What Is Hamas? Who Leads It? What’s Its Position on Ending the War?

With its exceptionally brutal attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip on Oct 7, 2023, the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas provoked a major new war. After nearly two years of fighting, much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble, the Hamas-run health ministry says more than 64,000 Palestinians have died, and a United-Nations backed monitor has declared a famine in part of the territory. Israel’s military has targeted a succession of Hamas leaders and is preparing an assault on the strip’s de facto capital, Gaza City, in what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described as a final push to topple the group. Hamas says it won’t bow to Israel’s demand that it disarm as a condition for ending the war. Its goal is to survive in order to continue pursuing Israel’s destruction.

Hamas, an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, began as a spinoff of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist religious, social and political movement. The group was founded in the impoverished and overcrowded Gaza Strip in 1987 during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, territories Israel captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Hamas drew popularity from its network of charities, which address poverty as well as health-care and educational needs, and its uncompromising rejection of Israel and promise to return Palestinians displaced from there.