Did Israel Found Hamas?
Anti-Israel detractors routinely blame Israel for the creation of Hamas, while also supporting Hamas. The reality is that Hamas was formed as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Branch in 1987. The Muslim Brotherhood is a fundamentalist Islamic terrorist group influenced by Nazi ideology.
After Israel’s victory against five invading Arab armies in 1948, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood fractured because Egypt maintained control of Gaza, and many of their members who had been in Jerusalem ended up under Jordanian occupation. Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War ironically united these two branches.
To undermine Arafat’s Fatah (which had been growing concerned about the Brotherhood’s growing influence, leading to violent skirmishes) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel decided to allow the Brotherhood to gain strength. This was a mistake. As Jonathan Schanzer wrote in his 2008 book, Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle For Palestine, “the Israelis made the ill-fated decision to permit the Brotherhood to operate with relatively little oversight.”
In 1973, the Israeli government allowed a Muslim cleric named Ahmed Yassin to operate an Islamic center, which became the center for the Brotherhood’s operations. Yassin used the center to expand through networks of civil services like healthcare and daycare. They filled a void left by the PLO which was carrying out terror attacks abroad from their HQ in Lebanon and later in Tunis.
Many more zealous members of the Brotherhood broke away, inspired by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and formed Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They called for a confrontation with Israel and proceeded to carry out several attacks, forcing Israel to arrest and imprison its operatives. PIJ’s actions and the start of the First Intifada in December 1987 led Brotherhood members to call for more active resistance.
Yassin’s followers in Gaza created an umbrella organization called Harakat al-Mueqawamma al-Islamiyya, the acronym for which is Hamas, which means zeal in Arabic. It was composed of young men and began distributing materials about the group’s ideology. This is how Hamas came to be, but there is a lot more to learn — read more from CAMERA Senior Political Analyst Sean Durns.
What IS HAMAS?
Hamas is a Sunni-Islamist fundamentalist terrorist organization created in 1948. It was initially founded as a Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian fundamentalist terrorist group influenced by Nazism. However, it emerged as its own entity in 1987, during the first intifada.
Hamas has successfully vied for influence and power with other Palestinian terror groups. This led to its takeover of Gaza in 2006. Under Hamas’ rule, the quality of life for Gazans has floundered due to the group’s greed, extremism, and terrorism against Israel.
Most of its leadership lives in mansions in Qatar, Turkey, Syria, and Europe.
WHAT DOES HAMAS STAND FOR?
The Hamas Charter calls for a global genocide of the Jews as a path toward global Islamic domination — beginning with Israel’s destruction to create a national home for Palestinians. It references the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a long-debunked antisemitic creed that claims the Jews nefariously control the world from the shadows.
“Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, and the stones and the trees will say, oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me
and kill him.”
WHAT DOES HAMAS DO?
Hamas has a long history of targeting soldiers and civilians alike regardless of their nationalities, including Israeli, Palestinian, and foreign civilians. Its methods of murder include suicide bombings, mass shootings, beheadings, and rockets, and it has planned on employing chemical weapons – all while using Palestinian civilians as protection from Israeli reprisals.
Between 2000 and 2006, Hamas carried out over 500 attacks, killing 390 people and injuring 2,100 (mostly civilians.) Since gaining control of Gaza in 2007, it has fired thousands of rockets into Israel, instigated 5 wars, and murdered thousands of Israeli and Palestinian civilians.
HAMAS’ HUMAN SHIELDS
Hamas has a long history of using Palestinian civilians as human shields to mitigate Israeli military responses. It embeds their operatives underneath or inside hospitals, fires rockets near daycares, stores munitions in schools, and establishes explosive-making factories in
residential neighborhoods.
Hamas also encourages civilians to stay in buildings used to fire rockets. It blocks civilian attempts to leave areas where the group operates, which are targeted by Israel. In the meantime, Hamas continues to build tunnels used to smuggle weapons and attack Israelis.
HAMAS ON OCTOBER 7
Hamas members invaded Israel and committed rape and murder. They mutiliated babies, threw infants in ovens, dismembered children, burnt entire families alive in their homes, murdered parents in front of their children, then murdered the children, among other atrocities. Israeli authorities have struggled to identify the remains of many of their victims due to the brutality of the attack.
As of this writing, the group is currently holding over 200 men, women, and children hostage.
