Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu vowed to put an end to Hamas, also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement. Netanyahu said this just hours after the unprecedented bloodbath perpetrated at the gates of Gaza, in Israel, on October 7. Hamas is an implacable enemy of Israel, whose existence it has never recognized, and took a considerable risk in launching this brutal attack. This Palestinian movement is considered unacceptable by Western diplomats and Arab regimes hostile to any form of political Islam. It has little support outside its Gaza base. And yet, throughout its history, it has demonstrated its resilience.
The former Palestinian branch of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood did not originally aspire to play its current role. Its founders were all trained in Egypt, including their leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic cleric. They were part of a regional movement to return to Islam after the defeat of Arab nationalism by Israel in 1967.
In Gaza, the Israeli occupier initially looked kindly on the emergence of pious or charitable associations that could compete with the nationalists grouped together in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), perceived as a mortal adversary that had to be eradicated. By the mid-1980s, however, the impact of the Iranian revolution in 1979 and competition from the Islamic Jihad, another Islamist formation in Gaza, had reoriented Sheikh Yassin towards the Palestinian national cause. This reorientation was in the name of the dogma that made the former Mandatory Palestine a "waqf," an inalienable "Muslim asset."
Formed out of terrorism in Lebanon
Hamas was officially founded on December 9, 1987, two days after the start of the first Intifada ("uprising"). The Intifada broke out in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza and caught both Hamas and the Palestinian national movement in exile by surprise. Gaza's conservatism and the refugees' influence (representing two-thirds of the population) explain the movement's rapid development. It was less hindered than elsewhere by Palestinian tribal solidarity attached to a specific geographical area.
With an extreme charter tinged with anti-Semitism (like the PLO when it was created), Hamas turned to armed action. Repression was severe. Sheikh Yassin, the movement's spiritual guide, was arrested and imprisoned in Israel in 1989. Then 400 of its activists were banished to Lebanon in 1992. There, they established contacts with radical Lebanese groups, who converted them to the use of terrorism. Their influence was felt at the start of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, following the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993. These accords led to Yasser Arafat's return, a year later, to Palestinian soil. Arafat was the undisputed leader of the Palestinian national movement.
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