What Was Hamas Thinking?

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior political leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, awoke Saturday morning to news of a bloodbath. Hamas’s military commanders, who are based in Gaza, had beeen so determined to keep secret their plan for a pre-dawn invasion of Israel that they’d hidden the details and the timing of the offensive even from the organization’s political leaders—including Abu Marzouk, who lives in exile in Doha, Qatar. He’d gone to sleep anticipating nothing, he told us, in a phone interview. “All of Hamas’s leaders who are not military ones received the news early Saturday morning,” Abu Marzouk said. The claim was plausible: given the penetration of Israeli intelligence services and the surveillance typically surrounding exiled Hamas leaders, it would have been unwise to give Abu Marzouk foreknowledge of the assault.

Hamas’s attack has introduced a dangerous new stage in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas fighters and other militants gunned down more than twelve hundred Israelis—many of them civilians. And more than a hundred and fifty hostages were captured. The Israeli government has retaliated by cutting off food, fuel, and water to Gaza’s two million residents. The Israeli military has begun levelling entire neighborhoods with air strikes, causing nineteen hundred deaths so far, and tens of thousands of ground troops may soon be deployed on a mission to eliminate Hamas as an organization.

Why had Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, undertaken this assault now, for so little tangible gain and with such a foreseeably grave cost to Palestinian civilians? So far, Hamas’s military leaders have mainly spouted propaganda. (“This is the day of the great revolution to end the last occupation!,” Mohammed al-Deif, the leader of Hamas’s military wing, declared in a statement.) On October 12th, we spoke with Abu Marzouk—a long-time Hamas political leader who had been at the forefront of its efforts to reach out to the West—in the hope of getting a clearer understanding of the group’s strategic thinking.

He told us that he’d been taken aback by the success of the assault: Hamas fighters had bulldozed about two dozen holes through the security barrier surrounding Gaza, and had penetrated more than twenty Israeli towns and villages. He said that Hamas’s leaders had expected the Israeli military units deployed around Gaza to be “the strongest divisions, and the most trained,” with “a lot of information and fortifications,” as well as assistance from “intelligence officers who know a lot about our movements.” Instead, he said, Israeli fighters had retreated in confusion. “We never expected that,” he said.

Abu Marzouk’s professions of surprise matched the agonized assessments of Israel’s military leaders. But his comments about Israeli failures were also clearly tactical, intended to rally Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza. He further claimed—this time, against all evidence—that Hamas fighters hadn’t executed civilians or committed atrocities. Such violence may have been done, he suggested, by Palestinian militants and civilians who had followed Hamas fighters through openings in the security wall.

Abu Marzouk emphasized that, though he’d been unaware of the final details, he and other Hamas political leaders had authorized the attack’s over-all strategy, including its scale and ambition. “The soldiers are the ones who plan, execute, and so on, but they abide by the general policies put forth by our political bureau,” he said. “We were surprised by the date but not by the actions.” He was hazier on the question of timing. He said at one point that Hamas’s military branch, the Qassam Brigades, had decided to invade mere hours before the security barrier was breached. Yet, at other moments in the interview, he referred to “a plan that had been prepared for years.” The attack “was not something that the Qassam could undertake five years ago,” he explained. “They were trained and prepared to do all of this. This wasn’t a spontaneous thing.”

While we spoke, Israeli air strikes were escalating and troops were massing on the Gaza border, and Abu Marzouk appeared eager to open negotiations over the release of hostages. He declared that Hamas was ready to release any women, children, or elderly captives, in addition to citizens of other countries—if Israel ceased its military campaign. “The innocent people who were imprisoned, we will not keep them,” he told us. (Whether Hamas’s military leaders concur remains to be seen.) He indicated that Hamas might seek to swap some Israeli soldiers for Palestinians being held in Israeli jails, but added, “It’s too early to talk about swaps.”

A spokesman for Hamas’s military wing had said that if Israel bombed Gazan homes without first warning occupants to flee, the group would broadcast video of civilian hostages being executed. Abu Marzouk retracted that threat. “That’s a mistake—we can’t execute hostages,” he told us. He said that four captives had died already—Israeli soldiers captured at the Erez border crossing—but they had been killed by an Israeli air strike, not by Hamas fighters. He said, “Let the situation calm down and the bombardment stop for us to be able to differentiate the prisoners from various factions. They are a very big number.” Abu Marzouk went on, “Let us stop the war and everything can be discussed on this issue.”

