H
Enemies

Hamas

Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya — the Islamic Resistance Movement) is an Islamist terrorist organisation controlling the Gaza Strip since 2007, designated as a terrorist entity by the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and dozens of other democracies. Rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood and committed by charter to the annihilation of Israel, Hamas perpetrated the October 7, 2023 massacre — the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust.

#International terrorist organisations

Key Facts

  • •Founded in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, with organised violence against Israel pre-dating its official establishment by at least four years — Iran was funding weapons acquisition as early as 1983.
  • •Hamas's 1988 founding charter is an explicitly genocidal document. It calls for the destruction of Israel through violent jihad, cites the antisemitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fact, and paraphrases a hadith calling for the killing of Jews as a religious duty. A 2017 political document softened the language without altering these core objectives
  • •On October 7, 2023 — the Jewish Sabbath and Simchat Torah — Hamas launched the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust: over 1,200 Israelis killed, entire families burned alive, children beheaded, women mass-raped, and 251 hostages — including infants and Holocaust survivors — taken into Gaza
  • •Hamas has been designated a terrorist organisation by the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Japan, and numerous other democracies. Its military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has fired tens of thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian population centres.
  • •ran's IRGC Qods Force is Hamas's primary state sponsor, providing documented transfers of over $154 million to Hamas's military wing between 2014 and 2020 alone, plus weapons, precision-guidance technology, and operational training. Hamas commanders have publicly and repeatedly credited Iran with enabling their military capabilities
  • •Qatar hosted Hamas's political bureau in Doha for years, transferring an estimated $1.8 billion or more to the organisation while simultaneously presenting itself as a neutral mediator — a posture that provided Hamas's leadership with diplomatic cover and financial lifelines.
  • •Hamas seized the Gaza Strip in a violent armed coup against the Palestinian Authority in June 2007, executing Fatah rivals and establishing an Islamist theocratic administration that has systematically diverted international aid toward a 500-kilometre underground tunnel network used for terrorism.
  • •Hamas deliberately embeds its military infrastructure inside civilian buildings — hospitals, schools, mosques, and UN facilities — a documented war crime that cynically exploits Palestinian civilians as human shields while generating international condemnation of Israel's lawful defensive operations

Hamas — an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement — traces its roots to the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the transnational Islamist movement founded in Egypt in 1928. The organisation was formally constituted in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin at the outset of the First Intifada, though its genesis in organised violence substantially predates that moment. As Hamas's own political bureau chief Khaled Mashal has publicly acknowledged, a founding decision to pursue an armed jihad project was reached as early as 1983, when Yassin's network resolved to stockpile weapons and prepare military cells for operations against Israel. Iranian financing of weapons acquisition was already operative by that date. The formal naming of Hamas in 1987 was, in Mashal's own words, a rebranding of a single organisation that had operated under the names the Islamic Movement, the Islamic Front, and the Islamic Youth Center since the 1960s.

Hamas's foundational 1988 charter removed all ambiguity about its nature and goals. Saturated with antisemitic rhetoric drawn directly from Muslim Brotherhood ideology and citing the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion as genuine, the document explicitly rejected any negotiated settlement with Israel and mandated violent jihad — the total obliteration of the Jewish state — as a religious obligation incumbent upon every Muslim, male and female. Article 7 of the charter paraphrases a hadith calling for the killing of Jews as a precondition for the Day of Judgement. While Hamas released a revised political document in 2017 that superficially moderated some of its language, the organisation's own senior figures have been explicit in clarifying that this revision represented a tactical adaptation, not an ideological transformation. The destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamist theocracy across the entirety of historic Palestine remains Hamas's declared and operative objective.

Structure and Governance

Hamas operates through three overlapping institutional structures: a political bureau responsible for external diplomacy, fundraising, and international relations; a governmental administration that has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007; and a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, responsible for terrorism, rocket warfare, tunnel construction, and guerrilla operations. The political bureau was long headquartered in Doha, Qatar, whose government hosted Hamas leaders in luxury while simultaneously positioning itself as an indispensable mediator between Hamas and the West — a moral contradiction that has drawn persistent and deserved international criticism. Prominent figures in Hamas's leadership have included Khaled Mashal, longtime political chief; Ismail Haniyeh, political bureau head until his assassination in Tehran in July 2024; and Yahya Sinwar, who rose to overall leadership of the organisation following Haniyeh's death and was himself killed by Israeli forces in Rafah in October 2024. Following Sinwar's elimination, his brother Mohammed Sinwar assumed a prominent role in the Gaza command structure, continuing the organisation's operations amid the ongoing Israeli military campaign.

Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 through a violent armed coup against the Palestinian Authority's Fatah faction, summarily executing rival security personnel, throwing captives from rooftops, and consolidating a brutal authoritarian theocracy over Gaza's approximately two million residents. Since then, Hamas has governed the territory as an Islamist police state, enforcing religious codes, suppressing all political opposition, and systematically plundering international reconstruction aid to fund its military infrastructure — most notoriously a subterranean tunnel network spanning an estimated 500 kilometres, constructed at enormous human and financial cost beneath the territory's civilian population.

