The Hamas Covenant (1988)

The Hamas Covenant is the founding charter of Hamas, published on 18 August 1988, and it is the single most explicit document in the conflict: a text that states in its own words, without euphemism, that the struggle is religious and permanent, that Palestine is Islamic land that can never be ceded, and that it will “not come about until Moslems fight the Jews.” It is not a position paper or a stray official’s remark. It is the movement’s constitution, and for three decades it was the clearest statement anywhere of what Hamas actually believes.

What it is

The Covenant’s full title is “The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement” (Mithaq Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, Hamas being the acronym of that Arabic name). It runs to a preamble and 36 articles, mixing religious exhortation, organizational description, and political program. It opens with two epigraphs that set its tone before Article 1 even begins: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” and “The Islamic world is on fire. Each of us should pour some water.” The full text has long been hosted by Yale Law School’s Avalon Project, a primary-source archive, and by Hamas’s own affiliated outlets, meaning no honest reader has to take anyone’s paraphrase on faith.

Who wrote it and when

Hamas was founded in Gaza in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a paralyzed Palestinian cleric who had led the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1970s, in the days immediately after the outbreak of the First Intifada. The Covenant followed eight months later, in August 1988, issued in the movement’s name as its founding leadership formalized Hamas into a standing organization with its own charter, distinct from the secular nationalism of the PLO. Article 2 of the document states the lineage directly: “The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.” Unlike a UN resolution or a peace treaty, the Covenant was never put to a vote or a signature ceremony; it was promulgated as doctrine, the way a religious movement issues a charter rather than negotiates one.

Why it came about

The context is the collapse of Palestinian secular nationalism’s monopoly on the resistance narrative. By 1987, Yasser Arafat’s PLO had been driven out of Lebanon, its 1968 charter already framed the conflict in nationalist terms, and a younger generation of Islamists in Gaza’s refugee camps wanted a rival vehicle that spoke in explicitly religious terms rather than Arab nationalist ones. The First Intifada, the grassroots uprising that erupted in December 1987, gave the Muslim Brotherhood’s Gaza wing the opening to convert decades of social and religious organizing into an armed political movement. The Covenant was the document that announced this new movement’s terms to the world: not a negotiating position, but a religious obligation.

Key provisions

The Covenant’s core claims recur across its articles. Article 11 declares “the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [religious endowment] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day,” meaning no government, including a Palestinian one, has the standing to trade any part of it away. Article 13 rejects diplomacy outright: “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.” Article 7 invokes a hadith holding that the final judgment will not come “until Moslems fight the Jews… Only the Gharkad tree would not [cooperate], for it is one of the trees of the Jews,” the same text catalogued in the wiki’s glossary entry on the gharqad hadith. Article 22 blames Jews for engineering the French Revolution, the Communist revolution, and both world wars, and claims control of Freemasonry, Rotary Clubs and Lions Clubs “for their interest and their purposes,” language lifted directly from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document the Covenant itself cites approvingly. Article 27 is dismissive of the PLO’s more secular framing, warning that “whoever takes his religion lightly is a loser.” Article 31, by contrast, claims that “under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions… to coexist,” a line propagandists sometimes quote in isolation to soften the document’s overall thrust.

What happened as a result, and its status today

The Covenant became the standard citation for why Western governments designated Hamas a terrorist organization: the United States in 1997, the European Union in 2003, the United Kingdom and others since, precisely because the group’s own founding text described genocidal religious war as a permanent obligation rather than a tactic tied to occupation. In May 2017, Hamas issued a separate text, the “Document of General Principles and Policies,” often described in media coverage as a softened charter; it drops the explicit “kill the Jews” hadith and states in Article 16 that Hamas’s “conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion,” and it references a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines “as a formula of national consensus.” What it does not do matters more than what it does: the 2017 document never mentions the 1988 Covenant, let alone repeals it, it still refuses to recognize Israel, Article 25 still calls armed resistance “the strategic choice,” and Hamas has never removed the original Covenant from circulation or renounced its content. Legally and organizationally, the 1988 Covenant remains in force as Hamas’s founding charter; the 2017 document sits alongside it, not in place of it, which is precisely the ambiguity Hamas’s spokesmen have exploited whenever pressed on which document represents current policy. See the companion document on the 2017 text for the fuller comparison, and how the 1988 Covenant differs from the PLO’s own charter at the 1968 PLO Charter.

Hamas 2017 Document · PLO Charter 1968 · Ahmed Yassin · The gharqad hadith · The Protocols of the Elders of Zion · Did Israel create Hamas?