A History of Hamas

With peace talks once again underway between Israel and Hamas, and hopes again growing for a permanent ceasefire, we’re bringing you our episode on the origins of Hamas: where it came from, how its influence grew, and what it represents. Next week, our episode on Benjamin Netanyahu and the rise of Israel’s right wing. This episode first ran in November 2023. We've done episodes on Hamas, Israel, Lebanon, Iran, and more. Find them all in our series, "The Cycle" https://www.npr.org/series/1255058395/throughline-middle-east-conflict. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for dirty air and water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on. Because it's not political, it's fundamental. Learn more at S E L C dot org.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  It has been over two years since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023. The attack killed around 1,200 people. 250 people were taken hostage. In response, Israel bombarded and invaded Gaza. According to Gaza health officials, more than 66,000 Palestinians have been killed in what an independent U N inquiry has classified as genocide. Since the start of the conflict, we've heard from many of you, our listeners, with questions about Hamas. Who are they? What do they want? And how did we get here?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  So in the weeks following the October 7th, 2023, attack, we talked to experts on all sides to answer those questions, people who know the history deeply and have even participated in it. This episode first aired in November 2023, and we wanted to bring it back to you again now to look back at the origins and influence of Hamas. Next week, we'll bring you our episode about the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right wing. Today, we'll start in 1987 with the event that birthed Hamas.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  In December 1987, a military truck driven by an Israeli citizen collided with another vehicle in Gaza near the Jabalya Refugee Camp. Four Palestinians died. Authorities explained it as an accident, but many Palestinians viewed it as an act of revenge for the killing of an Israeli man in Gaza days earlier. But these events were just a spark that lit a flame. In the days after, frustration and anger from Palestinians poured out in an event known as the First Intifada, or uprising.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  The hostility and tension are everywhere on the streets in Arab East Jerusalem, in the shouting voices of Palestinian teenagers hurling stones at cars and soldiers.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  In the past month, two Palestinians were killed by Israeli sniper fire, adding to the already inflamed atmosphere.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  In the walkie talkies of Israeli troops on patrol.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  With land, housing, and potable water in short supply.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  In the cries of angry Palestinian women watching as their children are arrested and taken away.

• 3:00Speaker 04

  We want exactly what the Israeli people enjoy: democracy, freedom, and independence.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Over 1,000 Palestinians and around 200 Israelis were killed in the 1987 Intifada. It shocked the world. But for people on the ground, it was the latest event in a cycle of attack and reprisal that dated back to the establishment of the State of Israel. Here's a very simple breakdown. In 1947, the United Nations called for the division of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. The idea was to create a Jewish homeland where Jews could feel safe after centuries of antisemitism in Europe culminated in the Holocaust.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  And in 1948, Israel was established. But there were already hundreds of thousands of Arab Christians and Muslims living there. Almost immediately, Israel was attacked by neighboring states, who argued that the UN division of land was not fair to the Arabs. A war ensued that Israel won. Then, two more wars were fought, one in 1967 and one in 1973. Israel won those wars as well. The reasons for those wars and their outcomes are very complicated. We do not have the time to go into those things here. What's important to know for our story is that those wars resulted in mass exoduses of people.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Arab countries where they'd lived for centuries. And hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes in what is now Israel. Key to the moment we're in right now is that as a result of winning these three wars, Israel gained control over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two territories that were recognized by the United Nations as Palestinian lands. So this meant that Israel became an occupying power over more than a million Palestinians. Palestinians still had a burning desire to establish their own state. An organization in exile called Fatah and its leader Yasser Arafat emerged as one of

• 5:23Speaker 01

  the main voices fighting for this state. Fatah became the most powerful group in a coalition called the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO. But in 1987, at the start of the first Intifada, a new Palestinian organization was born in the Gaza Strip that would change everything. The group was called Hamas.

• 5:48Speaker 05

  Hamas is an acronym for the Arabic phrase for Islamic resistance movement, Haraqat al-Mukawam al-Islamia.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Haraqat al-Mukawam al-Islamia.

