Hamas

Hamas (“Islamic Resistance Movement”) is a Palestinian Sunni Islamist organization founded in December 1987 as an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Japan, and the group that planned, financed and carried out the 7 October 2023 invasion of Israel that killed roughly 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. It has ruled the Gaza Strip by force since 2007, running a parallel welfare and propaganda apparatus alongside its armed wing, and its founding charter calls for Israel’s destruction and cites the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion as authentic.

Who founded it and how it is built

Hamas grew out of Mujama al-Islamiya, a Gaza charitable and religious network built by the paraplegic cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who formally launched the group as Hamas at the start of the First Intifada in December 1987. It is structured as a political bureau, historically based in Damascus and later Doha, Qatar, and a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, which trains and fights separately from the political leadership while answering to the same command. Israel killed Yassin in a targeted strike in March 2004. His successors as the group’s most visible faces, Ismail Haniyeh and Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, were both killed by Israel in 2024, along with military commander Mohammed Deif, whom the IDF said it killed in a Khan Yunis airstrike on 13 July 2024, a death Hamas did not confirm until months later.

What it wants: the covenant

Hamas’s 1988 covenant, still unrescinded, states in Article 7 a hadith calling for Muslims to fight and kill Jews hiding behind rocks and trees, and in Article 32 cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a real Jewish plan for world domination. It calls for a state covering all of historic Palestine and rejects any negotiated peace as a betrayal. A 2017 rebranding, the Document of General Principles and Policies, softened the language and floated accepting a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines “without recognizing Israel,” but Hamas never withdrew the 1988 Covenant it built its founding legitimacy on, and its own spokesmen have repeated the destruction of Israel as the movement’s goal since October 2023.

What it has done, dated

Hamas ran a wave of suicide bombings during the 1990s and the Second Intifada, including the March 2002 Park Hotel Passover massacre that killed 30 and triggered Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield. It won the January 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council election, then in June 2007 violently seized full control of Gaza from Fatah in a coup that killed hundreds, throwing rivals from rooftops and executing officials, and has held Gaza without another election since. It fought four further wars with Israel between 2008 and 2021 (Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense, Protective Edge and the 2021 round), each launched with rocket fire into Israeli population centers. On 7 October 2023 it led a coordinated invasion, having drilled the operational plan openly enough that Israeli intelligence possessed a detailed version of it, nicknamed “Jericho Wall,” more than a year in advance and did not act on it. The war that followed killed roughly 70,000 people in Gaza by the IDF’s own January 2026 assessment, which found close to a third were combatants, and cost Hamas its senior leadership.

Where and how it rules

Gaza has been Hamas’s exclusive territory since 2007, and Hamas runs both its own war effort and the Ministry of Health that supplies casualty figures widely reported without the qualifier that Hamas is a combatant party counting its own war’s dead; the Washington Institute has documented recurring undercounts of male fighting-age deaths in those figures. Israel and the United States say Hamas used al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City as a command center, and Gaza’s own terror factions have separately confirmed that people killed while reported as “journalists” were, in several documented cases, their own fighters. Alongside the armed and propaganda apparatus, Hamas also built the social-welfare and religious network, schools, clinics and charity distribution, that gave Mujama al-Islamiya its original standing in Gaza; that welfare work is real and is why an honest account does not reduce the organization to violence alone, even as the military wing subordinated it to war.

Funding and the world’s designations

Hamas is financed chiefly by Iran, which arms, trains and funds the Qassam Brigades through the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, and by Qatar, whose monthly cash transfers into Gaza, publicly earmarked for civil-servant salaries and fuel, were tied by Israeli officials to Hamas’s own request for an increase in the weeks before October 7. In the United States, the Holy Land Foundation, once the country’s largest Muslim charity, was shut down in December 2001 and its leaders convicted in 2008 of funneling over $12 million to Hamas, the largest terrorism-financing prosecution in American history; federal prosecutors named the Council on American-Islamic Relations an unindicted co-conspirator in that case. The United States designated Hamas a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997. The United Kingdom banned the Qassam Brigades in 2001 and proscribed Hamas in its entirety, ending the political/military distinction, in November 2021. The European Union, Canada, Australia and Japan list it as a terrorist organization or entity. In November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Hamas commander Mohammed Deif alongside warrants for Israeli officials, over the war-crime charge of hostage-taking and murder connected to October 7.

October 7 attacks · The Hamas Covenant, 1988 · Was the pre-October 7 policy toward Hamas defensible? · Hamas vs. the Palestinians · Did Israel create Hamas? · Palestinian Islamic Jihad