Did Israel create Hamas?

“Israel created Hamas.”

A kernel of truth wrapped around a falsehood. The truth: in the late 1970s and 80s Israel tolerated, and at times licensed, the Islamist charity and mosque network of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (Mujama al-Islamiya), seeing the then-quietist Muslim Brotherhood as a counterweight to the secular PLO that was actually waging war on it at the time. That was a real and, in hindsight, grievous miscalculation. The falsehood: Israel did not found, fund, arm or direct Hamas. Hamas was created as a militant group in December 1987 by the Brotherhood and at once turned its weapons on Israel; its 1988 charter demands Israel’s destruction and quotes the genocidal “kill the Jews” hadith. Tolerating a charity that a movement later spun a terror army out of is not creating that terror army, any more than the United States “created” al-Qaeda by backing Afghans against the USSR.

Origins of the claim

The claim is not a modern invention. It grew out of real reporting on the Mujama period, later flattened into a slogan. Israeli officials themselves supplied the raw material: Brigadier General (res.) Yitzhak Segev, Gaza’s military governor in the early 1980s, and other administration figures spoke on the record, years later, about having permitted Yassin’s charity to register, build mosques and run clinics and schools because a religious rival to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah seemed useful. That candor is exactly what the modern slogan weaponizes: journalists and researchers writing up the Gaza occupation’s political history noted the tolerance, and by the 2000s and especially after Hamas’s 2006 election win and 2007 takeover of Gaza, commentators compressed “Israel tolerated an Islamist charity that later spawned Hamas” into the much simpler, and false, “Israel created Hamas.” The compression drops every actor and every year in between.

The record in detail

Yassin, paralyzed from the neck down since a childhood accident, founded Mujama al-Islamiya in Gaza in 1973 and secured official registration as a charitable association from the Israeli military government in 1978. Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s it built a real social base of mosques, schools and clinics while, by design, avoiding armed confrontation with Israel. In that same period the PLO was waging an armed campaign that included the Munich Olympics massacre (1972), the Ma’alot school massacre (1974), and the March 1978 Coastal Road massacre near Tel Aviv, in which Fatah gunmen killed 38 Israeli civilians, 13 of them children, and hijacked a bus. Weighed against that record, a quietist religious charity looked, to Israeli planners fixated on the PLO, like the lesser problem. It was not.

Everything changed with the First Intifada, which erupted in December 1987. Within days, Yassin and Brotherhood colleagues, including Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi and Salah Shehade, founded Hamas as the movement’s dedicated militant wing. In August 1988 Hamas published its covenant: Article 7 invokes the hadith in which trees and stones call out to kill hiding Jews; Article 11 declares all of Palestine “Islamic Waqf land” for all generations of Muslims; Article 13 rejects any negotiated settlement as a betrayal of Islam. None of that text originates with Israel. Israel outlawed Mujama and Hamas in 1988 to 1989 and arrested Yassin in September 1989; an Israeli military court convicted him and sentenced him to life for ordering the killing of accused collaborators and for weapons possession. He served until 1997, when Israel released him as part of a prisoner exchange forced by the botched Mossad assassination attempt on Khaled Mashal in Amman, Jordan, an operation Israel undertook precisely because it now regarded Hamas as an enemy, not a proxy. Israel assassinated Yassin himself in a targeted airstrike on 22 March 2004.

Who pushes this claim today

Pro-Palestinian activists, some academics and commentators sympathetic to the “resistance” framing repeat the line as rhetorical shorthand to transfer moral responsibility for Hamas atrocities, including the October 7, 2023 attack, back onto Israel. The claim gets fresh, and more legitimate, fuel from a separate and later controversy: reporting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described to Likud lawmakers in 2019 a strategy of tolerating Qatari cash transfers into Gaza in order to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority divided and forestall a unified negotiating partner, and that Israeli officials again sought an increase in Qatari funds to Hamas in the weeks before October 7, 2023. That is a legitimate and heavily debated criticism of Israeli policy toward a group already in power in Gaza for over a decade. It is a different claim from “Israel created Hamas” in 1987, and conflating the two, treating a 2019 to 2023 political-management decision as proof of an act that predates it by three decades, is where the slogan does its dishonest work.

Hamas wrote its own charter; Israel didn’t hold the pen

This one rewards honesty: concede the real misjudgement, that Israel underestimated the Islamists while fixated on the PLO, and the later, separately debatable decision to permit Qatari money into Gaza as a divide-and-manage tactic. Concede both, and the slogan still collapses into what it is: a conspiracy theory built on a half-truth. Hamas is the child of the Muslim Brotherhood and its own charter, not of Israel, and no amount of 1970s tolerance or 2019 political calculation changes who wrote that covenant and who has spent every year since acting on it.