Hamas

"Terrorists"  Hamas   (Enemy image, Political party, Army, Freedom fighters)
Formation	1987
Founder	Ahmed Yassin Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi
Headquarters	Gaza, Palestinian territories Doha, Qatar (residence of Hamas chairman)
Interest of	Magnus Ranstorp
"Terrorists" according to the West, largely founded, financed and brought to power by Israel, Hamas has led Palestine into becoming an enemy image to the western world since 2006.

“To a certain degree, the Islamist Organisation whose militant wing has rained rockets on Israel [Hamas] has the Jewish state to thank for its existence.”
Ishaan Tharoor (30 July 2014) 

Ḥarakah al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah or the Islamic Resistance Movement better known as Hamas, is a Palestinian Islamic organisation with several integrated militant divisions, NGOs and political entities. It won the 2006 Palestinian legislative election and became the de facto governing authority of Gaza after 2007, gaining a slight majority in the parliament of the Palestinian National Authority. It was largely created and financed by Mossad-elements in the 1990s, socially engineering a support for Zionist activists in Israel by starting bombing attacks against Jews on Israeli soil and acting as "extremist voice of the people" of Gaza. The rise of Hamas during the 2000s "War on Terror" caused a rise in support of the Western world in the 2000s for Israeli Zionists, despite numerous Mossad-confessions Hamas thanks its existence to the Mossad.

Origins

Blowback: How Israel Helped Create Hamas - The Intercept

Israel and Hamas have engaged in several wars of varying intensity. Hamas's military wing has launched attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers, often describing them as retaliations, in particular for assassinations of the upper echelon of their leadership. Tactics have included suicide bombings and rocket attacks. Human Rights Watch condemned all attacks on civilian targets.

Creation

Full article: Mossad

The Islamic Resistance Movement is largely a creation of the Israeli deep state. For years, Israel encouraged Gaza’s Islamists as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, helping to turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups, which has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group.

Parliament

In the January 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, Hamas won a majority in the PNA Parliament, defeating the PLO-affiliated Fatah party. After the elections, the Quartet (the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States) made future foreign assistance to the PNA conditional upon the PNA's commitment to non violence, recognition of the state of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements. Hamas rejected those conditions.

Since the early 1990s, the group has frequently stated that it would accept a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, paid reparations, allowed free elections in the territories and gave Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes destroyed by Israeli settlers. In the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, Hamas won a majority in the PNA Parliament, and the western world stopped its aid to Hamas, but not Palestine.

"Inadvertent" support from the Israeli Deep state

"Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas," Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. "This is part of our strategy"

The support for Hamas began under Prime Minister Menahem Begin, Likud Prime Minister of from 1977 to 1983, and Yitzhak Shamir, also Likud, from 1983 to 1985, then from 1986 to 1992. Both were highly experienced in terrorist methods from the fight against the British. Under Begin and later Shamir, Israel created, funded and controlled the "Village Leagues," a system of local councils managed by Palestinians who were hand-picked by Israel to run local city and village administrations. The plan was devised by Ariel Sharon, who was Israel's Defence Minister. Funding was allowed to flow in from the Gulf states. The notion of only "original support" to a simple "Islamic organisation" that later "turned against its maker", makes it possible to minimise the full extent of covert Israeli support.

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, later told the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief David K. Shipler that he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both leftist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, and especially from Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as "a creature of Israel"), which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists. "The Israeli government gave me a budget" the retired brigadier general said, "and the military government gives to the mosques".

Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009 that "Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation," Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. "I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face," he wrote.

Founders and Spies

Full article: Mosab Hassan Yousef

One of the most vital spies in the organization early on among others is the son of co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, Mosab Hassan Youcef. Mosab converted to Christianity in 1998 after denouncing Islam and the violence people engaged in under the name of it, in particular the torture of Muslim collaborators in Palestinian prisons. Mosab developed a hate for Islam after seeing how Hamas used the lives of suffering civilians and children to achieve its goals and turned Israeli spy for Shin Bet after being arrested by them.

