Behind Hamas’ bloody gamble to create a ‘permanent’ state of war

Some factions had signed agreements with Israel intended to pave the way for a two-state solution. The Palestinian Authority, presented as a Palestinian government-in-waiting, had limited control over parts of the West Bank and remained officially committed to negotiating an end to the conflict.

Hamas, meanwhile, sought to effectively undo history, starting in 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what would become Israel during the war surrounding the founding of the Jewish state.

For Hamas, this displacement, together with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza during the 1967 Middle East war, was a major historical injustice that had to be corrected by force of arms. Hamas dismissed the peace talks with Israel as a betrayal and saw them as a capitulation to Israel’s control over what the group considered occupied Palestinian land.

The Palestinian political divide became etched into geography in 2007, when Hamas won a factional battle in Gaza and took control of the territory. Suddenly it was not only fighting Israel, but also governing Gaza. Israel, together with Egypt, imposed a blockade on the strip with the aim of weakening Hamas and plunging Gazans into deeper isolation and poverty.

By the time Mr. Sinwar returned to Gaza, Hamas had already entrenched itself as the de facto government and settled into what Tareq Baconi, a Hamas expert, has called a “violent equilibrium” with Israel. Deep hostility regularly erupted in deadly exchanges of Hamas rockets and Israeli airstrikes. But most of Gaza’s commercial goods and electricity came from Israel, and Hamas often tried to lift the blockade during ceasefire negotiations.

Hamas leaders were ambivalent about the group’s new governing role, with some believing they should improve the lives of Gazans while others saw the rule as a distraction from their original, military mission, experts say. Hamas mocked the Palestinian Authority for its cooperation with Israel, including its use of Palestinian police to prevent attacks on Israel. Some Hamas leaders feared that their own group, in negotiating issues of daily life with Israel, was to a lesser extent on the same path.

In 2012, Mr. Sinwar became the armed wing’s representative to Hamas’s political leadership, drawing closer ties to the military wing’s leaders, including Mr. Deif, the mysterious head of the Qassam Brigades. Arab and Israeli officials say the two men were the main architects of the October 7 attack.

When Mr. Sinwar became the overall head of Hamas in Gaza in 2017, he sometimes expressed interest in aligning with Israel. In 2018 he gave a rare one interview to an Italian journalist working for an Israeli newspaper calling for a ceasefire to ease the suffering in Gaza.

“I’m not saying I won’t fight anymore,” he said. “I say I don’t want war anymore. I want the end of the siege. You walk to the beach at sunset and you see all these teenagers chatting on the shore and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life is like,” he added. “I want them free.”

Hamas also released a political program in 2017 that allowed for the possibility of a two-state solution, while still not recognizing Israel’s right to exist.

Israel has made a number of concessions, agreeing in 2018 to allow $30 million a month in aid from Qatar to Gaza and increasing the number of permits for Gaza residents to work in Israel, bringing much-needed money entered the Gaza economy.

Violence continued to break out. In 2021, Hamas launched a war to protest Israeli attempts to expel Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem and Israeli police raids on the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City.

That was a turning point, Osama Hamdan, a Hamas leader based in Beirut, Lebanon, told The Times. Instead of firing rockets over issues in Gaza, Hamas fought for concerns that were central to all Palestinians, including those outside the enclave. The events also convinced many within Hamas that Israel was trying to push the conflict past a point of no return that would guarantee the impossibility of a Palestinian state.

“The Israelis were only concerned with one thing: how do I get rid of the Palestinian cause?” said Mr. Hamdan. “They went that way and didn’t even think about the Palestinians. And if the Palestinians had not resisted, all this could have happened.”

Building capabilities

Still, in 2021, Israeli military intelligence and the National Security Council believed Hamas wanted to avoid another war, according to people familiar with the assessments.

Hamas also reinforced the idea that it prioritized governing over fighting. Twice the group has refrained from participating in clashes with Israel initiated by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller militia in Gaza. According to diplomats involved in the discussions, Hamas political leaders tried through mediators in Qatar to increase aid going to Gaza and the number of workers going to work in Israel.

Many in Israel’s security apparatus also came to believe that complex border defenses to shoot down rockets and prevent infiltrations from Gaza were sufficient to keep Hamas in check.

But within Gaza, Hamas’s capabilities were growing.

According to American and other Western analysts, as of October 7, Hamas had an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 fighters, with about 15,000 rockets, mainly manufactured in Gaza and with parts most likely smuggled in through Egypt. The group also had mortars, anti-tank missiles and portable air defense systems, they said.

Mr. Sinwar had also mended the group’s ties with its old backer, Iran, which frayed in 2012 when Hamas closed its office in Syria, a close Iranian ally, amid Syria’s civil war.

That recovery has deepened the relationship between Hamas’s military wing in Gaza and the so-called Axis of Resistance, Iran’s network of regional militias, regional diplomats and security officials said. In recent years, a stream of Hamas operatives have traveled from Gaza to Iran and Lebanon for training by the Iranians or Hezbollah, adding another layer of sophistication to Hamas’s capabilities, the officials said.