Drop Site News, a US-based publication, has recently conducted interviews with senior Hamas officials and reviewed statements from the group’s leaders.
These efforts included background interviews with various Hamas sources, with two officials—Basem Naim and Ghazi Hamad—agreeing to speak on the record.
Additionally, knowledgeable Palestinians, Israelis, and international sources were consulted to understand the tactical and political objectives of the 7th October attacks.
Hamas leaders depict their actions on 7th October as a justified rebellion against an occupying force that has subjected Gaza to military, political, and economic warfare.
Dr. Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau and a former government minister in Gaza, stated: ‘They have left us no choice other than to take the decision in our hands and to fight back. 7th October, for me, is an act of defence, maybe the last chance for Palestinians to defend themselves.’
Naim, a medical doctor and a close associate of former Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, who is based in Doha, Qatar, has been one of the few Hamas officials authorised to speak publicly on behalf of the movement following 7th October.
In defending the attacks, Naim asserted that Hamas acted out of existential necessity amid continuous diplomatic and military assaults on Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. ‘The people in Gaza had one of two choices: Either to die because of siege, malnutrition, hunger, lack of medicine, and lack of treatment abroad, or to die by a rocket. We have no other choice,’ he explained. ‘If we have to choose, why choose to be the good victims, the peaceful victims? If we have to die, we have to die in dignity. Standing, fighting, fighting back, and standing as dignified martyrs.’
Polls indicate strong Palestinian support for Hamas despite the circumstances. Before the 7th October attacks, opinion polls in Gaza and the West Bank showed declining support for Hamas, with one survey reporting only 23 per cent of respondents expressing significant support and over half holding negative views.
However, Arab Barometer noted that: ‘The 7th October war reversed that trend, leading to a significant rise in Hamas’s popularity.’ A subsequent poll conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research in mid-June found that two-thirds of Gaza’s population continued to support the 7th October attack, with over 80 per cent believing it brought Palestine to global attention.
More than half of Gaza residents polled hoped for Hamas’s return to power after the war. Ghazi Hamad, the former Hamas deputy foreign minister and a senior member of its political bureau, commented: ‘They lost confidence in peace with Israel. People believe that the only way now is to fight against Israel, to struggle against Israel. We put the Palestinian cause on the table. I think that we have a new page of history.’
Hamad continued: ‘Israel has now spent nine months (fighting in Gaza) — nine months. This is a small area. No mountains, no valleys. It is a very small, besieged area — against Hamas’s 20,000 (fighters). They bring all the military power, supported by the United States. But I think now they failed. They failed.’
Dr. Yara Hawari, co-director of Al-Shabaka, an independent Palestinian think tank, commented on the moral complexities surrounding Hamas’s 7th October attacks. She noted: ‘If the Israeli regime hadn’t embarked on a genocide in Gaza, would we be facing this level of solidarity? It’s a difficult question. It’s also uncomfortable because I don’t think Palestinians anywhere should pay in blood for the solidarity of people around the world, and certainly not in over 40,000 people killed.’
Hawari, based in Ramallah, remarked: ‘We have surpassed the numbers of the Nakba by at least three times in terms of those killed. An entire place has been destroyed. Gaza doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been destroyed completely. This has certainly been a revealing moment. Had 7th October not happened, would that have been revealed to people around the world or not? It’s an uncomfortable thing to consider.’
Hamas has stressed that its goal on 7 October was to disrupt the status quo and force the US and other nations to address the Palestinians’ situation. Analysts believe they have succeeded in this regard.
Mouin Rabbani, a former UN official and special adviser on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group, stated: ‘On 6th October, Palestine had disappeared from the regional and international agenda. Israel was dealing unilaterally with the Palestinians without generating any attention or criticism.
‘The attacks of Hamas on 7th October and their aftermath played a crucial role, but I think just as much credit, if you will, goes to Israel, if not more so. If Israel had responded in the way it did in previous assaults on Gaza in 2008, 2014, 2021, it would have been a story for a few weeks, with a lot of hand-wringing, and then it would have ended.’