Shin Bet called Mosab responsible for preventing dozens of Palestinian suicide attacks and prevent the assassinations of many Israelis, exposing numerous Hamas cells, and assisted Israelis arresting Palestinian militants. Mosab even helped the intelligence agency arrest his father.

The Hamas-Likud objective alliance

During the 1990s Suicide bombings from Hamas helped to undermine the policies of the Israeli Labor Party and have at least twice helped to elect Likud candidates to the office of Prime Minister. Every time Israeli and Palestinian negotiators appeared ready to take a major step toward achieving peace, a Hamas suicide bombing scuttled the peace process and pushed the two sides apart. After the return to power of Labor in 1992, negotiations resumed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat. The initiative made Likud increase the pressure on Arafat through Hamas. On the political front, Likud officials met with political prisoners from the ranks of Hamas to convince them of the need to politically short-circuit the peace process. Likud then pushed for the release of Palestinian prisoners so that they organise a political opposition to Arafat.

Suicide attacks and the destruction of the peace process

The first suicide attack attributed to Hamas occurred in April 1994, in response to a deadly massacre by Baruch Goldstein, a fanatical Israeli settler against Muslims praying at the Hebron mosque. As a result, in January 1995, Bill Clinton banned any negotiations with the organisation because of its power to cause trouble in the context of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, on November 4, 1995 by the Israeli deep state destroyed half of the hopes for a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas, through a major wave of attacks, destroyed the Palestinian half. In February and March 1996, a series of suicide bombings undermined the authority of the interim labor Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, who lost the elections shortly after to Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, once at the head of the government, has Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin released from Israeli captivity in 1997, under pretext of a prisoner exchange. This cleverly staged release is followed, as planned, by a new wave of attacks, which allowed the Israeli prime minister to obtain the support of his public opinion to suspend the peace process and go back on the agreements signed by Yitzhak Rabin.

As soon as Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister in March 2001, he used a wave of Hamas suicide bombings as the pretext to trigger a military operation: on this occasion, the IDF took control of areas normally under Palestinian sovereignty and ravaged Yasser Arafat's government infrastructure. In March 2002, a particularly deadly attack in a hotel in Netanya (30 dead, 150 injured), still attributed to Hamas, triggers the operation "Ramparts" by the IDF, which commits a massacre in the Jenin refugee camp and besieged the Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat, in Ramallah. The number of suicide attacks continued until the end of Sharon's government in 2006; allowing it to do everything possible to "destroy, not only Arafat, but all hope of a Palestinian state."

Executive Intelligence Review wrote in 2001 that "To this day, Sharon is the "Godfather of Hamas". This is privately acknowledged by many American, European, and Russian intelligence professionals. Haven’t you marveled that, every time American pressure has come down on Sharon, to end the colonial occupation, Hamas bombers have bailed out the Israeli Prime Minister with an act of horrific terrorism? This is not to say that every member of Hamas is an Israeli spy, although US intelligence has ample evidence that some of Hamas' commanders are witting of their collaboration with Sharon. Rather, the cumulative effect of irregular warfare shock trauma becomes a self-feeding phenomenon, in which a handful of witting players can keep the population trapped."

Funding

In February 2020, Haaretz wrote how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had sent Mossad Chief Yossi Cohen and the Israeli military's chief of Southern Command Herzl Halevi to Qatar to ensure it continues its financial aid policy to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, by "begg[ing] "the Qataris to keep funneling money into Hamas." The visit came to light in an interview with former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman who said "both the Egyptians and the Qataris are angry with Hamas, and they were going to cut all ties with them. All of a sudden Netanyahu shows up as a Hamas advocate, pressuring Egypt and the Qataris to continue" with the financial support, adding that Netanyahu's policy is tantamount to "surrender to terrorism." Cohen and Halevi stayed in Doha for less than 24 hours, meeting with the Qatari envoy to the Gaza Strip Mohammed al-Emadi and Qatari national security advisor Mohammed Bin Ahmed al-Misnad."