• 6:00Speaker 05

  Hamas also happens to mean zeal or passion.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  This is Khalid El-Gindi.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  And I'm the author of the 2019 book called Blind Spot: America and the Palestinians From Balfour to Trump.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Khalid also served as an advisor to the Palestinian leadership during their negotiations with Israel in 2007.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  Hamas's overall vision was a Palestinian state in all of the land of historical Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Khalid says this goal, to establish a Palestinian state, was shared by other Palestinian liberation groups. But Hamas was different for one major reason.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  They were Islamist, whereas most of the Palestinian factions emerged in the 1950s and 60s and were either leftist, like strongly Marxist, or centrist.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Hamas basically put Islam at the center of its political program. In their charter, they made it clear that it was only through Islam that Palestinians could achieve liberation.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  Part of Hamas's appeal was they didn't believe in diplomacy. They didn't believe in compromise.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  That's reflected in Hamas's charter, published in 1988. It spells out their purpose and objectives. We've asked Throughline's senior producer, Devon Katayama, to read from the group's founding document.

• 7:27Speaker 06

  There's no solution for the Palestinian question, except through jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. Hamas, it is an

• 7:41Speaker 04

  Expression of Palestinian anger, desperation and frustration.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  This is Martin Keir.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  I'm a lecturer in international relations at the University of Sydney in Australia.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  He also wrote a book all about Hamas called.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Hamas in Palestine, the contested road to statehood.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Martin says that Hamas introduced itself as an organization dedicated to both Palestinian statehood and Islamic jihad, or holy war.

• 8:07Speaker 06

  The Islamic resistance movement consider itself to be the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism and a step on the road. Islamic groupings all over the Arab world should also do the same, since all of these are the best equipped for the future role in the fight with the warmongering Jews.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  While their charter in 1988 clearly lays all this out, Martin says we should not mistake it for some well-thought-out founding document.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  The people who wrote it were very insular. It was not as though the leadership of Hamas sat down and put this document together. Three people wrote it, and they'd never been outside of Gaza, never traveled. But Hamas, after that, rarely, if ever, mentioned its charter.

• 8:55Speaker 06

  The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  The Hamas charter contains anti-Semitic language.

• 9:13Speaker 06

  Their plan is embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  The first goal of Hamas is to destroy completely the state of Israel.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  This is David Hacham. He's a former Colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF, where he served for 30 years.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  During my military service, I was for almost eight years in the Gaza Strip. I arrived to Gaza one year before the beginning of the first Palestinian uprising.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  David has written two books on Hamas and other Palestinian groups, and is affiliated with the Miriam Institute, which is basically an Israel-focused think tank. He says that Hamas was expressly dedicated to the destruction of Israel from its inception.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  As a matter of fact, they are speaking about. In the first phase about the establishment of a Palestinian Islamic state on the ruins of the state of Israel.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Ultimately, Hamas's emergence in the chaotic, bloody years of the first Intifada signaled a change in the symbolic and material direction of the Palestinian fight against occupation.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  It allowed Hamas to frame their narrative that this was a sense that we are an Islamic resistance movement.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  And in the years after their launch, Hamas began carrying out the promise of its charter.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, we're going to tell you the history of Hamas from multiple perspectives and try to answer a few central questions. Why did Hamas form? In what context has it evolved into the organization it is today? And what does it represent to Palestinians, Israelis, and the rest of the world?

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Hi, this is Patrick Corningate Jr. calling from Washington DC. And you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Thanks.

