“We will leave them for dead.” It was to Hamas that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed this promise of annihilation. On Saturday October 7 in the early morning, the terrorist group attacked Israeli territory by surprise. According to the latest count, more than 700 people have been killed and more than 2,000 injured on Israeli territory. What do we know about this organization, responsible for what many analysts call “Israel’s September 11”?
At the end of the 1960s, what would become Hamas was still only the Palestinian subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Gaza Strip. The term “hamas” is the Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Its founders – including the main Sheikh Ahmed Yassin – were all trained in Egypt. They created a network of mosques, charities and schools in Gaza to spread political Islam for two decades. They thus compete with the hegemony of the nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), considered by Israel as the enemy to be defeated. Tel Aviv views them almost with kindness.
“Hamas was only founded in 1987 following the start of the first Intifada,” explains Jean-Charles Brisard, president of the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism. Its charter states that “the land of Palestine is an Islamic land.” It advocates the destruction of the State of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian Islamic state. “Hamas has a few hundred people, several thousand operational personnel and tens of thousands of sympathizers in Gaza.”
Hamas is currently considered a terrorist organization by France, the European Union and the United States, but also by Canada and Japan. Other nations, such as Great Britain, Australia or Egypt, consider only the armed wing to be a terrorist organization. China, Arab-Muslim countries and even Norway do not consider it as such.
Hamas has a political branch and a military branch. The armed wing has been led by Mohammed Deïf since 2002, following the death of its previous leader, Salah Shehadeh. Born in the Gaza Strip in 1965, Deïf joined the ranks of the organization since its creation in 1987. The man is now the number 1 target for Israel. In August 2014, the IDF army had already tried to eliminate it with an airstrike. His wife and daughter had been killed. But he escaped, although seriously injured. He had both legs and an arm amputated and had lost the use of one eye.
The political office has been headed since 2017 by Ismaïl Haniyeh, 60 years old. From 1993, he became the confidant of the spiritual leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yassine, who died in March 2004 in an Israeli strike which targeted him personally. He was one of the leaders of Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2005 and 2006. In the process, he became Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority between February 2006 and June 2014, before taking office. head of the Hamas political bureau. “We are on the verge of a great victory,” he said Saturday evening in a speech broadcast by Al-Aqsa TV, the television channel of the terrorist organization.
Chain of command, equipment, regiments, battalions… these brigades have everything of a small army. The forces of the Ezzedin al-Qassam brigades were estimated at 20,000 fighters, or six brigades bringing together 30 battalions. The number of these “soldiers” could double in the event of mobilization.
“The operation launched on Saturday implements terrorist tactics,” recalls David Rigoulet-Roze, researcher at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS). “But it also takes the form of a global military operation requiring a very high level of preparation: they attacked on land, at sea and in the air, which requires planning over several months. It’s anything but improvisation.”
The al-Qassam brigades also have a special unit, the Nuhba, which actively took part in Saturday’s assault. These elite fighters were specially trained to infiltrate Israeli territory by sea, by air (notably using motorized gliders) and by land, via cross-border tunnels. They are trained to carry out raids to kidnap people or kill them.
“They are accustomed to taking hostages,” underlines Jean-Charles Brisard. This weekend, the terrorist organization took “more than 100 prisoners,” according to a count published Sunday by the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO). “This time, their massive nature could allow Hamas to obtain mass releases or significant financial and political compensation.”
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Hamas’s objectives reflect its structure: both political and terrorist. On the latter level, the organization’s objective is very clear: to strike Israel until its total destruction.
On the political level, Hamas has established itself as the dominant political force in the Gaza Strip, constantly playing the card of radical one-upmanship against Fatah, the party of Yasser Arafat, accused of ineffectiveness and incompetence. At the beginning of the 2000s, Hamas took advantage of the weakening of the Palestinian Authority, targeted by Israel since the second Intifada in 2000. Despite the repeated assassinations against its leaders (the assassinations of Ahmed Yassine and Abdel Aziz Al-Rantissi in Gaza in 2004 by Israel are the hardest blows for the movement), the Hamas hydra is constantly reconstituting itself.
The organization finally took power after its victory in the municipal elections (December 2004) and then the legislative elections (January 2006). It was at this time that Ismaïl Haniyeh took the head of an Islamist government. Little by little, Fatah is ousted. Relying on the population of Gaza favorable to violence, Hamas is gradually establishing itself as the only real power in this territory, to the detriment of the Palestinian Authority.
From then on, Hamas’s terrorist strategy evolved. In 2006, the organization announced the end of suicide attacks and replaced them with rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021… since then, wars with Israel have continued, without the Palestinian Authority really having the means to intervene.
On the geostrategic level, a guideline: try to isolate Israel and unite all the countries in the region against it, relying, again, on public opinions that are often more radical than their governments. The series of suicide attacks which began in 1993 aimed to halt the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, after the signing of the Oslo Accords. After the repression carried out by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority against Hamas, an attempt at rapprochement with the movement failed, further undermined by the continuation of Jewish colonization in the West Bank.
In the same way, the barbarity unleashed by Hamas since Saturday is not without geopolitical ulterior motives. The organization hopes to derail the rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia by putting pressure on Riyadh, which sees Saudi public opinion taking up the cause of Hamas.
“This time, I am not sure that it is a good calculation, David Rigoulet-Roze nuance however, some of these normalizations are already effective – Bahrain for example – and Mohammed ben Salman had said that the normalization of the relationship with Israel would not be taken hostage by the Palestinian cause. Above all, this operation is almost an Iranian destabilization program in the region, which risks worrying Saudi Arabia and perhaps pushing it even further towards Tel Aviv, in order to benefit from Israeli military power, even if it was shaken by the Hamas offensive.”
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Before its founding as such in 1987, Hamas was mainly financed by Saudi Arabia and Syria. Israel was not very concerned about this, as the organization was not yet developing armed actions. Today, Hamas is mainly supported by Qatar and Iran.
Hence a proximity between Hamas and Hezbollah, or “Party of God”. Founded in 1982 following the conflict between Israel and South Lebanon, Hezbollah is both a party and a Lebanese Islamist paramilitary group, of Shiite faith, based in Lebanon. Led by Hassan Nasrallah, the organization has Ayatollah Khomeini as its spiritual father and political model. Like Hamas, Hezbollah is supported without reservation by Iran, which sponsors organizations favorable to the destruction of Israel.
Did Lebanese Hezbollah try to open a second front, in support of its Hamas “brothers”? On Monday, Israel indicated that in addition to the attack from Gaza launched on Saturday, several armed Hezbollah commandos had infiltrated their territory through southern Lebanon. Tel Aviv bombed a border village and claimed to have killed “a number of suspected activists”. The organization had fired on Israeli positions the day before, but denied any involvement in the infiltration.
“Hamas is mainly supported by Qatar on the financial level and by Iran on the material level, summarizes Jean-Charles Brisard, even if it is also financed by taxes imposed at the borders and taxes on goods.”
