Why Hamas believed the status quo was more dangerous than its 7 October gamble

The events of 7 October cannot be understood outside the long history of Palestinian dispossession, occupation, siege and struggle. They cannot be examined seriously by beginning with the premise that Palestinians must justify their right to resist a system that has dispossessed them for generations. That right is not in question. What is open to question is why Hamas chose this particular course of action at this particular moment, and whether the decision was rational given what its leaders knew and could reasonably have anticipated before 7 October. It also raises the question of whether it was the right strategic choice among the alternatives available to them, and what strategic assessment led them to take such an extraordinary risk. These questions are inevitably viewed through the devastation that followed. Gaza has endured a genocide , as concluded by Amnesty International , B'Tselem , the International Association of Genocide Scholars and the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry , while Human Rights Watch has documented extermination and acts of genocide. For three years, Gaza has suffered destruction and losses on a scale few could have imagined before 7 October. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Hindsight is no substitute for analysis. Rationality must first be judged on what decision-makers knew, feared and reasonably expected at the time. Whether the decision was ultimately correct is a different question, and one whose answer may still be premature. Hamas's internal discussions in the years preceding 7 October reveal a leadership increasingly convinced that the status quo itself had become a strategic threat. Most of the internal documents on which that picture rests, captured by the Israeli army in Gaza, have been published by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, an Israeli research centre tied to the military intelligence establishment, and they offer an insight into the thinking of Hamas's Gaza leaders in the years before the attacks. Five developments shaped that calculation : the siege of Gaza; the accelerating colonisation of the West Bank ; the struggle over Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque; Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons; and normalisation, particularly the prospect of a Saudi -Israeli agreement. Each of the five pointed to the same conclusion that time was not neutral. Waiting was itself a choice, and one that Hamas increasingly believed was steadily eliminating Palestinian options. Siege, settlers, Al-Aqsa Gaza came first. By 2023, the siege had lasted more than 16 years, and more than 2.2 million Palestinians were confined to a narrow coastal strip, with movement, trade, and economic and social life heavily restricted. Movement into and out of Gaza remained tightly controlled . Even before the current war, unemployment stood at around 44 percent in the second quarter of 2022, and youth unemployment exceeded 60 percent later that year. More than 80 percent of Gaza's population lived below the poverty line , and 1.2 million Palestinian refugees depended on emergency food assistance from Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, to meet their most basic needs. Hamas governed Gaza but could not end the siege. Periodic confrontations imposed costs on the Zionist regime but failed to alter the basic equation. Destruction was followed by limited reconstruction, negotiations produced temporary easing and the blockade remained. The choice, therefore, was never simply between war and peace. The existing situation itself involved continuing violence, strangulation and deterioration. The West Bank presented a different but equally urgent danger. Settlement expansion was steadily destroying what remained of the territorial basis for a Palestinian state. By 2023, roughly 750,000 Israeli settlers were living in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in settlements that are illegal under international law. The choice was never simply between war and peace. The existing situation itself involved continuing violence, strangulation and deterioration The government formed by Benjamin Netanyahu in late 2022 brought figures such as Bezalel Smotrich into positions of unprecedented influence over the West Bank. Smotrich had openly presented Palestinians with three choices: accept Israeli rule and domination without national aspirations, emigrate, or face deadly force if they resisted. For Hamas, the strategic implication extended beyond the settlements themselves. Time was not necessarily working in the Palestinians' favour. Every additional year brought greater territorial fragmentation, more Israeli control and fewer possibilities for reversing the process. Under such circumstances, strategic patience could eventually become strategic paralysis. Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa further raised the stakes. The May 2021 confrontation, Saif al-Quds, had demonstrated Al-Aqsa's extraordinary capacity to mobilise Palestinians, as well as Muslims worldwide, across geographical and political divisions. For Hamas, the confrontation represented something larger than another war between Gaza and the Zionist regime. It appeared to demonstrate the possibility of connecting Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank, Palestinians inside the 1948 territories , prisoners and the diaspora within a single national struggle. Events in 2022 and 2023 sharpened Hamas's fears for Al-Aqsa. Repeated Israeli incursions into Al-Aqsa, confrontations with worshippers and increasingly assertive demands by Israeli religious-nationalist forces concerning the compound raised fears that the existing arrangements were being gradually dismantled. The experience of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, first divided and then placed increasingly under Israeli control, provided an ominous precedent. For Hamas, another Palestinian red line appeared to be eroding. Prisoners and normalisation The prisoners added a fourth pressure. More than 5,000 Palestinians were being held in Israeli prisons before 7 October, including women and children, while more than 1,200 were detained without charge. The West wants Netanyahu gone - so Palestinians can be killed more quietly again Read More » Soon after becoming national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir began imposing additional restrictions on Palestinian prisoners. The history of prisoner exchanges offered a different lesson. The 1985 Jibril agreement secured the release of 1,150 prisoners held by Israel, and Hezbollah's exchanges with Israel in 2004 and 2008 reinforced the same principle. Most importantly for Hamas, the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange