Hamas leaders: we conceived attacks to create a ‘permanent’ state of war

Hamas leaders tell the New York Times they launched their October 7 attack because they believed that only violence could revive the fading Palestinian cause.

Thousands have been killed in Gaza, with entire families wiped out. Israeli airstrikes have reduced Palestinian neighbourhoods to expanses of rubble, while doctors treat screaming children in darkened hospitals with no anaesthesia. Across the Middle East, fear has spread over the possible outbreak of a broader regional war.

But in the bloody arithmetic of Hamas’s leaders, the carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation. Quite the opposite, they say: It is the necessary cost of a great accomplishment — the shattering of the status quo and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel.

It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha, Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

“I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times.

The assault was so devastating that it served one of the plotters’ main objectives: It broke a longstanding tension within Hamas about the group’s identity and purpose. Was it mainly a governing body — responsible for managing day-to-day life in the blockaded Gaza Strip — or was it still fundamentally an armed force, unrelentingly committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state?

With the attack, the group’s leaders in Gaza answered that question. It doubled down on military confrontation.

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Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gambit to Create a ‘Permanent’ State of War
Hamas leaders say they waged their October 7 attack on Israel because they believed the Palestinian cause was slipping away, and that only violence could revive it.