” She similarly made light of Hamas’s religiosity, stating that “Hamas’s fundamental impulse is political and nationalist, not religious, which has accounted for its pragmatism and flexibility.”
Such views do not hold up well in light of October 7. In the last analysis, given the choice between governance and resistance, Hamas chose resistance, and in a manner so brutal and heinous as to make the choice not just clear but irrevocable. Hamas, as it turned out, had been neither deterred nor transformed.
The timing of October 7 was of course determined by more than one factor. It was timed to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, to take advantage of the tumultuous situation in Israel over a controversial judicial reform, and to disrupt efforts at achieving normalization of between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Yet the fundamental motivation behind the attack was no doubt ideological.
What Hamas showed was that it remained committed to a religiopolitical ideology that holds Israel’s existence to be an affront to God.
Even as some Hamas leaders appeared willing to engage in tactical accommodation with Israel, rejectionism remained a fundamental feature of the Hamas ideology shared by all.
Copyright 2025 Academic Studies Press
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