Rabbani added: ‘It’s not only the actions of the colonised, but also the reaction of the coloniser that has created the current political reality, the current political moment.’
US and Israeli officials often respond to questions about the staggering death toll in Gaza or the mass killing of women and children by casting sole blame on Hamas. They treat the events of 7th October as if they granted Israel an open-ended licence to kill on an industrial scale. ‘None of the suffering would have happened if Hamas hadn’t done what it did on 7th October,’ is a sentiment frequently repeated by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. However, this perspective ignores the long-standing brutality of the Israeli occupation.
Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and a leading US historian of Palestine, pointed out: ‘These deaths should be on the conscience of the Israeli leaders who decided to kill all these people. But they also to some extent should be on the consciences of the people who organised [the 7th October] operation. They should have known, and had to have known, that Israel would inflict devastating revenge not just on them but mainly on the civilian population. Do you credit them for this? The end result may be the permanent occupation, immiseration, and perhaps even expulsion of the population of Gaza, in which case I don’t think anybody would want to credit whoever organised this operation.’
Palestinian-American novelist and author Susan Abulhawa, who has travelled to Gaza twice since the siege began, has been unapologetic in her defence of Palestinian armed resistance.
She rejects the notion that Hamas is responsible for Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza since 7th October.
Abulhawa remarked: ‘It’s kind of like telling the folks in the Warsaw uprising that you should have known that the German military was going to respond the way they did and you are going to be responsible for the deaths of other residents in the Warsaw ghetto. Maybe that’s true, but is it really a moral point to make? I don’t think there has ever been so much scrutiny on an indigenous people, on how they’re resisting their colonisers.’
Abulhawa, whose novels include Against the Loveless World and Mornings in Jenin, stated: ‘As a Palestinian, I’m grateful for it. I think what they have done is something that no amount of negotiation was ever able to achieve. Nothing else we did was able to achieve what they did on 7th October. And I should say, actually, it’s not so much what they did, but it was Israel’s reaction that led to a shift in the narrative because they’re finally naked before the world.’
The men in the tunnels being hunted by Israeli forces in Gaza can best answer what Hamas was thinking on 7th October. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader on the ground, and Mohammed Deif, commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, are widely recognised as the decision-makers.
In both Israeli and US media, Sinwar is often depicted as a villain hiding in his tunnel lair, plotting ways to terrorise Israelis. He has been a US State Department-designated terrorist since 2015. ‘The United States has to have a bogeyman, a Saddam Hussein figure, a Hitler figure,’ noted Khalidi. ‘I think Sinwar has been chosen.’
Despite these portrayals, Sinwar’s writings and media interviews suggest he is a complex thinker with defined political objectives, believing in armed struggle as a means to an end. He appears as a well-educated political militant rather than a cult leader on a mass suicide crusade.
‘It’s not this black image of Sinwar as a man with two horns living in the tunnels,’ said Hamad, a Hamas official who worked directly with Sinwar for three years. ‘But in the time of war, he’s very strong. This man is very strong. If he wants to fight, he fights seriously.’
In 1988, shortly after Hamas was founded, Sinwar was arrested by Israeli forces and sentenced to four life sentences for allegedly murdering Palestinian collaborators. During his 22 years in an Israeli prison, he became fluent in Hebrew and studied Israeli history, politics, and intelligence. He translated by hand the memoirs of several former heads of the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet.
Sinwar told an Italian journalist in 2018, ‘When I entered (prison), it was 1988, the Cold War was still ongoing. Here (in Palestine), the Intifada. To spread the latest news, we printed fliers.
‘I came out, and I found the internet. But to be honest, I never came out — I have only changed prisons. And despite it all, the old one was much better than this one. I had water, electricity. I had so many books. Gaza is much tougher.’
