Since the surprise attack on October 7 that exposed Israeli defence’s weakness and broke its invincibility, the name of Hamas has featured more prominently than any other entity in the political discourse of the Middle East.
Over 5,000 rockets were fired at Israeli towns and settlements from the Gaza Strip and about 1,000 Hamas fighters entered Israel from road, sea and air in a well-coordinated operation against Israel.
The attack was far more sophisticated than any that came before it.
Israel’s sensors were attacked and its security cameras were disabled as Hamas made use of advanced electronic warfare, jamming Israeli communications systems.
All this suggests that Hamas has been bolstering its military technologies for some time.
But the attack will also be known for its savagery as many innocent people were the victim and several young women were raped by Hamas fighters.
More than 1,200 people, including 120 Israeli soldiers, were killed—the highest number of deaths of Israelis in a single day in its history.
About 150 Israelis were taken as hostages back to Gaza.
Stunned by the surprise attack, Israel has responded by relentlessly firing and bombing Gaza from the air, killing thousands of Palestinians, destroying buildings and demolishing a number of neighbourhoods.
After cutting off the supply of food, medicine, power, water and other necessities to the people of the embattled coastal enclave, the Israeli army has forced thousands of Palestinians to flee from their homes to safer places as it prepares a ground assault on Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas.
But what is Hamas?
Hamas is an Islamist militant movement which is one of the two major Palestinian political parties that governs more than 2.3 million people in the Gaza Strip.
The other Palestinian enclave, West Bank, is governed by the Palestinian Authority that is dominated by its rival, Al Fatah.
Nearly three million Palestinians live there along with 670,000 Israelis, who have been illegally settled in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Hamas is best known for its armed resistance to Israel and has been involved in several armed confrontations with Israeli forces in past years.
It is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (“Islamic Resistance Movement”) founded by a wheelchair-bound Palestinian cleric, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
He became an activist in the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo and established Hamas as its political arm in Gaza in December 1987.
Yassin was subsequently killed by the Israelis.
Hamas’ s charter calls for the destruction of Israel and establishing an Islamic society in historic Palestine.
Opposed to any compromise with Israel, it employed suicide bombing for the first time in April 1993 in the run-up to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s decision to sign the Oslo Accords.
The accords had given temporary rights to Palestinians to govern the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Arafat had renounced violence and recognised Israel and its people’s right to live in peace, some years before the pact. The Oslo Accords had also set 1999 as the deadline to end the Israel-Palestine conflict—which has so far proved elusive.
Hamas rejected the accords and refused to recognise either the Palestinian Authority or the State of Israel.
In the early 2000s Hamas spearheaded the second intifada and launched a number of violent attacks against Israel with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Tanzim militia of Fatah.
How it is organised
Hamas has a number of leadership bodies apart from its military wing, like political and social that perform different functions. It has an overarching consultative body known as the politburo that operates in exile.
Local committees deal with grassroots-level issues in Gaza and West Bank. Ismail Haniyeh is currently the political head after its long-time leader Khaled Meshaal was replaced in 2017.
The day-to-day affairs in Gaza are overseen by Yahya Sinwar and Issam al-Da’alis is its de facto prime minister.
The two commanders of Hamas’s military wing, the Izzad-Din-al-Qassam Brigades that spearheaded the October 7 attack are Mohammed Deif and Marwan Issa.
West Bank and Gaza were both occupied by Israel after it won the Six-Day War against the Arab countries in 1967. Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005 when it unilaterally withdrew from the area to boost its international image. Hamas won the Palestinian provincial Assembly elections in 2006 and after driving out Fatah fighters, took control of the Gaza Strip. But it refused to renounce violence or recognise Israel, which led Israel and Egypt to seal its two main borders that allowed people in Gaza contact with the outside world. The blockade severely curtailed the supply of food, medicine, water, power and other necessities to Gaza. It continues even today and has become more severe. But despite the blockade, Hamas was able to build its military capacity. Over the years its arsenal and capability have improved significantly.
It is suspected that Iran, Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon helped Hamas. But Hamas is no match to the Israeli Defense Force, which is the most powerful army in the region.
Global reaction
The United States and others have designated Hamas a terrorist organisation. Though Prime Minister Narendra Modi strongly condemned the “terror” attack on Israel, India has not described Hamas as a terrorist organisation so far. US President Joe Biden is scheduled to arrive in Israel on Wednesday. His Secretaries of State and Defense have already visited Tel Aviv and supplied it with fresh arms. However, the US doesn’t want Israel to re-occupy Gaza. Whether Israel will be successful in destroying Hamas will be known only in the coming days.
But Hamas has managed to destroy Biden’s Middle East policy and succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back at the centre stage.
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