Hamas releases first report since start of the war

The aim of the document is to "clarify to our people and the free peoples of the world the reality of what happened on Oct. 7 and the motives behind it"

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On Sunday, Hamas released a 16-page report — the first since the start of the war — to, in Hamas’s own words, “clarify to our people and the free peoples of the world the reality of what happened on Oct. 7, the motives behind, its general context related to the Palestinian cause, as well as a refutation to the Israeli allegations and to put the facts into perspective”. 

It’s an important document, albeit one that, of course, has to be taken with a grain of salt: the views expressed therein are obviously strongly partisan, and are ultimately intended to bring grist to Hamas’s mill in the court of global public opinion. Yet in any conflict it is vital to understand the point of view of all sides involved. We are constantly exposed to the Israeli point of view in the mainstream media; listening to the other side’s point of view, regardless of one’s opinion of the latter, is something that can only enrich our understanding of the conflict.

So here’s a brief summary of the document’s main points. The report starts by explaining the reasons for Operation Al-Aqsa Flood — i.e., the October 7 attack.

It starts by situating the attack in the wider context of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine:

The battle of the Palestinian people against occupation and colonialism did not start on Oct. 7, but started 105 years ago, including 30 years of British colonialism and 75 years of Zionist occupation. 

Over these long decades, the Palestinian people suffered all forms of oppression, injustice, expropriation of their fundamental rights and the apartheid policies. 

It stresses the West’s complicity in the crimes committed against the Palestinians:

Unfortunately, the US administration and its allies did not pay attention to the suffering of the Palestinian people over the past years but provided cover to the Israeli aggression.

That’s why we see the US and other Western countries complicit and partners to the Israeli occupation in its crimes and in the continued suffering of the Palestinian people. 

Lastly, it claims that Israel has never been truly interested in a peace deal:

Israel systematically destroyed every possibility to establish the Palestinian state through a wide campaign of settlements’ construction and Judaization of the Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem.

For all these reasons, it concludes that “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7 was a necessary step and a normal response to confront all Israeli conspiracies against the Palestinian people and their cause”.

The second part of the document focuses on the actual events of October 7. It’s by far the most interesting part. According to Hamas, the operation was aimed at Israeli military targets, not civilians; to the extent that Hamas was responsible for civilian deaths, this was an indirect result of clashes with Israeli forces:

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on Oct. 7 targeted the Israeli military sites, and sought to arrest the enemy’s soldiers to pressure on the Israeli authorities to release the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails through a prisoners exchange deal. Therefore, the operation focused on destroying the Israeli army’s Gaza Division, the Israeli military sites stationed near the Israeli settlements around Gaza. 

Avoiding harm to civilians, especially children, women and elderly people is a religious and moral commitment by all the Al-Qassam Brigades’ fighters. We reiterate that the Palestinian resistance was fully disciplined and committed to the Islamic values during the operation and that the Palestinian fighters only targeted the occupation soldiers and those who carried weapons against our people. In the meantime, the Palestinian fighters were keen to avoid harming civilians despite the fact that the resistance does not possess precise weapons. In addition, if there was any case of targeting civilians; it happened accidentally and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces.

The document also claims that a large number of civilian casualties were caused by the IDF — not Hamas — as confirmed by several Israeli media reports:

According to two reports by the Israeli Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Oct. 10 and the Haaretz newspaper on Nov. 18, many Israeli civilians were killed by an Israeli military helicopter especially those who were in the Nova music festival near Gaza where 364 Israeli civilians were killed. The two reports said the Hamas fighters reached the area of the festival without any prior knowledge of the festival, where the Israeli helicopter opened fire on both the Hamas fighters and the participants in the festival. The Yedioth Ahronoth also said the Israeli army, to prevent further infiltrations from Gaza and to prevent any Israelis being arrested by the Palestinian fighters, struck over 300 targets in areas surrounding the Gaza Strip. 

Other Israeli testimonies confirmed that the Israeli army raids and soldiers’ operations killed many Israeli captives and their captors. The Israeli occupation army bombed the houses in the Israeli settlements where Palestinian fighters and Israelis were inside in a clear application of the Israeli army notorious “Hannibal Directive” which clearly says that “better a dead civilian hostage or soldier than taken alive” to avoid engaging in a prisoners swap with the Palestinian resistance. 

Finally, Hamas rejects the accusations of mass rape:

The suggestion that the Palestinian fighters committed rape against Israeli women was fully denied including by the Hamas Movement. A report by the Mondoweiss news website on Dec. 1, 2023, among others, said there is lack of any evidence of “mass rape” allegedly perpetrated by Hamas members on Oct. 7 and that Israel used such allegation “to fuel the genocide in Gaza”.

For these reasons, Hamas calls for a “fair and independent inquiry [to] prove the truth of our narrative and … the scale of lies and misleading information in the Israeli side”.

The next section is a sort of primer on Hamas. It explains that the organisation is engaged in a struggle against “the Zionist project” and its occupation of Palestine (which in other documents Hamas identifies as the post-1967 Occupied Territories) — i.e., not Jews or even Israel as such.

The Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas” is a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means. Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. 

Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.

The document then explains Hamas’s right to resistance under international law:

The Hamas Movement according to international laws and norms is a national liberation movement that has clear goals and mission. It gets its legitimacy to resist the occupation from the Palestinian right to self-defense, liberation and self-determination. Hamas has always been keen to restrict its fight and resistance with the Israeli occupation on the occupied Palestinian territory, yet, the Israeli occupation did not abide by that and committed massacres and killings against the Palestinians outside Palestine.

We stress that resisting the occupation with all means including the armed resistance is a legitimized right by all norms, divine religions, the international laws including the Geneva Conventions and its first additional protocol and the related UN resolutions e.g. The UN General Assembly Resolution 3236, adopted by the 29th session of the General Assembly on Nov. 22, 1974 which affirmed the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine, including the right to self-determination and the right to return to “their homes and property from where they were expelled, displaced and uprooted”.

Finally, the document outlines Hamas’s demands:

Based on that we call for the following: 

1. The immediate halt of the Israeli aggression on Gaza, the crimes and ethnic cleansing committed against the entire Gaza population, to open the crossings and allow the entry of the humanitarian aid into Gaza including the reconstruction tools. 

2. To hold the Israeli occupation legally accountable for what it caused of human suffering towards the Palestinian people, and to charge it for the crimes against civilians, infrastructure, hospitals, educational facilities, mosques and churches. 

3. The support of the Palestinian resistance in the face of the Israeli occupation with all possible means as a legitimized right under the international laws and norms. 

The organisation also urges an international investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into crimes committed in Gaza and the rest of occupied Palestine:

Despite having doubts [about the commitment of Western countries to justice], we still urge the ICC Prosecutor and his team to immediately and urgently come to occupied Palestine to look into the crimes and violations committed there, rather than merely observing the situation remotely or being subject to the Israeli restrictions.

***

Make of the above what you want — and, as noted, take it with a grain of salt. I’ll simply limit myself to saying that there’s something very topsy-turvy about terrorist-designated (at least in the West) organisations like Hamas, or even Ansar Allah in Yemen, appealing to international law and institutions while the Western nations that created those international legal institutions systematically disregard them. It’s hard to imagine a more telling example of the crumbling of the Western-led order.

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Thomas Fazi

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Twitter: @battleforeurope 

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