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The Palestinian-American novelist and author Susan Abulhawa has twice traveled to Gaza since the siege began last fall and has been unapologetic in her defense of Palestinian armed resistance. She rejects the notion that Hamas is responsible for Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza since 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,” Abulhawa said. “Maybe that's true, but is it really a moral point to make? I don't think there has ever been so much scrutiny on an indigenous people, on how they're resisting their colonizers.” Abulhawa, whose novels include Against the Loveless World and Mornings in Jenin, told me, “As a Palestinian, I'm grateful for it. I think what they have done is something that no amount of negotiation was ever able to achieve. Nothing else we did was able to achieve what they did on October 7. And I should say, actually, it's not so much what they did, but it was Israel's reaction that led to a shift in the narrative because they're finally naked before the world.” Men in the Tunnels The past 76 years of Palestinian history have been a nonstop succession of Israeli atrocities and war crimes. Why did Hamas launch such a monumental action at this specific moment? The people who can best answer the question of what Hamas was thinking on October 7 are the men in the tunnels being hunted by Israeli forces in Gaza. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader on the ground, and Mohammed Deif, commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades, are widely understood to have decided how and when the course of history would be altered. In both Israeli and U.S. media, Sinwar is generally portrayed as a cartoonish villain hiding in his tunnel lair, dreaming up ways to murder and terrorize innocent Israelis as part of a warped, ISIS-style interpretation of Islam. He has been a U.S. State Department-designated terrorist since 2015. “The United States has to have a bogeyman, a Saddam Hussein figure, a Hitler figure,” said Khalidi. “I think Sinwar has been chosen.” Despite the sinister portrayals, Sinwar’s writings and media interviews indicate he is a complex thinker with clearly defined political objectives who believes in armed struggle as a means to an end. He gives the impression of a well-educated political militant, not a cult leader on a mass suicide crusade. “It's not this black image of Sinwar as a man with two horns living in the tunnels,” said Hamad, the Hamas official who worked directly with Sinwar for three years. “But in the time of war, he's very strong. This man is very strong. If he wants to fight, he fights seriously.” In 1988, just months after Hamas was founded, Sinwar was arrested by Israeli forces and sentenced to four life sentences on charges he had personally murdered alleged Palestinian collaborators. During his 22 years in an Israeli prison, he became fluent in Hebrew and studied the history of the Israeli state, its political culture, and its intelligence and military apparatus. He translated by hand the memoirs of several former heads of the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet. “When I entered [prison], it was 1988, the Cold War was still going on. And here [in Palestine], the Intifada. To spread the latest news, we printed fliers. I came out, and I found the internet,” Sinwar told an Italian journalist in 2018. “But to be honest, I never came out—I have only changed prisons. And despite it all, the old one was much better than this one. I had water, electricity. I had so many books. Gaza is much tougher.” Yahya Sinwar, the Gaza leader of Hamas, interviewed by Vice News in June 2021 In his past media interviews, Sinwar has spoken of Hamas as a social movement with a military wing and framed its political goals as part of the historic struggle to reestablish a unified state of Palestine. “I am the Gaza leader of Hamas, of something much more complex than a militia—a national liberation movement. And my main duty is to act in the interest of my people: to defend it and its right to freedom and independence,” he said. “All of those who still view us as an armed group, and nothing more, you don't have any idea of what Hamas really looks like.... You focus on resistance, on the means rather than the goal—which is a state based on democracy, pluralism, cooperation. A state that protects rights and freedom, where differences are faced through words, not through guns. Hamas is much more than its military operations.” Sinwar, unlike leaders of Al Qaeda or ISIS, has regularly invoked international law and UN resolutions, exhibiting a nuanced understanding of the history of negotiations with Israel mediated by the U.S. and other nations. “Let's be clear: having an armed resistance is our right, under international law. But we don't only have rockets. We have been using a variety of means of resistance,” he said in the 2018 interview. “We make the headlines only with blood. And not only here. No blood, no news. But the problem is not our resistance, it is their occupation. With no occupation, we wouldn't have rockets. We wouldn't have stones, Molotov cocktails, nothing. We would all have a normal life." “All of those who still view us as an armed group, and nothing more, you don't have any idea of what Hamas really looks like.” Throughout 2018 and 2019, Sinwar endorsed the large-scale nonviolent protests along the walls and fences of Gaza known as the Great March of Return. “We believe that if we have a way to potentially resolve the conflict without destruction, we’re O.K. with that,” Sinwar said at a rare news conference in 2018. “We would prefer to earn our rights by soft and peaceful means. But we understand that if we are not given those rights, we are entitled to earn them by resistance.” Israel responded to the protests with the regular use of lethal force, killing 223 people and wounding more than 8,000 others. Israeli snipers later boasted about shooting dozens of protesters in the knee during the weekly Friday demonstrations. For many Palestinians these events reinforced the view that Israel’s policies cannot be changed by words. In May 2021, following a series of Israeli attacks on Palestinian worshippers at Al Aqsa mosque—as well as threats of forced evictions of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem—Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched a barrage of rockets at Israeli cities, killing 12 civilians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with U.S. support, ordered heavy attacks against Gaza. More than 250 Palestinians were killed and thousands injured. After the end of Israel’s 11-day bombing campaign against Gaza, Sinwar spoke to VICE News and sought to frame the Palestinian struggle in a U.S. context, using recent cases of lethal police violence against African Americans. “The same type of racism that killed George Floyd is being used by [Israel] against the Palestinians in Jerusalem, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, and in the West Bank. And by the burning of our children. And against the Gaza Strip through siege, murder, and starvation.” Drop Site is brand new and we need our readers to spread the word. This post is public so feel free to share it. Share The Israeli attacks ended when President Joe Biden intervened and told Netanyahu to wrap it up. “Hey, man, we are out of runway here,” Biden told Netanyahu on a May 19 phone call. “It’s over.” Two days later, Israel agreed to a ceasefire. “The battle between us and the occupation who desecrated our land, displaced our people and are still murdering and displacing Palestinians—confiscating lands and attacking sacred places—is an open ended battle,” Sinwar said. When asked about the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas rockets, Sinwar became animated. “You can’t compare that to those who resist and defend themselves with weapons that look primitive in comparison. If we had the capabilities to launch precision missiles that targeted military targets, we wouldn’t have used the rockets that we did,” he shot back. “Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while we’re getting killed? For us to be slaughtered without making a noise? That’s impossible.” Two and a half years later, Sinwar authorized the start of Operation Al Aqsa Flood, the single deadliest attack inside Israel in history.