How powerful is Hamas? 

IN THE EARLY hours of October 7th Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organisation that runs Gaza, launched more than 2,000 rockets towards Israel. Over a thousand Hamas fighters, some in motorised gliders, crossed the border between Israel and Gaza. They attacked civilians on the streets of small Israeli towns and in their homes. In the next 48 hours they killed more than 900 Israelis, a figure far surpassing the deaths in the previous 19 years of conflict, and took around 150 hostages. Israel was caught off guard partly because Hamas had never carried out such a large attack. The country’s defence establishment had assumed that in recent years Hamas had decided to refrain from wide-scale confrontation—and that its capacity to do so was limited. They were wrong. Just how powerful is Hamas?

Hamas was founded in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian cleric, during the first intifada, when thousands of Palestinians fought against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Yassin, who had joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s oldest Islamist movement, in Cairo, intended Hamas to be the Brotherhood’s political spin-off in Gaza. In its first charter, published in 1988, the “Islamic Resistance Movement”—“HMS” are its initials in Arabic—proclaimed its duty to liberate Palestine from Israel, which it declared illegitimate. It carried out its first attacks on Israeli military targets in 1989 and formally established a military wing in the early 1990s. It expressed its opposition to the Oslo accords, which were aimed at establishing peace between Israel and the Palestinians, by carrying out suicide-bombings within Israel.