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Members of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. Photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP via Getty The past nine months of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza have spurred an unprecedented global awakening to the plight of the Palestinian people. At no point in the 76 years since the formation of the state of Israel and the unleashing of the Nakba has there been such sustained and open anger at Israel and such widespread solidarity with the Palestinians. The massive demonstrations in cities across the globe, the severing of diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv, the recalling of ambassadors, rulings from world courts against Israel, and mounting demands for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state—none of this would have taken place without the impetus of Hamas’s armed insurrection on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent war of annihilation in Gaza. This reality poses uncomfortable but ineluctable questions. From Hamas’s perspective, was Operation Al Aqsa Flood a successful operation? Hamas undoubtedly knew that Israeli retaliation would include the killing of many Palestinian civilians, even if the horrific scale of Israel’s assault was unforeseen. Was October 7, then, a collective martyrdom operation launched without the consent of 2.3 million Palestinians? And, for the many people who proclaim their support for the Palestinian cause but reflexively condemn the violence of the October 7 attacks, how can they realistically separate the two? Drop Site conducted a series of interviews with senior Hamas officials alongside a comprehensive review of its statements and those of its leaders. I interviewed a variety of Hamas sources on background for this story and two—Basem Naim and Ghazi Hamad—agreed to speak on the record. I also spoke to a range of knowledgeable Palestinians, Israelis, and international sources in an effort to understand the tactical and political aims of the October 7 attacks. Some people will inevitably criticize the choice to interview and publish Hamas officials’ answers to these questions as propaganda. I believe it is essential that the public understand the perspectives of the individuals and groups who initiated the attack that spurred Israel’s genocidal war—an argument that is seldom permitted outside of simple soundbytes. Hamas leaders cast their operations on October 7 as a righteous rebellion against an occupation force that has waged a military, political, and economic war of collective punishment against the people of Gaza. “They have left us no choice other than to take the decision in our hands and to fight back,” said Dr. Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau and a former government minister in Gaza. “October 7, for me, is an act of defense, maybe the last chance for Palestinians to defend themselves.” Naim, a medical doctor, is a member of the inner circle surrounding former Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, the chief political leader of Hamas, who is based in Doha, Qatar. In the aftermath of October 7, Naim has served as one of the few Hamas officials authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the movement. In an interview, Naim offered an unapologetic defense of the October 7 attacks against Israel and said that Hamas was acting out of existential necessity in the face of sustained diplomatic and military assaults not only on Palestinians in Gaza, but also the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. “The people in Gaza, they had one of two choices: Either to die because of siege and malnutrition and hunger and lacking of medicine and lacking of treatment abroad, or to die by a rocket. We have no other choice,” he said. “If we have to choose, why choose to be the good victims, the peaceful victims? If we have to die, we have to die in dignity. Standing, fighting, fighting back, and standing as dignified martyrs.” Polls suggest that Palestinian support for Hamas remains strong. Prior to the October 7 attacks, opinion polling in Gaza and the West Bank indicated that support for Hamas was on the decline, with one poll finding that just 23 percent of respondents expressed significant support for Hamas and more than half registering negative views. “The October 7 war reversed that trend leading to a great rise in Hamas’s popularity,” Arab Barometer reported. “If we have to choose, why choose to be the good victims, the peaceful victims? If we have to die, we have to die in dignity.” A more recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, whose findings were released in mid-June, found that two-thirds of the Gaza population continued to express support for the October 7 attack on Israel, with more than 80 percent asserting that it put Palestine at the center of global attention. More than half of Gaza residents polled indicated that they hoped Hamas would return to power after the war. “They lost confidence in peace with Israel. People believe that the only way is now to fight against Israel, to struggle against Israel,” said Ghazi Hamad, the former Hamas deputy foreign minister and a longstanding member of its political bureau, in an interview. “We put the Palestinian cause on the table. I think that we have a new page of history.” “Israel has now spent nine months [fighting in Gaza]—nine months. This is [a] small area. No mountains, no valleys. It is a very small, besieged area—against Hamas’s 20,000 [fighters],” Hamad continued. “They bring all the military power, supported by the United States. But I think now they failed. They failed.” Dr. Yara Hawari, the co-director of Al-Shabaka, an independent Palestinian think tank, said that assessing the role Hamas’s October 7 attacks played in the growing global movement to support Palestinians raises complex moral questions. “If the Israeli regime hadn't embarked on a genocide in Gaza, would we be facing this kind of level of solidarity? I think it's a difficult thing to answer. It's also an uncomfortable one because I don't think Palestinians anywhere should pay in blood for the solidarity of people around the world and certainly not in over 40,000 people killed,” she told me. “We have surpassed the numbers of the Nakba by at least three times in terms of those killed. And an entire place has been destroyed. Gaza doesn't exist anymore. It's been destroyed completely. So I think that it's certainly been a very revealing moment,” said Hawari, who is based in Ramallah. “Had October 7 not happened, would that have been revealed to people around the world or not? It’s an uncomfortable thing to think about for sure.” Hamas has emphasized that its aim on October 7 was to shatter the status quo and compel the U.S. and other nations to address the plight of the Palestinians. On this front, informed analysts say, they succeeded. “On October 6, Palestine had disappeared from the regional agenda, from the international agenda. Israel was dealing unilaterally with the Palestinians without generating any attention or any criticism,” said Mouin Rabbani, a former UN official who worked as a special advisor on Israel-Palestine for the International Crisis Group. “The attacks of Hamas on October 7 and their aftermath played a crucial role, but I think just as much credit, if you will, goes to Israel, if not more so,” he added. “If Israel had responded in the way that it did in [previous assaults on Gaza] in 2008, 2014, 2021, it would have been a story for a number of weeks, there would have been a lot of hand wringing, and that would have been the end of it.” “It's not only the actions of the colonized, but also the reaction of the colonizer that has created the current political reality, the current political moment,” Rabbani said. U.S. and Israeli officials often respond to questions about the staggering death toll in Gaza or the mass killing of women and children over the past 9 months by casting blame solely on Hamas. They have treated the events of October 7 as if they granted Israel an open-ended license to kill on an industrial scale. “None of the suffering would have happened if Hamas hadn’t done what it did on October 7,” is a sentiment Secretary of State Antony Blinken is fond of repeating. That is clearly untrue. But does multi-decade brutality of the Israeli occupation absolve Hamas of all responsibility for the consequences of its actions on October 7? “It's kind of like telling the folks in the Warsaw uprising that you should have known that the German military was going to respond the way they did and you are going to be responsible for the deaths of other residents in the Warsaw ghetto.” “These deaths should be on the conscience of the Israeli leaders who decided to kill all these people,” said Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and widely viewed as the leading U.S. historian of Palestine. “But they also to some extent should be on the consciences of the people who organized [the October 7] operation. They should have known, and had to have known that Israel would inflict devastating revenge not just on them but mainly on the civilian population. Do you credit them for this?” Khalidi added. “The end result may be the permanent occupation, immiseration, and perhaps even expulsion of the population of Gaza, in which case I don't think anybody would want to credit whoever organized this operation.”