Gazan civilians have little chance to express objections to the high price they’re now paying for Hamas’s aggression. The organization’s tight control over Gaza leaves little room for dissent or criticism. But, in a telephone call from Gaza, Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist based in Gaza City, said that the difference in attitude between Hamas leaders and other Gazans was clear: “The Palestinian people in Gaza have a lot to lose. Most Palestinians don’t want to die, and they don’t want to die in this ugly way, under rubble. But an ideological organization like Hamas believes that to die for a just cause is much better than living this meaningless life.”

Abu Marzouk’s family lives in the Gazan city of Rafah, and one of his brothers, Youssef, was killed this week in an air strike. Abu Marzouk deflected talk about his personal loss and insisted that Gazans accepted such sacrifices: “The Palestinians are ready to pay an even higher price for their freedom.”

Abu Marzouk, who is seventy-two, was born three years after the state of Israel. Raised by illiterate refugee parents who had fled to Rafah, he was bookish and religious, and as a young man he committed himself to the Muslim Brotherhood. He moved to the United States in 1982, where he earned a Ph.D. in engineering. After Hamas, a militant offshoot of the Brotherhood, first emerged, in 1987, Abu Marzouk became one of its leaders, regularly flying back and forth between the U.S. and the Middle East. In 1995, he was detained upon arrival at J.F.K. Airport and held for more than a year, in solitary confinement, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, in Manhattan. After a long court battle, he fought off extradition to Israel, where he faced charges of abetting terrorism; in 1997, the U.S. State Department arranged his deportation to Jordan. (Later that year, the U.S. designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.)

After the attacks this past weekend, a number of analysts, including some close to Hamas, have suggested that the group deliberately lulled the Israeli security forces into a false sense of security. In the past few years, Hamas had appeared increasingly willing to moderate its most hard-line positions and to strike deals with Israel, in order to better the lives of Gaza residents. In 2017, Abu Marzouk had helped promote a Hamas policy document that avoided the aggressive antisemitism of the organization’s original charter, which had called for the obliteration of the Jewish state. Hamas has lately prevented other militants or civilians within Gaza from attempting to attack Israeli forces across the border, effectively entering into a quiet security arrangement with Israel, even as it has denounced the Palestinian Authority for its more open collaboration. During recent escalations of violence involving the hard-line Palestinian faction Islamic Jihad, Hamas fighters conspicuously stood aside as Israeli forces wiped out the military commanders of its ostensible ally.

Through intermediaries, meanwhile, Hamas has reached agreements with Israel that brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in Qatari grants for poor families, provided greater electricity to residents, expanded fishing rights off the coast of Gaza, and increased the number of permits for Gaza residents to work in Israel. As recently as 2020, Hamas committed to participate in Palestinian national elections; this plan fell apart not because of Hamas but because of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, whose leaders denounced Israel’s refusal to allow elections in East Jerusalem.

Had these apparent gestures of compromise all been part of a ruse to buy time while Hamas prepared a brutal assault? Abu Marzouk insisted that these efforts at negotiation and coexistence had been genuine. He blamed Israel and the Western powers for thwarting Hamas’s overtures. He told us, “We rolled down all of the pathways to get some of our rights—not all of them. We knocked on the door of reconciliation and we weren’t allowed in. We knocked on the door of elections and we were deprived of them. We knocked on the door of a political document for the whole world—we said, ‘We want peace, but give us some of our rights’—but they didn’t let us in.” He added, “We tried every path. We didn’t find one political path to take us out of this morass and free us from occupation.”

There is some evidence to support Abu Marzouk’s narrative. In recent years, Hamas had appeared willing to coexist with the Jewish state. But, as Abu Marzouk acknowledged to me, Hamas also never abandoned core demands such as full Palestinian independence and the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. Nor did the group relinquish its weapons. “But we didn’t mislead anyone,” he told us. “We never hid these slogans.”