Hamas

"Terrorists"  Hamas   (Political party, Army)
Founder	Sheikh
Headquarters	Gaza, Palestinian territories Doha, Qatar (residence of Hamas chairman)
Interest of	Magnus Ranstorp

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

Origins

Hamas 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.</ref>

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 Communist 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.

Hamas banned

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 will be debated in Parliament before becoming statute on 26 November.

 

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
Ronald Plasterk	“All the more exasperating that in the reactions to Hamas's horrific pogrom, in which more Jews were murdered in one day than at any time since the Holocaust, first, it is pretended that it is indeed symmetrical, and the major media such as the NOS news even ostentatiously takes sides with Hamas and against Israel (see, for example, holding Israel directly responsible for that bomb on the hospital, without any check, and then no neat response). You can have all sorts of objections to the Netanyahu government, and because Israel is a democracy (the only one in the Middle East) there are many people even within Israel who voice those objections. You can insist on observing borders when counterattacking. If you recognise Israel's full right to defend itself, there are always limits anyway; remember, for example, that Israel is a nuclear power. But even if you keep the balance right, it is important to have in mind why the situation between Israel and Hamas is anything but symmetrical. There are civilian casualties on both sides. A first fundamental difference is that Hamas, as a terror organisation, is out to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible, while the Israeli army is trying to hit Hamas while inflicting as few civilian casualties as possible. You might perhaps think that they should take even more of a margin on that point, but in any case the intention is a completely different one from Hamas’. A further difference is that Israeli soldiers may be willing to die in war, but still prefer to come home to their families in one piece. Hamas has a death culture, with the highest good being to blow yourself up, for which you are rewarded with sex with 72 young virgins (not wondering if those 72 young women feel like it). Then taking civilians hostage as human shields, including very young children. That is a serious war crime, and one would expect that all responses would constantly insist that Hamas must first release those hostages. On top of that, Hamas is also preventing its own civilians from leaving locations where Hamas posts are located, precisely with the intention of those civilians being killed in attacks from Israel. Another criminal tactic that Israel does not use.”	Ronald Plasterk	2023
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 19,500 Palestinian civilians after half a year of bombing hospitals, schools and civilian towers, utilising 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:Dear Mr Starmer, we fact-checked your 7 Oct statement. You’re welcome	blog post	7 October 2024	Editor	"Appalling mix of regurgitated and already-discredited lies with grotesque one-sidedness"
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:Netanyahu Plays Chicken	blog post	21 September 2024	Craig Murray	Netanyahu’s strategy of assassinations and deadly stunts appears to be an attempt to goad Hezbollah out of their own territory into a suicidal advance into Israel. But Nasrullah is not falling for it. It is worth stressing that, contrary to the propaganda, in the last year Israel has hit Lebanon with five missiles for every one sent by Hezbollah.
Document:Only a failing US empire would be so blind as to cheer Netanyahu and his genocide	Article	26 July 2024	Jonathan Cook	Members of the US Congress roared “USA!” to their satrap from Israel, just as Roman senators once roared “Glory!” to generals whose victories they assumed would continue forever. Every empire falls. Its collapse becomes inevitable once its rulers lose all sense of how absurd and abhorrent they have become.
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:Starmer’s purges of Labour have mutated into the arrest of Palestine supporters	blog post	30 August 2024	Jonathan Cook	Britain’s authoritarian new prime minister is expanding the scope of already draconian laws to redefine his critics as ‘supporters’ of terrorism. Starmer wants to be judge, jury and executioner. We must not let him get away with it.
Document:The BBC is weaponising its Lebanon reporting to help disguise Israel's crimes	Article	27 September 2024	Jonathan Cook	By the third week of September, Israel had killed more than 750 Lebanese, compared to 33 Israeli deaths. The differential is even starker now. And yet the western media has not framed Hezbollah’s attacks as its "right to defend itself" – a right we are continuously reminded Israel has.
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 Israel-US game plan for Gaza is staring us in the face	Article	30 April 2024	Jonathan Cook	"The western media is pretending the West’s efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza are serious. But a different script has clearly been written in advance by Israel and the United States. Our job is to do everything in our power to stop them making their plan a reality."
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.

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.