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• 13:12Speaker 01

  Part one, Men in the Sun.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  In 1988, Hamas was created explicitly as an Islamist organization. Now, you might be wondering what I mean by Islamist. Well, the larger context for that term goes all the way back to the early 20th century. Back then, European powers were slowly encroaching on and sometimes outright colonizing parts of the Middle East. This was a big change because since the medieval period, the Middle East and North Africa had been ruled by Muslim empires that were dominant politically, militarily, and economically on the international level. This was and is a point of historical pride for many in the Muslim world.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  I was reminded of it all the time, growing up, by people in my community. But as Europe and eventually the United States rose to power, those fortunes changed. By the 20th century, several kinds of responses to that formed. There was the leftist, anti-imperialist Marxist kind that was prevalent all over the world. Think like Che Guevara. There were also secular nationalists like Ataturk in Turkey. But there was another camp that basically said the problem in the Muslim world was that Muslims weren't Muslim enough, not religious enough, that if Muslims reconnected with Islam, then perhaps they could regain the glory of the past.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  This worldview created movements and organizations all over the Middle East. And one of those organizations, based in Egypt, was called the Muslim Brotherhood. They are key in the creation of Hamas.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  So the Muslim Brotherhood's goal is to connect Muslims again with Islam. And once that connection is made, Then the people themselves will rise up and feel the sense of collective identity. And through that, collective identity be able to get rid of foreign occupation.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Even though it was founded in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood had chapters and supporters all over the Middle East, from Saudi Arabia to Jordan to Iraq. But while the group did engage in political violence, it was different from extremist Islamist groups that we might think of today, like Al Qaeda or ISIS. The Muslim Brotherhood started out by focusing on social welfare programs and preaching. The Palestinian chapter in Gaza and the West Bank provided education, food, and other kinds of social services to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And it would be one of its members that would help found Hamas, a guy named Sheikh Ahmed Yasin.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  So he was a young Palestinian, he was a quadriplegic. He was, he born in 1936, near the modern city of Ashgolan.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Yasin came to Gaza as a refugee, like many other Palestinians, after the establishment of Israel.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  He was a product of the occupation.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  He had joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a young man in Egypt. In Gaza, he focused his efforts on Palestinian statehood.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  He wasn't an ideologue. Now, there's certainly that Islamic frame of reference, but you wouldn't say that he was an ideologue. There's a, this very action-oriented, and that, when I say action, it doesn't necessarily mean violence. It's a, we need to, we need to be the controllers of our own destiny.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  To do this, he founded an organization in Gaza in 1973, which was licensed to operate by the Israeli government in 1979. He came with a request from the Israeli, you know, military government in the Gaza

• 17:05Speaker 03

  in order to bring him like the green light for the establishing of Al Mujam Al Islami.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  This organization David's talking about, Al Mujam Al Islamiya, or the Islamic Center, was the precursor to Hamas. It was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Israeli government approved Yasin's request for the Islamic Center because it was basically a charity organization. But according to David, it did more than that.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  During the eighties, Al Mujam Al Islami did its utmost with Sheikh Ahmed Yasin at his head to gain, you know, public support, to take control of local associations, to open, you know, mosques.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  So Sheikh Yasin and several other Gazans established Hamas out of the Islamic Center.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  Hamas was created because a number of Palestinians who believe in armed resistance and this Islamist ideology created the organization.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  This is Tarek Pakoni. He's a scholar and president of the Board of Al Shabaka, a nonprofit focused on Palestinian policy research and author of the book.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Hamas contained the rise and pacification of Palestinian resistance. When Hamas was established out of that structure and it began to engage in resistance activities.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Like attacks on military posts and abducting Israeli soldiers.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Immediately, Israel's approach to dealing with Hamas changed and it stopped being one of approval. It started being an antagonistic relationship because obviously now it's a resistance party. In retrospective, I think this was, I call it the original scene of the Israeli authorities, Israeli security authorities, that did not understand that period of time, what can be developed of this innocent organization movement, Al Mujam Al Islami.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  As the first Intifada went on, many Palestinians became more and more frustrated, not only with the occupation, but with the PLO slash Fatah as it attempted to negotiate a two-state solution with Israel.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  The reality was that Fatah and some of the smaller parties were interested in joining a peace process that would result in a compromise situation of a West Bank and Gaza state.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  It's certainly by this stage, 1987, 20 years of occupation. What have the PLO done? When I say PLO, what has Fatah done? Nothing, virtually. We've been fighting for 20 years, resisting for 20 years. Nothing has changed. In fact, it's actually gotten worse, where we're further away from independent state than we've ever been before.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  This sense of desperation and frustration among Palestinians is part of what allowed for Hamas's argument that compromise and negotiation are losing strategies, that fighting was the only way forward. And part of Hamas's appeal at this time was that their founders and members were from Gaza. They grew up there under an occupation that, according to a 1985 UN committee report, included a stagnant economy, broken communities, depleted natural resources, and violations of fundamental human rights. Meanwhile, many of the PLO slash Fatah leaders lived in exile, and in some cases, luxury.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  The key Fatah people, most of Fatah are living in the diaspora. They're the ones living in the four-story houses, driving around in their gold Mercedes. They're not experiencing the day-to-day privations of the occupation. Whereas Hamas, they're a product of the occupation. You can see them walking in the streets. You can see them at the market. People may not necessarily agree with their narrative as an Israelist movement. They get a lot of respect for the fact that they live amongst the community.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  The body of an Israeli border policeman kidnapped two days ago by the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement was found today in the Israeli occupied West Bank.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  In 1992 Hamas carried out a plan that would set in motion a cascade of events altering their path. They took an Israeli border policeman hostage, a man named Nissim Tolidano.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  And he was eventually killed by the kidnappers.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  We don't think that it's kidnapping, it's capturing, because we are the state of the world. And we are struggling to expel our enemy from our land. This is our land.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Hamas did this at a time when the PLO was starting negotiations with the Israeli government on a peace deal that could potentially create a two-state solution.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Prime Minister Rabin said Hamas wanted to murder both Jews and peace, but they would not succeed. I love the road, the queen of the day. "Nothing will move us from here," Rabin said, "not stones, Molotov cocktails or knives, not Hamas, not the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and not the PLO," he said. "We will live here forever." Rabin said Israel would pursue the war. I was there, I was in all the meetings that took place with our Prime Minister, Itzhak Rabin.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  At the time, David Hacham was serving in the Israel Defense Forces and as an advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  And after the killing of Nissim Tolidano, there was a decision taken by Itzhak Rabin as the Israeli Prime Minister to expel 415 Hamas activists from both the West Bank and the Gazprom. During the night, security forces woke up more than 400 of the 1,500 Palestinians who have been arrested in the past two days. The deportees were blindfolded, their hands bound with plastic handcuffs, and loaded onto buses which headed for the Lebanese border.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  It was a way of dismantling and disrupting Hamas, and it did for a time, because these were the key members of, key leadership of Hamas. But it was a public relations disaster for Israel. About 400 Palestinians deported by by Israel are trapped in a no man's land in southern Lebanon. The international community found out. And it was like, well, OK, how come you're deporting 415 people?