Hamas banned in UK

"Terrorists" says the West, "freedom fighters" – Global South

On 19 November 2021, Home Secretary Priti Patel laid before Parliament an order to outlaw the militant Islamist terrorist movement Hamas in its entirety from the UK.

Hamas is an organisation which calls for the establishment of a Islamic Palestinian state under Sharia law and has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel. It has long been involved in significant terrorist violence.

The organisation’s military wing is already banned in the UK but following a new assessment the Home Secretary has concluded it should be proscribed in its entirety. This action will support efforts to protect the British public and the international community in the global fight against terrorism. Hamas is already listed in its entirety by the United States and European Union.

Proscription makes it a criminal offence to be a member of, or invite support for the group, with those found guilty facing up to 14 years in prison.

The proscription order laid before Parliament on 19 November will now be debated and, subject to approval, will come into force on 26 November 2021.

It was debated in Parliament before becoming statute on 26 November 2021.

October 7th Hamas attacks

GRAPHIC RAW FOOTAGE: Massacre Across Israel From the Eyes of Hamas - Footage of CCTV

In October 2023, during Operation Al Aqsa Flood, Hamas killed some 1,200 people and seized some 240 hostages in a raid on Israeli settler towns. At least 3,000 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip prompting Israel's government to declare a state of emergency. Palestinian militants who infiltrated Israel made their way into several kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip as well as the city of Siderot.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Israel "is at war" with Hamas in a national address following the the attacks, and the IDF began an aerial bombardment of Gaza. Speaking on 13 October 2023, Netanyahu said:

“These are not merely acts of war, these are war crimes. What Hamas has done is to perpetrate the worst war crimes since the Holocaust: the burning of people alive, cramming young people into a room, bringing spare tyres from cars so there is more flames, burning them alive. This is the Holocaust method.

“Shooting babies, bound children, shooting them in the face, killing children in front of their parents, killing parents in front of their children, the rape and murder of women, the kidnapping of old people, young people, families, carrying them away. You saw the picture of that little boy. Pushed. Beaten. It reminds us of the pictures from the worst periods of the Holocaust.

“If Hamas could have its way, it would do to us exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews—they would kill every last one of us, they would mutilate our bodies, they would behead us, and that’s what they did. And therefore, it’s important to understand that Hamas perpetrated the worst war crimes since World War II."

$1 million offered by Israel

Hamas leaders wanted by Israel for $1 million

In December 2023, the Israeli military airdropped leaflets in Gaza offering monetary rewards totalling $1 million for information on the whereabouts of senior Hamas leaders.

The leaflets offer

• $400,000 for information on Yahyah Sinwar, who leads the group in Gaza;

• $300,000 for information on his brother, Muhammed Sinwar, who commands the Hamas's southern brigade;

• $200,000 for information on Rafa’a Salameh, the commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis battalion; and,

• $100,000 for information on Muhammad Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, who has survived repeated assassination attempts.

 