October 7, 2023 — The Massacre

The full measure of Hamas's character was revealed to the world on October 7, 2023, when the organisation launched a meticulously coordinated surprise assault on southern Israel during the Jewish Sabbath and the holy day of Simchat Torah. Thousands of Hamas terrorists breached Israel's security barrier using explosives and bulldozers and flooded into communities across the Gaza envelope. What followed was a day of industrialised barbarism without precedent in the modern history of the Middle East. More than 1,200 Israelis were massacred in the space of hours. Entire families were burned alive in their homes. Children were beheaded. Women and girls were gang-raped and mutilated. The elderly were executed in their beds. At the Nova music festival, terrorists swept through the crowd with automatic weapons, killing nearly 400 young people. Hamas took 251 hostages — among them infants, the severely disabled, Holocaust survivors, and foreign nationals — dragging them back to Gaza to serve as human shields and diplomatic leverage. Hamas's own body cameras and social media broadcasts documented the atrocities with evident pride; its operatives broadcast the killings in real time to cheering audiences. October 7 was the single deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust, and it was not an aberration — it was the fullest expression of everything Hamas was created to do.

Financing and State Sponsorship

Hamas's operational capacity is sustained by a sophisticated, multi-layered financing architecture that crosses state boundaries and exploits the international humanitarian system with calculated cynicism. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — specifically its Qods Force, long directed by the late General Qassem Soleimani until his killing in a US strike in January 2020 — has been Hamas's primary foreign patron for decades. Captured documents declassified by Israeli intelligence reveal that between July 2014 and July 2020 alone, Iran transferred $154 million directly to Hamas's military wing. Annual Iranian subsidies have been estimated at $100 million or more, encompassing not only cash but weapons, precision-guidance missile technology, drone systems, and the training of Hamas operatives inside Iran. Hamas's own senior commanders, including Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, have publicly and repeatedly expressed their gratitude to Iran for making their military capabilities possible.

Qatar's role has been more structurally ambiguous but no less consequential. Doha transferred an estimated $1.8 billion or more to Hamas over the years, including cash payments nominally designated for Gazan civilian salaries — a mechanism that, regardless of stated intent, directly subsidised Hamas's budget and freed resources for military expenditure. Qatar's hosting of the Hamas political bureau provided the organisation's leadership with a safe and comfortable operational base in a country protected by the presence of a major American military installation, a paradox that underscores the complexity and moral failure of the Gulf state's foreign policy posture. Hamas also finances itself through a predatory internal tax regime imposed on Gaza's civilian population, extracting revenues from businesses, smuggling tunnels, and consumer imports that analysts have estimated at up to $250 million per year. Layered atop all of this is the systematic diversion of international aid — from UNRWA, the World Bank, and dozens of NGOs — a practice so well-documented that multiple Western governments have suspended or conditioned their contributions to UN Gaza operations in response.

The BDS Movement and the United Nations

Hamas's strategy has never been confined to armed violence. Alongside its military campaign, the organisation actively cultivates and exploits the international soft-power infrastructure arrayed against Israel, two of the most important instruments of which are the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and compliant structures within the United Nations system. While BDS presents itself as a non-violent civil society campaign for Palestinian rights, its foundational demand for the "right of return" of all Palestinian descendants to Israel proper — a demographic mechanism that would dissolve the Jewish state from within — mirrors Hamas's political objective of eliminating Israel by means other than overt violence. Hamas has openly and enthusiastically welcomed BDS as a complementary and reinforcing front in its broader war against Israel's legitimacy.

Within the United Nations, Hamas has long benefited from the structural anti-Israel bias embedded in bodies such as the UN Human Rights Council, which has historically passed more resolutions condemning Israel than all other states combined, while largely ignoring the far graver human rights records of authoritarian regimes. UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, has served as a particularly troubling institution: its employees have been documented participating in the October 7 massacre, its schools have for decades provided Palestinian children with curricula that glorify martyrdom and deny Jewish historical and legal ties to the land, and its operational infrastructure in Gaza was found to be physically co-located with Hamas military facilities. The international community's persistent failure to hold Hamas accountable while subjecting Israel's defensive operations to relentless legal and rhetorical assault is not a neutral posture — it is an outcome that serves Hamas's strategic interests, and Hamas knows it.

Moral Clarity and the Path Forward

The moral distinction in the conflict with Hamas is not genuinely difficult to draw, however much ideological pressure is brought to bear to obscure it. Israel is a liberal democracy, a multi-ethnic and multi-faith society governed by the rule of law, with a free press, an independent judiciary, regular competitive elections, and a Arab Muslim minority with full civic rights, parliamentary representation, and access to Israeli courts. Hamas is a theocratic terror organisation whose founding document calls for genocide, whose leaders have lived in Qatari penthouse suites while Gaza's civilians were kept deliberately impoverished, and whose entire military strategy rests on the calculated decision to maximise Palestinian civilian casualties as a tool of information warfare against the Israeli public and the Western conscience. Any analytical or diplomatic framework that treats these two parties as morally equivalent is not a reflection of ethical seriousness or journalistic balance; it is, whether wittingly or not, a form of complicity with an organisation that murders children and films it.

The defeat of Hamas — military, political, and ideological — is not merely in Israel's national interest. It is a precondition for any honest prospect of Palestinian civilian welfare, regional stability, and the eventual possibility of a negotiated future. So long as Hamas governs Gaza, the Palestinian population will remain hostage to a movement that has explicitly chosen permanent war over any accommodation that allows a Jewish state to exist alongside it. The West's commitment to Israel's security and to the eradication of Hamas is therefore not merely an expression of alliance solidarity — it is an expression of the same foundational values that animated the defeat of fascism and the long struggle against Soviet totalitarianism: the conviction that genocidal ideologies must be confronted, not accommodated, and that democracy is worth defending.