• 23:47Speaker 05

  To Israel's surprise, they became a kind of cause célèbre as these self-sacrificing, the exiles, they represent kind of a microcosm of what the Palestinian movement is about. And it was also seen as an especially cruel move. I mean, of course, it's a violation of international law. You can't deport elements of the population.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  The international media starts to take more attention. You know, what is it about Hamas? Why were these people deported? You know, is it a human interest or whatever? So people start to pay more attention to Hamas. Hamas's narrative, they're interviewed on international media. They get their narrative out. They get their story out for the first time, really, to the outside of the Arab world.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  The only ones doing anything to help the Palestinian people, he says, is Hamas. He's especially.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Well, all of a sudden, you can you can talk to these people. And it's 10 fingers, 10 toes, two arms, two legs. They're just like me.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  And the other thing that happens is that Hezbollah, which is another resistance movement to Israeli occupation, this time of southern Lebanon, looks after these deportees.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Hezbollah is an Islamist organization based in Lebanon that was founded during the Israeli invasion of that country in the 1980s. The group is backed by Iran.

• 25:22Speaker 05

  Both movements see a convergence of interests in their opposition, their militant opposition to Israel. They were totally indoctrinated by. Theologically by Hezbollah by Iran. I think Hamas saw Hezbollah as someone they could learn from politically, tactically, and in other ways.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Hezbollah introduces Hamas to the idea of suicide terrorism, to car bombs, a more violent resistance to Israeli occupation. It adopts a tactic of suicide bombing from Hezbollah and brings that back to Palestine when they are, when the international community essentially forces Israel to take them back in. People come back in dribs and drabs. Israel admits that over time that, okay, these 10 people were illegally deported. These five people.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  This was another mistake taken by Israel. I'm not speaking about the expel. I'm speaking about the coming back to the territory.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Coming up, Hamas begins to put the lessons learned in Lebanon into practice.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  Hi, my name is Fabio Ferrari. I'm calling from New York City. You are listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 26:50Speaker 04