Events carried out

Event	Location	Description
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War	Gaza Israel Iraq Egypt Syria Palestine Lebanon Indian Ocean Golan Heights	Hamas attack on dozens of illegal Israeli settlements in Southern Israel provoking mass retaliatory killings by Israel. Corporate media call it the Israeli "9-11", while critics of Israel refer to "10-7" as a staged, military operation in order to manufacture consent for a disproportionate response.
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/October 7	Gaza Israel Palestine Lebanon Golan Heights	Hamas attacks Israeli settlements in Southern Israel, mass raping and abducting, which get called an Israeli "9-11" by CCM. The NYT and Al Jazeera claimed the Israeli government knew of the impending attack, ignored warnings, shot some of their own civilians, made up several stories and used the resulting increased death toll to go on a revenge killing spree in the 2023 Israeli invasion of Gaza.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War	“There had already been a significant increase in violence by Israeli settlers this year, even before the Hamas attack, according to UN data, with more than 100 incidents reported each month and about 400 people driven from their land between January and August. Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem told the BBC that since the attack, it had documented "a concerted and organised effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank". Partial data compiled by B'Tselem, covering the first six days after the Hamas attack, recorded at least 46 separate incidents in which it said settlers threatened, physically attacked or damaged the property of Palestinians in the West Bank. "A lot of shepherding families and communities have fled because they were threatened in the past week by settlers," said Roy Yellin, a spokesman for B'Tselem. "Settlers have been giving residents a deadline to leave and telling them if they don't they will be harmed. And some villages have been totally emptied out."”	BBC Joel Gunter	2023
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/Israeli invasion of Gaza	“When I was first asked to work there [at Shifa], I was told there was a part of the hospital I was not to go near, and if I did, I’d be in danger of being shot. No, but implicit was that it was being used for non-medical purposes. I stayed away, but I saw a few dodgy-looking non-medical characters going in and out all the time. It was a ward leading to a basement. As I said, I didn’t go there; so I behaved myself. I was welcome everywhere else, and as I say the doctors and nurses there were very welcoming and very kind and the hushed tones under which this was said was very consistent with all the other hushed tones with which Hamas was discussed. You know people were genuinely fearful. I cannot emphasise too much, the air of collective paranoia that existed there. If hospital staff were 10 per cent frightened of possible Israeli airstrikes, they were 90 per cent frightened of being persecuted by Hamas.’”	Daily Mail Nick Pisa	2023
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/Israeli invasion of Gaza	“UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said after a key Hamas operations center was discovered right beneath his headquarters that he had no idea. That's absurd. There was a very advanced tunnel with electrical cables, which supplied a Hamas server center with power. That came directly from UNRWA's electricity grid. Moreover, a few years ago, UNRWA staff noticed that an entire parking lot above it was starting to subside. So what do you mean, we couldn't have known anything?”	Hillel Neuer	2024
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/October 7	“Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan. Hamas had "decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope," analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division. But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet. On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing. The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times. The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out. The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off. “In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.”	Ronen Bergman Adam Goldman	2023
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/October 7	“Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of war intentions on the part of Hamas. On the contrary, the assessment of the entire security echelon, including the head of military intelligence and the head of Shin Bet, was that Hamas was deterred and was seeking an arrangement".”	Benjamin Netanyahu	October 2023
George Carlin	“Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It's as simple as that. The CIA doesn't kill anybody anymore, they neutralize people, or they depopulate the area. The government doesn't lie, it engages in disinformation. The Pentagon actually measures nuclear radiation in something they call sunshine units. Israeli murderers are called commandos, Arab commandos are called terrorists. Contra killers are called freedom fighters. Well, if crime fighters fight crime, and firefighters fight fires, what do freedom fighters fight?”	George Carlin
Palestine	“Israel first encountered Islamists that would later form Hamas in Gaza in the 1970s. Back then they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. Israel realised that it could use the organisation to help splinter Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip and hurt the PLO which dominated Palestinian politics. So Israel helped and even gave funds to Hamas in the 1980s so it could establish itself in Gaza. The Israeli government officially recognised the precursor to Hamas, called "Mujama Al-Islamiya" back then, registered the group as a charity and even supported it with funds to help it spread its influence in Gaza and in the occupied Palestinian territories. At the time, Israel's main enemy was the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah party, which formed the heart of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). Fatah was secular and cast in the mould of other revolutionary, leftist guerrilla movements waging insurgencies elsewhere in the world during the Cold War. Israel's military-led administration in Gaza in the 1980's looked favourably on Hamas, which set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank. Documents from the 1980's show that Israel enabled Hamas to act in the first Intifada so as to enable it to strengthen, thus to cause a splitting of the Palestinian nation – in order to weaken the PLO which was responsible for the Intifada. “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.” says retired Israeli official Avner Cohen, a former Israeli official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades in an interview to the Wall Street Journal. Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the PLO and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”). General Segev himself even admits to funding Hamas himself with Israeli taxpayers' money that was later used to kill the same people who were funding them.<a href="#cite_note-12">[12]</a>”	Dispropaganda	2021
UNRWA	“UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said after a key Hamas operations center was discovered right beneath his headquarters that he had no idea. That's absurd. There was a very advanced tunnel with electrical cables, which supplied a Hamas server center with power. That came directly from UNRWA's electricity grid. Moreover, a few years ago, UNRWA staff noticed that an entire parking lot above it was starting to subside. So what do you mean, we couldn't have known anything?”	Hillel Neuer	2024

