This claim is one of the most persistently recycled distortions in anti-Israel propaganda, and it collapses under even minimal scrutiny. Hamas was not created by Israel. It emerged from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamist organization founded in 1928, and was formally established in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmad Yassin at the outset of the First Intifada. Its founding ideology, organizational lineage, and financial backing were entirely independent of the Israeli state. Attributing Israel with deliberate "creation" of Hamas is not only historically inaccurate — it inverts the documented record.

The Facts: Hamas Origins and Funding

The Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood had been active in Gaza since the 1960s. Yassin's organization was plotting armed attacks as early as 1983 — four years before Hamas was formally declared — when it held an internal meeting to launch what Khaled Mishal himself described as "the Palestinian Islamic project." Mishal has acknowledged that even in 1983, Iran was funding Yassin's activities, stating openly that "It is no secret that the 1983 arms deal was funded from abroad; Hamas was still forming." This directly undermines the claim that Israel was the financial patron of the nascent organization.

Israel's actual posture toward Yassin's movement in the early 1980s was not sponsorship but active suppression. Israeli authorities arrested Yassin in 1984 after discovering a weapons cache in Gaza. An Israeli military court imprisoned members of his network for illegal possession of submachine guns, grenades, rifles, and pistols, with Israeli military spokespeople explicitly describing them as "the nucleus of religious anti-Israel activity in Gaza." This arrest record is irreconcilable with any claim of deliberate Israeli creation or funding.

• Hamas was legally registered in 1978 as a generic Islamic Association — not as a militant organization — and its primary early funding came from Jordan and Saudi Arabia, not Israel.
• Iran was funding Yassin's proto-Hamas military cells as early as 1983, according to Hamas co-founder Khaled Mishal's own account.
• Israel arrested Yassin in 1984 for stockpiling weapons for what an Israeli court described as a planned "holy war" — hardly the behavior of a patron protecting its creation.
• Hamas published its founding charter in August 1988, explicitly calling for the destruction of Israel through violent jihad — a document no Israeli sponsor would have logically encouraged.
• Even the pro-Palestinian outlet Electronic Intifada published a detailed investigation in April 2026 concluding that the "Israel created Hamas" claim is a myth unsupported by the historical record.

Historical Context: Why This Myth Persists

The grain of truth exploited by this myth is a documented period of Israeli strategic miscalculation, not deliberate creation. In the early years of Hamas's social-welfare phase, some Israeli officials believed that the rise of Islamist civil organizations might serve as a passive counterweight to the PLO's secular nationalism — and Israel did not aggressively suppress Hamas's charitable activities the way it targeted PLO infrastructure. Israel also issued a routine permit to the Islamic Center in Gaza, which was later temporarily rescinded. This passive tolerance has been grotesquely inflated into a claim of active creation and funding.

Scholars, including those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, distinguish clearly between Israel's strategic blunder of non-interference and the accusation of deliberate sponsorship. As the Jewish Virtual Library summarizes, "Israel's assistance was more passive than active; that is, it did not interfere with Hamas activities or prevent funds from flowing into the organization from abroad." This is a far cry from Israel "deliberately creating and funding" Hamas. Conflating negligence or miscalculation with intentional creation is a rhetorical sleight of hand designed to erase Hamas's independent ideological agency and shift moral responsibility for its atrocities.

It is also worth noting the ideological genealogy Hamas proudly claims for itself. Hamas's 1988 founding charter explicitly situates the organization within the global Muslim Brotherhood network and endorses the ideology of Abdullah Azzam, al-Qaeda's chief ideological patron. Hamas has never described itself as an Israeli creation — quite the opposite. Its leaders celebrate their Brotherhood roots and their Iranian and Qatari financial patrons. Stripping Hamas of its own ideological identity to blame Israel for its existence is both factually wrong and deeply patronizing to Palestinian agency.

Conclusion: A Dangerous Myth That Shields Terrorists from Accountability

The claim that Israel deliberately created Hamas is a disinformation narrative that serves a clear political purpose: to transfer moral responsibility for Hamas's decades of terrorism — suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and the October 7, 2023 massacre of over 1,200 Israeli civilians — from the organization and its state sponsors onto Israel itself. This inversion of accountability is not merely wrong; it is morally corrosive. It shields a designated terrorist organization from scrutiny, launders Iranian and Qatari sponsorship of jihadist violence, and denies the foundational reality that Hamas is an ideologically driven Islamist movement with its own organizational history, charter, and leadership.

The documented facts are clear: Hamas grew from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, was armed with Iranian money before its official founding, was suppressed — not nurtured — by Israel in its early militant phase, and has waged unrelenting terror against Israeli civilians for decades on the basis of an explicit genocidal charter. Accepting the myth that Israel created Hamas requires ignoring all of this evidence. Responsible journalism and honest historical analysis demand its rejection.