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• 28:12Speaker 02

  Part Two. 1994.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  When the first Intifada ended around 1993, the path to a potential two-state solution seemed more possible than ever. Israel and the PLO culminated months of negotiations in Oslo, Norway. It was the first agreement in what would come to be known as the Oslo Accords. The agreements recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and called for the creation of the Palestinian Authority to handle some policing and municipal authority in some parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In exchange, they had to ensure the security of Israeli civilians from Palestinian attacks. Israel agreed to negotiate on the status of its settlements during the peace process.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  The terms of the deal would be implemented over the course of five years and promised further negotiations. Many in the world viewed the deal as a groundbreaking step towards a Palestinian state and towards peace. PLO leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were all given the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. But many in Israel and the Palestinian territories saw it completely differently.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  I think there's a lot of misinformation about what the Oslo Accords actually were. They certainly weren't about peace. The Oslo Accords were designed to transfer administrative control of Palestinians from the Israeli occupation to Palestinians. So it would be the Palestinian Authority who was in charge of the provision of basic services to Palestinians. Making Palestinians responsible for their own administration means that if anything goes wrong, if there are starving Palestinians, if there are Palestinians who can't access healthcare, basic services, that's not the responsibility of the occupation, that's the responsibility of Palestinian Authority, even though the occupation controls everything that's going on, controls all of the money that goes in.

• 30:16Speaker 05

  There was a lot of suspicion. It looked like, in some ways, a bad deal, but for the Palestinian public, there was this sense of, well, let's give it a chance. Let's see what happens with this peace process.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  Fatah signed it to get back in control of Palestinian life. The PLO had been forced out of Lebanon in 1982, they've been cast adrift, no direct contact, they're becoming irrelevant. So Arafat was desperate to get back in control.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  And the suspicion grew into despair as it became clear the peace deal wouldn't deliver a better life for most Palestinians.

• 30:54Speaker 05

  It's really when the process began to falter, when the peace dividends in economic terms never actually materialized, when closures were imposed, when Israel didn't meet its commitments to withdraw from certain areas by a certain deadline.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Hamas has said that the Oslo Accords was the biggest betrayal of Palestinian nationalism ever.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Hamas opposed the Oslo Accords from the beginning. Unlike the PLO, Hamas did not believe in compromise and negotiation. They didn't think it would make a difference. And this gave Hamas an incentive to oppose the peace deal because they feared what might happen if it were to succeed.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  Hamas had gained enormous support and popularity in the territories and it was fast becoming the dominant resistance movement. And so for Hamas, it was like, well, okay, what if there's a genuine peace agreement between the PLO and Israel? Where does that put us? How are we supposed to resist? How can we be a resistance movement if there's peace?

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Hamas was not the only faction on either side against a peace deal. In Israel, far-right Jewish settlers also oppose the Oslo Accords. Here's why. Since 1967, hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews have created settlements on internationally recognized occupied Palestinian territories. These settlements come in the form of villages, towns, and full-blown suburbs. Many of these settlements are sanctioned by the Israeli government and protected by police and military. They have become so extensive that they've essentially carved the West Bank into a collection of small territories separated by Jewish settlements.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  This was and is a major source of tension in the conflict on both sides. And when the Oslo Accords were being negotiated, some of those Israeli settlers feared their settlements could be dismantled as part of an agreement. So in 1994, one of those settlers did something that would change the course of the conflict.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  There is the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Hebron is a Palestinian city in the West Bank. It's about 17 miles southwest of Jerusalem.

• 33:22Speaker 04

  Which is sacred to both Jews and Muslims. There'd be events, religious events, significant events for both Jews and Palestinians. And on one of those days where it was a Palestinian or Muslim holy day, there was an American Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein.

• 33:45Speaker 05

  He walked into the mosque during dawn prayers while there were, you know, the mosques were full. It was Ramadan, so there was quite a large number of worshippers. And he gunned down 29 people in the middle of the mosque.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Baruch Goldstein was celebrated by a small minority in Israel. And for Hamas, this event also had a radical impact.

• 34:09Speaker 05

  That was a turning point for Hamas. They switched to attacking civilians. And so after 1994 is when we see, you know, when they attack a bus, for example, or a cafe, something along those lines. And they blow up large numbers of civilians.

