Thousands of people have died in Gaza and whole families have been annihilated. Israeli airstrikes have reduced Palestinian neighborhoods to rubble, while doctors treat children screaming in dark hospitals without anesthesia. Fear of a wider regional war has spread throughout the Middle East.
But in the bloody calculus of Hamas leaders, the killing is not the regrettable result of a major miscalculation. Rather, they say, quite the opposite: it is the necessary price of a great achievement, the breaking of the status quo and the opening of a new and more volatile chapter in their struggle against Israel.
“We had to change the whole equation and not just have a confrontation,” said Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’ top leadership body, to The New York Times in Doha, Qatar. “We managed to put the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region lives in peace.”
Since Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7, in which Israel claims about 1,400 people – mostly civilians – were killed and over 240 were forcibly taken to Gaza as hostages, the group’s leaders have praised the operation. Some hope for a sustained conflict that will end any pretense of coexistence between Israel, Gaza, and the surrounding countries.
“I hope that the state of war with Israel becomes permanent on all borders, and that the Arab world stands by our side,” said Taher el-Nounou, a Hamas media advisor, to the Times.
In weeks of interviews, Hamas leaders, as well as Arab, Israeli, and Western officials tracking the group, said the attack had been planned and executed by a small circle of commanders in Gaza who did not share the details with their own political representatives abroad or with their regional allies like Hezbollah, which surprised people outside the enclave with the ferocity, scale, and reach of the assault.
The attack ended up being bigger and deadlier than even its planners had anticipated, they said, largely because the attackers easily penetrated the defenses that Israel boasts about, allowing them to invade military bases and residential areas almost without resistance. When Hamas stormed an area in southern Israel, it killed and captured more soldiers and civilians than it expected, according to officials.
The assault was so devastating that it contributed to one of the main goals of the conspirators: it broke an old tension within Hamas about the identity and purpose of the group. Was it primarily a governing body – responsible for managing daily life in the blockaded Gaza Strip – or was it still fundamentally an armed force, relentlessly committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state?
The group’s leaders in Gaza – including Yahya Sinwar, who had spent over 20 years in Israeli prisons, and Mohammed Deif, a little-known military commander whom Israel had tried to assassinate repeatedly – answered that question with the attack. They doubled down on military confrontation.
In the weeks since, there has been a bloody Israeli response that has killed more than 10,000 people in Gaza, according to health officials in the area. But for Hamas, the attack emerged from a growing sense that the Palestinian cause was being sidelined and that only drastic action could revive it.
On the surface, the months before the brutal assault had been relatively calm in Gaza. Hamas had stayed out of recent clashes between Israel and other militants, and the group’s political leaders were thousands of kilometers away in Qatar, negotiating for more aid and jobs for residents of the impoverished territory.
But frustration was mounting. Hamas leaders in Gaza were seeing images of Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, Jews openly praying in a disputed place traditionally reserved for Muslims, and Israeli police storming the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a touchstone for Palestinian claims to the holy city. The possibility of Israel normalizing its ties with Saudi Arabia, a longtime sponsor of the Palestinian cause, seemed closer than ever.
Then, on a quiet Saturday morning, Hamas attacked.
It was clear beforehand that Israel would respond by bombing Gaza, killing Palestinian civilians.
“What could change the equation was a big action, and undoubtedly, it was known that the reaction to this big action would be significant,” said Al-Hayya.
But, he added, “we had to tell people that the Palestinian cause was not going to die.”
Now, some Israeli officials express deep regret for having so misjudged Sinwar and his intentions, one of many security failures that allowed Hamas to breach the border fence and rampage for hours, largely unimpeded.
“I will carry the weight of this mistake for the rest of my life,” said an Israeli official.
A new leader in Gaza
Sinwar took over Hamas’ leadership in Gaza in 2017. He is a tough man, without a smile, with well-trimmed white hair and a groomed beard. He belongs to the first generation of Hamas, an armed group founded during the first Palestinian intifada, an uprising that took place in the late 1980s, and later classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and many other countries.
Sinwar helped create the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, which became famous for sending suicide bombers to Israeli cities and launching rockets from Gaza into Israeli communities. He also monitored Hamas for alleged spies recruited by Israel, and earned a reputation for such brutality towards them that he earned the nickname “the butcher of Jan Yunis,” after the Gazan city where he was born.
In 1988, he was arrested and subsequently prosecuted for the deaths of four Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel, according to Israeli court records. He ended up in an Israeli prison for over two decades, an experience he called formative.
“They wanted prison to be a grave for us. A mill to crush our will, determination, and body,” he said in 2011. “But, thank God, with our faith in our cause, we turned the prison into sanctuaries of worship and study.”
Much of that education involved studying his enemy.
He learned Hebrew, which allowed him to better understand Israeli society, and he dedicated himself to freeing the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Israel has convicted many of them of violent crimes; Palestinians generally consider them unjustly detained.
In 2011, Sinwar was released in a prisoner exchange that Hamas considered a landmark lesson: Israel was willing to pay a high price for its captives.
Hamas exchanged a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, for over 1,000 Palestinians, including Sinwar, who had been involved in the negotiations as a prison leader. His release was a major prize for Hamas, which promised to free more prisoners.
“For me, it is a moral obligation,” he said in an interview in 2018. “I will try as much as I can to release those who are still inside.”
When Sinwar returned to Gaza in 2011, the Palestinian movement was deeply divided.
Some factions had signed agreements with Israel, designed to pave the way for a two-state solution. The Palestinian Authority, conceived as a waiting Palestinian government, had limited authority over parts of the West Bank and officially remained committed to negotiating an end to the conflict.
Hamas, on the other hand, sought to undo history, starting with 1948. That was the year when over 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes, which were located in what would later become Israel, during the war linked to the founding of the Jewish state.
For Hamas, that displacement, along with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza during the 1967 Middle East war, was a great historical grievance that had to be rectified by force of arms. Hamas rejected peace talks with Israel as a betrayal and…