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CNN –
Palestinian militant group Hamas’s brazen attack on Israel that began Saturday is being seen as a turning point in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with far-reaching implications, analysts say.
The multi-pronged attack saw up to 1,000 attackers enter Israeli territory, killing hundreds of soldiers and civilians and taking dozens of hostages back to Gaza. It was like nothing Israel had seen since the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
Israel vowed revenge, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promising “powerful revenge.” Hamas said it was prepared for all scenarios.
“Things will change forever,” said Kobi Michael, senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv. There is nothing in Israeli history that compares to this attack, he said.
“Hamas will no longer be the Hamas we knew years ago,” Michael, who was previously deputy director general and head of the Palestinian department in Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, told CNN.
Hamas said the attack was in retaliation for attacks on women, the desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the ongoing siege of Gaza.
Here’s what we know about the group:
Hamas, an Islamist organization with a military wing, was founded in 1987. It was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist group founded in Egypt in the late 1920s.
The word “Hamas” is itself an acronym for “Harakat Al-Muqawama Al-Islamiyya” – Arabic for “Islamic Resistance Movement.” The group, like most Palestinian factions and political parties, insists that Israel is an occupying power and is seeking to liberate the Palestinian territories. She views Israel as an illegitimate state.
Unlike some other Palestinian factions, Hamas refuses to cooperate with Israel. In 1993, it rejected the Oslo Accords, a peace pact between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which stipulated that the PLO would abandon armed resistance against Israel in return for the promise of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. The agreements also created the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Portal
Palestinian Hamas fighters attend the funeral of their comrade in the southern Gaza Strip in August 2017.
Hamas presents itself as an alternative to the Palestinian Authority, which has recognized Israel and participated with it in several failed peace initiatives. The Palestinian Authority, whose credibility among Palestinians has suffered over the years, is led by President Mahmoud Abbas.
The group has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks on Israel over the years and has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union and Israel.
The US State Department said in 2021 that Hamas receives funding, weapons and training from Iran, as well as some funds raised in Arab Gulf states. The group also receives donations from some Palestinians, other expatriates and its own charities, it said.
In April, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant suggested that Iran provide Hamas with about $100 million annually.
With such a devastating attack, the group’s main goal would have been to dramatically shake up the status quo, experts say: Israel remains under a tight siege on Gaza and continues to occupy the West Bank, and the goal of an independent Palestinian state is nowhere in sight.
One goal would be to put the Palestinian issue back on the regional and international agenda, said Khaled Elgindy, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and director of its program on Palestine and Israeli-Palestinian affairs.
“People had moved on (from the Palestinian issue),” Elgindy told CNN. “The new game in town is normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel and this new regional integration.”
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman publicly acknowledged for the first time last month that negotiations were underway with Washington over the possible establishment of ties with Israel, saying normalization was moving “closer” every day. Normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel could be a milestone for Israel’s regional legitimacy as it could prompt other Muslim countries to follow suit. Saudi Arabia had previously promised not to recognize Israel until it granted independence to the Palestinians.
Elgindy said that Hamas had succeeded to some extent in achieving its goal of refocusing attention on the Palestinian cause.
The group may also be trying to shatter any perceptions of its military capabilities, analysts say.
Hamas “delivered a blow to Israel beyond what it is used to” and also demonstrated its capabilities, said Omar Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs who focuses on Palestinian affairs. His shock tactics are a sign that things “need to be taken more seriously,” Rahman said.
The Israeli military said Monday that Hamas had taken “dozens” of hostages and that Hamas said it had kidnapped more than 100 people. The number of hostages and the fact that many are civilians shows that Hamas is seeking much more than just a prisoner exchange, the experts said. In a previous kidnapping situation, Israel exchanged more than 1,000 prisoners for an Israeli hostage.
The large number of hostages ensures that “this is not a short-lived military chatter that will die down and be forgotten,” Rahman said, “but that it has longer-term political implications.”
As part of its campaign against Israel, Hamas produced sophisticated propaganda videos that documented its attack on Israel step by step. In some videos, its fighters wore body cameras to film operations as they breached Israeli fortifications and were dressed in commando uniforms.
That’s key to the group’s propaganda war, which serves multiple goals, analysts say.
On the one hand, it is about “stoking fear” among the Israeli public and suggesting that their leaders cannot protect them, Elgindy said. “This will come as a shock because the Israelis are enormously proud of their military and intelligence capabilities.”
On the other hand, it is also intended for Palestinian domestic consumption. Hamas has long been locked in a political war with the Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank and participates in security coordination with Israel.
This is intended to show Palestinians that “while Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president) is basically asleep at the wheel there, we are the real resistance and we are actually doing something,” Elgindy told CNN Hamas.
Mahmoud Hefnawy/picture-alliance/dpa/AP
Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’ political bureau, speaks during a rally in Qatar’s capital Doha in May 2021.
Hamas’s large-scale offensive shows that the group knows the coming war could be an existential war, experts say.
INSS’s Michael suspects that Hamas may have been trying to provoke an all-out war with Israel and may have been promised regional support by its allies if it took place.
“Hamas… has a very clear strategy based on the organizational logic of a multi-front conflict,” Michael told CNN, adding that Hamas is eyeing Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank, Israel’s Arab citizens who support Hamas, and southern Lebanon as a potential supporter of his campaign.
A senior Hamas official, Saleh al-Arouri, said over the weekend that the militant group was prepared for the “worst-case scenario, including a ground invasion.”
He said that the ground invasion would be “the best thing for us to decide the end of this battle.”