• 34:34Speaker 05

  A bomb exploded today on a crowded downtown

• 34:37Speaker 01

  bus in Tel Aviv. It was one of the worst terrorist attacks in Israel's history, and it was the third strike against Israeli targets in less than two weeks. On October 19th, 1994, a member of Hamas named Saleh Abdurahim Al-Sawi boarded a bus on a very busy street in Tel Aviv. He carried with him massive explosives. He rode the bus to a busy area with cafes and pedestrians. At 9:00 AM, he detonated the explosive. The massive blast lifted the bus off the ground and ripped it apart, eviscerating passengers. 21 Israeli citizens and one Dutch citizen were killed. An anonymous caller to Israel Radio claimed

• 35:21Speaker 01

  responsibility for today's bombing in the name of Hamas, the Islamic militant group. The attack shocked Israelis. The Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, promised a tough response. "We cannot fight these barbarians with silk gloves,"

• 35:36Speaker 04

  he said. "All measures are foreseeable." Hamas uses that moment to really change the scale and the type of its resistance and to begin carrying out operations against Israeli civilians as a way of instilling a form of deterrence against Israeli occupying forces, basically saying, "If you kill Palestinian civilians, your civilians will also die."

• 36:02Speaker 04

  And it's very shocking.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Palestinians. There's a lot of debate within Hamas about the utility of these. You know, if we, if we do this, there's no coming back from this. The bus bombing in October of 1994 was one of Hamas's first attacks on civilians. It would not be their last. That year, there were six suicide bombings in the span of several months, and even more attacks in cafes, shopping malls, and events. At the time, David Hacham was serving in the Israel Defense Forces. He challenges the idea that the Hebron massacre was the main reason for Hamas's move towards attacking civilians.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Instead, he says, Hamas carried out these attacks to derail the Oslo peace process, because ultimately, they opposed the two-state solution, not because they didn't want a Palestinian state, but because they refused to recognize Israel's right to exist.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  The main reason behind the, these activities was in order to spoil and to harm the Oslo process between Israel and the PLO. This was the main reason.

• 37:15Speaker 05

  Hamas was able to capitalize on that despairing of the peace process. Of course, Hamas also contributed to that despairing by its campaign of attacking civilians and almost always, of course, triggered an Israeli harsh response, mass arrests, harsh treatment, internal closures, preventing movement and access that really decimated the Palestinian economy. And it was part of the way Hamas could disrupt any, any progress.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Coming up, another bloodier intifada, and Hamas finds its way to power.

• 38:06Speaker 07

  Hi, from Knoxville, Tennessee. This is Mary, and you are listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 38:14Speaker 00

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• 39:30Speaker 02

  Part Three. The Day After.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  After the end of the first intifada and the signing of the Oslo Accords, extreme factions on both sides seemed to keep inflaming tensions and undermining the peace process. In 1995, an Israeli right-wing extremist assassinated Prime Minister Itzak Rabin. By 1997, Hamas had carried out more than a dozen attacks against Israeli civilians, killing hundreds. Meanwhile, Israel continued to occupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip, being accused by many, including Amnesty International, of repression. Also, illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian territories continued to expand.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  And by 2000, it all boiled over in the Second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising. Unlike the first intifada, the second intifada was

• 40:27Speaker 03

  Very bloody from the get go. Even though Palestinian resistance began similar to how the first Intifada began, which is through popular mobilization. This was met with enormous use of force by the Israeli occupying forces. And so the Palestinian Intifada militarized very quickly.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Hamas's violent escalation inspired other Palestinian groups to do the same. Soon Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad were all conducting attacks inside Israel on civilians. Eventually, Israel responded with a massive invasion of the West Bank. They destroyed infrastructure and devastated the population, killing thousands of civilians.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  This was happening in a post 9/11 world where the Israelis successfully to an American public and administration argued that they were fighting their own Al Qaeda, that they were fighting their own war on terror, which justified its heavy-handedness.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  During this time, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founder of Hamas, was assassinated by missile shot from an Israeli attack helicopter. Many other members of Hamas's leadership relocated to neighboring countries. They were losing fighters. And by 2005, their suicide attacks in Israel had considerably slowed down. That same year, Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a man widely seen as a hardliner and supporter of Israeli settlements, pulled all of Israel's military forces and settlements out of the Gaza Strip, a move that surprised everyone.

• 42:07Speaker 05

  This was a huge step and was quite controversial inside Israel.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  This is Khalid El-Gindi again.