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/Israeli invasion of Gaza	27 October 2023		Gaza	After October 7, Israel invaded Gaza with widespread international support. The IDF went on a widely reported revenge killing spree. Even by Israel's own account, they killed 19500 Palestinian civilians after half a year of bombing hospitals, schools and civilian towers, utilizing numerous condemned tactics.
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/October 7	7 October 2023	8 October 2023	Gaza Israel Palestine Lebanon Golan Heights	Hamas attacks Israeli settlements in Southern Israel, mass raping and abducting, which get called an Israeli "9-11" by CCM. The NYT and Al Jazeera claimed the Israeli government knew of the impending attack, ignored warnings, shot some of their own civilians, made up several stories and used the resulting increased death toll to go on a revenge killing spree in the 2023 Israeli invasion of Gaza.

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:British Jewish Zionist MP Gerald Kaufman says Israel acting like Nazis in Gaza	Speech	January 2009	Gerald Kaufman	"However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis' real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools."
Document:Goldstone: An act of negligence	Article	4 April 2011	Noura Erakat	Downplay of Israeli aggression towards civilians during the Gaza War, causes scholars to question Richard Goldstone. Regardless of what may have been his best intentions, Goldstone has negligently, one hopes not deliberately, undermined the laws of armed conflict and emboldened those states, like Israel, who believe that it is a surmountable nuisance.
Document:Jeremy Corbyn says “I Condemn Violence Against All Civilians, Why Can’t Keir Starmer?”	Article	12 October 2023	Jeremy Corbyn	In an interview with LBC, Keir Starmer was asked whether “cutting off power and water” to 2 million people, half of whom are children, was appropriate. He agreed that Israel “has that right”. Where is the empathy for Palestinians who have lost their loved ones, their homes and their futures? What happened to the universal application of international law?
Document:Priti Patel's Israel links undermined British diplomacy in the Middle East	Article	23 December 2021	Martin Linton	Home Secretary Priti Patel, who was fired from her previous government post by Theresa May for holding secret meetings with Israeli ministers, spearheaded the blacklisting of Hamas as a "terrorist organisation" in a move that angered Palestinians and undermined British diplomacy
Document:The House of Zion	Essay	November 2015	Perry Anderson	Perry Anderson’s long essay, ‘The House of Zion’, is the Marxist equivalent of a Papal edict. He excommunicates the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and anoints an alternative: "the demand for one state is now the best Palestinian option available."
Document:The UK government is on the wrong side of history… again	Article	25 November 2021	Ahmed Abu Artema
Document:Why I No Longer Stand with Israel, and Never Will Again	Article	15 October 2023	Scott Ritter	"I stand with Palestine, because I stand for the children of Israel and Palestine, knowing full well that the only chance they have of a future where they can live together as neighbours united in peace, instead of enemies united in war, is for a free and independent Palestine to exist." (Scott Ritter)
Stop the Worsening Undercount of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza	Article	5 March 2024	Ralph Nader	From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.

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