‘Necessary cost’: Behind Hamas’ bloody gambit to create a permanent state of war

DOHA – Thousands have been killed in the Gaza Strip. Israeli air strikes have reduced Palestinian neighbourhoods to rubble, while doctors treat screaming children with no anaesthesia. Across the Middle East, fear has spread over the possible outbreak of a broader regional war.

But in the bloody arithmetic of Hamas’ leaders, the carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation. It is the necessary cost of a great accomplishment – shattering the status quo and opening a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel.

It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash”, Mr Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’ top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

Since the Oct 7 Hamas attack, in which Israel says about 1,400 people were killed – most of them civilians – and more than 240 others dragged back to Gaza as captives, the group’s leaders have praised the operation, with some hoping it will set off a sustained conflict that ends any pretence of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them.

“I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Mr Taher Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told the Times.

In weeks of interviews, Hamas leaders, along with Arab, Israeli and Western officials who track the group, said the attack had been planned and executed by a tight circle of commanders in Gaza who did not share the details with their own political representatives abroad or with their regional allies like Hezbollah.

The attack ended up being broader and deadlier than even its planners had anticipated, they said, largely because the assailants managed to break through Israel’s vaunted defences with ease, allowing them to overrun military bases and residential areas with little resistance. Hamas killed and captured more soldiers and civilians than it expected to, officials said.

The assault served one of the plotters’ main objectives: It broke a tension within Hamas about the group’s identity and purpose. Was it mainly a governing body – responsible for managing the blockaded Gaza Strip – or was it still fundamentally an armed force, committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state?

With the attack, the group’s leaders in Gaza – including senior head Yahya Sinwar, who had spent more than 20 years in Israeli prisons, and military commander Mohammed Deif, a shadowy figure whom Israel had repeatedly tried to assassinate – answered that question. They doubled down on military confrontation.

The weeks since have seen a furious Israeli response that has killed more than 10,000 people in Gaza, according to health officials there. But for Hamas, the attack stemmed from a growing sense that the Palestinian cause was being pushed aside.

The months before the assault seemed relatively quiet in Gaza. Hamas had sat out recent clashes between Israel and other militants, and the group’s political leaders were 1,600km away in Qatar, negotiating to get more aid and jobs for residents of the impoverished territory.

But frustration was building. Hamas leaders in Gaza were flooded with images of Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, Jews openly praying at a contested site customarily reserved for Muslims, and Israeli police storming Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a touchstone for Palestinian claims to the holy city. The prospect of Israel’s normalising ties with Saudi Arabia, long a patron of the Palestinian cause, appeared closer than ever.

Then, on a quiet Saturday morning, Hamas attacked.

It was clear in advance that Israel would respond by bombarding Gaza, killing Palestinian civilians.

“What could change the equation was a great act, and without a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big,” Mr al-Hayya said.

But, he added: “We had to tell people that the Palestinian cause would not die.”

Sinwar took the helm of Hamas in Gaza in 2017. He hailed from the first generation of Hamas, an armed group founded during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the late 1980s and ultimately classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States and many other nations.

Sinwar helped create the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing.

In 1988, he was detained and later prosecuted for the killing of four Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel, according to Israeli court records. He ended up in prison in Israel for more than two decades.

In 2011, he was released in a prisoner swop that Hamas took as a signature lesson: Israel was willing to pay a high price for its captives.

Hamas traded a single Israeli soldier, Mr Gilad Shalit, for more than 1,000 Palestinians, including Sinwar. He vowed to release more inmates.

When Sinwar returned to Gaza in 2011, the Palestinian movement was divided.

Some factions had signed accords with Israel, meant to pave the way for a two-state solution.

Hamas, meanwhile, effectively sought to undo history, starting with 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what would become Israel during the war surrounding the foundation of the Jewish state.

For Hamas, that displacement, along with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza during the 1967 Middle East war, was a great historical wrong that had to be righted by force of arms.

In 2007, Hamas won a bout of factional fighting in Gaza and took charge of the territory. Suddenly, it was governing Gaza. Israel, in tandem with Egypt, imposed a blockade on the strip aimed at weakening Hamas, plunging Palestinians in Gaza into isolation and poverty.

In 2012, Sinwar became the armed wing’s representative to Hamas’ political leadership, linking him more tightly to the leaders of the military wing, including Deif, the head of the Qassam Brigades. The two men were key architects of the Oct 7 attack, according to Arab and Israeli officials.

In 2021, Hamas launched a war to protest Israeli efforts to evict Palestinians from their homes in east Jerusalem and Israeli police raids of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

That was a turning point, Mr Osama Hamdan, a Hamas leader based in Beirut, told the Times. Instead of firing rockets over issues in Gaza, Hamas was fighting for concerns central to all Palestinians, including those outside the enclave. The events also convinced many in Hamas that Israel sought to push the conflict past a point of no return that would ensure the impossibility of Palestinian statehood.

“The Israelis were only concerned with one thing: How do I get rid of the Palestinian cause?” Mr Hamdan said. “They were heading in that direction and not even thinking about the Palestinians. And if the Palestinians did not resist, all of that could have taken place.”

By Oct 7, Hamas was estimated to have 20,000 to 40,000 fighters, with about 15,000 rockets, mainly manufactured in Gaza with components most likely smuggled in through Egypt, according to American and other Western analysts. The group had mortars, anti-tank missiles and portable air-defence systems as well, they said.

Sinwar had also restored the group’s ties with Iran, which had frayed in 2012.

That restoration deepened the relationship between Hamas’ military wing in Gaza and Iran’s network of regional militias, according to regional diplomats and security officials. In recent years, Hamas operatives travelled from Gaza to Iran and Lebanon for training by the Iranians or Hezbollah, the officials said.

On Oct 7, Hamas used paragliders to fly over the border fence and exploding drones to disable Israel’s border security architecture. The attackers who then stormed Israeli bases and communities carried maps, most likely fleshed out in part by Palestinian workers whom Hamas had recruited as spies, one regional security official said.

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The decision to launch the assault on Oct 7 was a secret closely guarded by a small number of Hamas leaders in Gaza who did not even inform those taking part until the last minute to prevent interception by regional intelligence services, according to Hamas and regional officials.

A key objective was to take as many Israeli soldiers captive as possible for use in a prisoner swop, according to two Arab officials whose governments talk to Hamas.

One regional security official said Hamas had expected that, once the attack began, Palestinians elsewhere would rise up against Israel, other Arab populations would explode against their governments, and the group’s regional allies, including Hezbollah, would join the fight.

Hamas’ own political leaders outside Gaza were surprised by the assault, according to several Arab and Western officials.

Now, some of those leaders are struggling to explain how the mass killing of civilians could be justified by political aims.

In interviews, Hamas officials tried to distance the group from the atrocities committed on Oct 7, repeatedly denying that their fighters had deliberately targeted civilians, despite extensive evidence that they did.

Still, Hamas leaders have praised the attack, saying it was necessary to reinvigorate the armed struggle against Israel.

“Hamas’ goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said Mr al-Hayya, the politburo member. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.

“This battle was not because we wanted fuel or labourers. It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle was to completely overthrow the situation.” NYTIMES

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