• 42:14Speaker 05

  The calculation that Sharon had made was the settlement project in Gaza was a losing bet. You had 6, 7,000 Israeli settlers living among 1.5 million Palestinians. Demographically, it was a losing prospect. So let's cut our losses in Gaza.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  David Hakam says that this move was a huge mistake for Israel.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Ramtin, it was only one-sided decision taken by Israel with no Palestinian, I would say, partner. This was, I would say, a great, great, a big, big mistake taken by the Israeli government. And as a matter of fact, it led later on to the taking control of Hamas in the Gaza Strip area and to the situation that we are witnessing nowadays.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Some critics claim that Sharon did this in order to freeze the peace process. And that same year, 2005, Hamas also made a controversial move. They decided to begin participating in elections against Fatah, the ruling organization in the PLO.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  There is a strong argument that any participation in these elections legitimizes these Israeli constructions from the Oslo Accords, and we have just become complicit in the administration of the occupation. But the people, other people say, well, no, this is our chance to get our narrative out there to the international community.

• 43:50Speaker 05

  I think they see an avenue for power through the official channels that exist.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  And they campaigned really well. Fatah does not campaign well. They're very fractured.

• 44:01Speaker 05

  They do better than anyone expected, probably better than even they expected. And I think they were hoping to be the kind of significant minority and be the opposition bloc, but they ended up with a majority of the seats in the parliament, which allowed them to form a government entirely on their own.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  The US had actually pushed the Palestinian Authority to hold the elections. And the day after, President George W. Bush congratulated the Palestinian people on a free and fair election. But as for the results of that election.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  Israel and the United States says absolutely not. Condoleezza Rice.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  She was the Secretary of State at that time.

• 44:44Speaker 04

  In her memoir, says that we, she accepts that Hamas has won the election, but she cannot accept their program. Hamas can change or fail is essentially the Bush administration's strategy towards Hamas.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  The US had designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1997. So they put a set of demands on them after they won the election. If they met the conditions, then the government of Palestine would continue to receive foreign aid from the United States and its European allies.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  Renounce violence. Recognize Israel, accept all previous agreements. Rice says in her memoir, they knew that Hamas would reject them.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  And that's exactly what happened. Hamas did not meet the US's demands. So the US, EU, and Israel essentially boycotted the new Hamas-controlled government.

• 45:38Speaker 04

  Immediately, Israel imposed an economic and political siege on Gaza. They stopped all the work permits from Gazans into Israel.

• 45:48Speaker 05

  That creates this dilemma. There is very dire economic consequences. And there's a crisis internally because Palestinians are looking for a way out of the situation.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  This put immense pressure on the Palestinian Authority and its president Mahmoud Abbas to cancel the results of the elections. This would mean they'd have to forcibly remove Hamas from power in order to keep the West Bank and Gaza Strip from completely falling apart under the weight of the boycott. Obviously, Hamas did not like this idea because they'd won the elections fair and square. This crisis caused rising tension between Hamas and Fatah. And by 2007, they were on the verge of a civil war. That's when Saudi Arabia, as one of the most powerful countries in the Arab world, stepped in to mediate. They called together the two sides in Mecca, where they convinced Hamas

• 46:48Speaker 01

  to do what was for them the unthinkable.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  They come out with the Mecca Agreement, which is a unity government between Fatah and Hamas. And in that Mecca Agreement, Hamas says that it will respect the previous agreements signed by the PLO.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  The moves show that Hamas was willing to compromise on its hardline beliefs to some extent.

• 47:12Speaker 04

  We don't like that Israel's there, but we can't ignore it.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  But they stopped short of explicitly recognizing the state of Israel. So Israel and the US did not accept the solution that came out of the Mecca negotiations.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  Now, Israel cannot accept a unity government. The United States refused, the Bush administration refuses any Palestinian government with Hamas in it. So Hamas fears that there will be a coup and they'll be overthrown, so they strike. First in Gaza.

• 47:41Speaker 05

  And so there was a there was fighting between Mahmoud Abbas' loyal forces and Hamas.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  A civil war broke out between Hamas and Fatah. It was bloody. Hamas channeled its military power and viciousness against fellow Palestinians.

