New Delhi: Hamas, which carried out the terror blitzkrieg against Israelis last weekend killing over a 1,000 and kidnapping over 100, has a history steeped in brutal violence that seeks to obliterate Israel while seeking an independent Palestine.
They are almost ideologically and tactically opposite its rival entity – Fatah and its leader Mahmoud Abbas who are internationally recognised as the President of the Palestinian Authority.
In control of the Gaza strip since 2007, Hamas has been designated as a foreign terror group by the US, the UK, the European Union and Israel.
It has been vying to lead the Palestinian national movement and has seen conflict with Fatah which is part of the larger Palestinian Liberation Organisation founded under the aegis of the Arab League in 1964.
Globally, including by India, Fatah has been recognised as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people since 1974.
Hamas and Fatah are caught in a struggle to fully represent the Palestinian movement in the last decade-and-half, after a conflict in 2007 resulted in the militant group taking control of the Gaza strip and the expulsion of Fatah from the region.
Israel and Egypt immediately enforced a blockade on Gaza, preventing the import and export of most items — a blockade that is still ongoing 16 years later.
Hamas has fought numerous conflicts against Israel like in 2008, 2011, 2014 and 2021 before the current crisis. Its aerial and ground attacks against Israel launched on 7 October — at a scale not seen since the Yom Kippur War of 1973 — stunned the world.
This prompted Israel to launch a counteroffensive, ‘Swords of Iron’, that has seen the Gaza strip continuously being pounded with airstrikes. According to the latest update from the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), over 1,300 Israelis were killed and more than 3,000 injured since Saturday.
War against Hamas—operational update day 7. pic.twitter.com/1XYn4ri6qQ
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 13, 2023
The Israeli blitz has killed over 1,000 people in Gaza, according to health officials in the area.
More than 1,75,000 Gazans have fled homes since Saturday, while most of the 2.3 million people living in Gaza have no electricity and no water after Israel continued its retaliatory attacks against Hamas.
Conflict amongst the Palestinians
In 2006, the Palestinian National Authority — an institution created as a result of the 1993 Oslo Accords, with limited self-governance in the Palestinian territories — held legislative elections. Hamas won the popular vote and a majority in the legislature with 74 out of 132 seats. Fatah won only 45 seats.
Ismail Haniyeh, the current chairman of Hamas’ political bureau, was sworn in as Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority by President Mahmoud Abbas in March 2006.
As per media reports, Israel refused to negotiate with any Palestinian government headed by Hamas.
Abbas dismissed Haniyeh in June 2007 after the expulsion of Fatah officials from Gaza during the conflict that year. He also declared a state of emergency in the Palestinian territories.
Oraib Al Rantawi, founder and director general of the Al Quds Center for Political Studies, told ThePrint that both Hamas and Fatah have tried to become the “backbone” of the Palestinian cause describing the problem as “an individual with two backbones may not be able to function.”
The simmering conflict between the internationally recognised Fatah and the Hamas militant group brings forth the question of who and what these two organisations are.
Hamas
The genesis of Hamas lies almost four decades before it was officially founded. Khaled Al Hroub, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Northwestern University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera, “Hamas is a manifestation of Palestinian resistance” — a result of the multiple failed political solutions to the question of Palestinian statehood.
“Hamas goes back in fact to what we could say another organisation that is the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. The Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Jerusalem in 1946 – that is two years before the creation of the state of Israel. However it continued to remain on the margins of the Palestinian politics over decades,” he explained.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s focus in those decades was social work, specifically establishing schools and hospitals through the Palestinian territories, as per media reports. Hamas founder Shaikh Ahmad Yasin spent the years as a teacher of Arabic and Islamic studies before founding the organisation, according to media reports.
Born in a village near modern day Ashkelon that was depopulated in 1948 during the first Arab-Israeli war, Yasin was injured at the age of 12 and left paralysed and required a wheelchair for the rest of his life. In December 1987, Yasin founded the Harakat al – Muqawama al-Islamiya, or Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement in English.
In 1988, at the height of the first Palestinian Intifada, Hamas released its first charter that highlighted the fact that the organisation is a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine and secondly that there is “no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad”. The Preamble called for the “obliteration” of Israel.
As per media reports, the first suicide bomber from Hamas was in April 1993. By 1997, the US designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organisation. The UK, the EU and Israel all designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
In 2017, Hamas released a document of ‘General Principles and Policies’, which saw significant changes from the 1988 charter — firstly, Hamas accepted to a two-state solution based on the borders of June 1967 as a ‘national consensus’, and also makes it clear that their struggle is not against Jews because of religion but against the ‘Zionist project.’
Apart from the political arm, Hamas also consists of its military wing — the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades headed by Mohammed Deif, the mastermind behind the recent attacks against Israel last Saturday.
In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza strip and Hamas beat the Fatah in the elections the following year. Despite Haniyeh being the Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, tensions rose between Hamas and Fatah, resulting in an armed conflict in June 2007.
Ismail Haniyeh, the current Chairman of the Political Bureau of Hamas lives in Doha. The US and other international nations recognise Iran’s role in the funding of the organisation.
Fatah
Founded in 1957 by Yasir Arafat and his colleagues in Kuwait, Fatah is a reverse acronym of the Arabic name Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini, which translates to ‘The Palestinian National Liberation Movement’. Fatah also means conquest in Arabic. In its early days Fatah advocated for an armed struggle against Israel as per media reports.
In 1964, under the aegis of the Arab League, Fatah joined the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) — an umbrella organisation bringing together a number of groups working for the liberation of Palestine from Israel.
However, after Israel defeated a coalition of Arab countries, including Egypt, Syria and Jordan, in the Six-Day War in 1967, the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip came under control of Tel Aviv.
Arafat, in the early days, advocated for a guerilla war to free Palestine – training and arming guerillas and conducting attacks against Israel. Fatah eventually in the 1980s attempted to reach a peaceful political settlement with Israel.
Based out of Jordan in the early years, the PLO was eventually expelled by King Hussein in 1970 after the Jordanian Civil War, also known as Black September, between the state of Jordan and Arafat’s PLO.
The PLO shifted base to Lebanon and remained there until the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982 forced it to relocate to Tunisia.
“By the end of the 1980s, we have a deep sense of failure within the Palestinian national movement. PLO faced multiple failures and were expelled to Tunisia in 1982,” Khaled Al Hroub told Al Jazeera.
Eventually, the PLO decided to leave the armed struggle and in 1993 signed the Oslo Accords with Israel, which allowed for the creation of the Palestinian National Authority and promised for a sovereign Palestinian state within five years.
As Oraib Al Rantawi, founder and director general of the Jordan-based think tank Al Quds Center for Political Studies, notes in his interview with ThePrint, by 1998, Israel had moved over half a million settlers into the West Bank further delaying the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state.
Fatah continued as a political party in the territories of Palestine, winning the second largest number of seats in 2006. However its control remains solely in the West Bank with the de facto capital at Ramallah, as Hamas maintains full control of the Gaza strip.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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