• 47:57Speaker 04

  Hamas threw and kicked out, removed the government of unity and took control, total control of the Gaza Strip. It was in June 2007.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  When Hamas took control, Israel responded by executing a blockade of the Gaza Strip. This means that they control how much food, water, and electricity the people of Gaza have access to.

• 48:23Speaker 04

  What Israel began doing was to limit the entry and exit of people and goods, which meant that if you were living in Gaza, you will not be able to leave the Gaza Strip unless you get a permit, and those permits are almost impossible to get. The entry of food into the Gaza Strip is restricted, and there was a policy at the early years of the blockade by Israeli government to count the number of calories that would go into the Gaza Strip, to make sure that the population there isn't starved, but to maintain them just above what is the humanitarian catastrophe. The fuel that's needed for electricity generation is restricted and rationed, so essentially

• 49:07Speaker 04

  to strangle Gaza so it doesn't survive, but it also doesn't collapse. So it's maintained in that state. The blockade is a form of collective punishment.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  What Tarek means by collective punishment is that the blockade punished all Gazans, about half of whom are children, for the actions of Hamas. Gaza became one of the most densely populated places on earth and one of the poorest, with an unemployment rate at nearly 50%. Hamas held no elections during that time. Meanwhile, Israel became per capita one of the richest countries on the planet, with a population that enjoys a quality of life on par with any country in Europe. Yet it is also true that Hamas expanded tunnels underneath the ground in Gaza to sneak in food and supplies from Egypt, store weapons, and to attack Israel.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  One of Hamas' biggest financial and military supporters during this time was Iran.

• 50:10Speaker 05

  Iran is trying to capitalize on pan-Muslim sentiment with regard to Jerusalem and the holy places. They see the Arab states as having essentially surrendered to Israel and that they are the true champions of Jerusalem and the Palestinian cause. And so it's part of how Iran projects its power and legitimacy in the broader Arab and Muslim world.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  U.S. officials have said there's not much direct evidence that Iran actually helped plan Hamas' attack on October 7, 2023. But there is no denying they gave Hamas weapons and money over the 16 years of blockade. And they weren't the only ones sending money to Gaza. Israeli news reports and analysts say that Qatar has provided over $1 billion. And this is what David Hachem says is the problem, that Hamas has been more focused on fighting than on the needs of the Palestinian people. I'll tell you frankly, here we have to put the blame on Hamas' government in Gaza.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  They were taking a lot of money coming, but Hamas used it in order to develop its military capabilities against Israel. Hamas is in control of Gaza, and Hamas doesn't take any, you know, step in order to improve the situation of living, the standard of living of the Palestinians. They are doing the opposite. They are concentrating on fighting against Israel. Israel and Hamas have fought multiple wars. But there's also evidence that they've cooperated. In fact, according to the Jerusalem Post, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

• 52:00Speaker 01

  in 2019 told a private meeting with fellow members of his political party that his government had allowed funds from Qatar to reach Gaza because it was part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate and to ostensibly prevent the formation of a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, the suffering of the Gazan population has only increased. Ultimately, Tarek Barakoni says that this story is about more than Hamas.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  The issue isn't Hamas. The issue is always the Palestinian political demands. The Palestinian demands for return, the Palestinian demands for self-determination. This is what's troubling Israeli authorities. The Palestinian liberation project, like any liberation project, is diverse and multifaceted. Hamas is one faction in that. Let's say in an ideal world, from the Israeli perspective, Hamas is removed from the equation. There will be an organization committed to armed resistance for the liberation of Palestine emerging the day after.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  For more coverage and for differing views and analysis of the conflict, go to npr.org/mideastupdates.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR. This episode was produced by me and

• 53:40Speaker 04

  Lawrence Wu.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Kristina Kimm.

• 53:45Speaker 06

  Devin Kadyama. Peter Balanon.

• 53:49Speaker 07

  Akshara Ravishankar. Irene Noguchi.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. The episode was mixed by Josh Newell. Music for this episode was composed by me and my band, Drop Electric, which includes.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Anya Mizani. Naveed Marvi.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Sho Fujiwara. Thank you to Rand Abdel Fattah, Johannes Dergi, Larry Kaplow, Aya Batrawi, Tony Cavan, and Anya Grunman. And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at [email protected]. Thanks for listening.

• 54:38Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.