resulted in the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for a single captured Israeli soldier. The conclusion was difficult to miss. Prisoners created leverage where diplomacy often did not, so capturing Israeli soldiers belonged to an established strategic logic rather than being an objective invented on 7 October. The fifth development, normalisation, may have been the most consequential of all. By 2023, Hamas was increasingly concerned about a regional transformation that threatened to marginalise the Palestinian question altogether. The 2020 Abraham Accords had demonstrated that Arab governments could normalise relations with Israel without resolving the Palestinian issue, and the Biden administration was now pursuing the far more consequential prize of normalisation between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The symbolism became unmistakable on 22 September 2023, barely two weeks before 7 October. Standing before the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu presented his vision of a "new Middle East", centred on normalisation and an economic corridor linking Asia and Europe through the region. The map he displayed effectively showed historic Palestine as Israel, without a Palestinian state. For Hamas, the danger that Palestine would be strategically bypassed altogether was obvious. This was the context in which Hamas made its decision. Gaza remained besieged, the West Bank was being colonised, Al-Aqsa appeared increasingly threatened, thousands of prisoners remained incarcerated, and normalisation threatened to push Palestine further towards the margins of regional politics. None of this proves that 7 October was the only viable response, but it demonstrates that the operation emerged from an identifiable political and strategic calculation. Judging rationality Rationality has to be judged ex ante, not ex post. After witnessing Gaza's devastation, it is tempting to reason backwards and conclude that any decision followed by such destruction must have been irrational. That is not how strategic decisions can fairly be evaluated. Before weighing Hamas's judgment, one distinction must be clear. Responsibility for the genocide and destruction of Gaza lies with the Zionist regime and those who enabled it. The question here is whether Hamas adequately anticipated the response and incorporated it into its strategic calculations, which is a different matter from whether Palestinian resistance caused Israel's conduct. Hamas certainly expected a massive Israeli assault . No serious leader could have believed that Israel would absorb an operation involving the breaching of the Gaza perimeter, the overrunning of military positions, the killing of hundreds of Israeli soldiers and settlers, and the capture of a large number of Israelis without launching a major war. Hamas must also have expected extensive American support, since previous Israeli wars against Gaza provided ample evidence of both. The war on Iran cracked the US-led regional order. The Mecca pact could deal the final blow Read More » Still, foreseeing a severe military assault is vastly different from predicting the unprecedented war that followed: a genocidal campaign extending across years; the displacement of nearly an entire population; the physical destruction of vast portions of Gaza; and a campaign of starvation and deprivation carried out despite global scrutiny. American support itself was entirely predictable, but its scale and duration were without precedent. Washington continued providing the most sophisticated weapons and destructive munitions, intelligence and diplomatic protection despite the mounting Palestinian death toll and growing international condemnation. Major European governments largely remained aligned with Israel and the United States, while the response of Arab and Muslim governments remained extraordinarily weak. Each of these bears directly on Hamas's assessment before 7 October. Iran , Hezbollah and the broader Axis of Resistance raise a separate question. Hamas had spent years developing these relationships and seeking greater coordination among the region's resistance movements. After Saif al-Quds in 2021, its internal discussions increasingly reflected an interest in connecting the Palestinian struggle to a wider regional confrontation with the Zionist regime. The documentary record does not support the simplistic claim that Hamas launched 7 October because Iran or Hezbollah had promised to enter an all-out regional war. Hamas sought deeper coordination, discussed multiple fronts and several possible scenarios, and understood that pressure from Lebanon and elsewhere could complicate Israel's military calculations. Its leaders were actively communicating with Iran and Hezbollah, but communication is not a binding military alliance. Equally, the evidence does not establish that Iran or Hezbollah knew the timing and operational details of 7 October beforehand, much less that Hamas possessed a guarantee that either would immediately enter a full-scale war. Miscalculation and alternatives If Hamas launched the operation expecting Iran and Hezbollah to immediately enter an all-out regional war, then a central assumption of its strategy failed almost at once. The available evidence points instead towards an expectation of gradual regional pressure in the form of additional fronts that would impose military and strategic costs on Israel without necessarily producing immediate total war. That did happen, although not on the scale necessary to prevent Gaza's devastation. Hezbollah opened a support front from Lebanon, the Houthis intervened from Yemen , Iraqi groups attacked American positions, and Iran itself eventually entered into direct confrontation with Israel and the United States after coming under attack . Hamas did have alternatives, and more importantly, Yahya Sinwar had already tried several of them The strategic miscalculation, if there was one, lay in failing to anticipate the convergence of several adverse developments: an Israeli assault that crossed virtually every previous threshold; sustained western military and diplomatic support despite mounting evidence of genocide; the extraordinary weakness of Arab and Muslim governments; limited coordination among the Axis of Resistance, whose members were surprised by the timing of the operation; and the failure of a major uprising to materialise in the West Bank or among Palestinians inside the Green Line. Hamas could reasonably have anticipated several of these obstacles individually. Failing to forecast all of them occurring at this magnitude, all at once, proved to be a serious blind spot. Every judgment about 7 October has to answer another question: compared with what? Hamas did have alternatives, and more importantly, Yahya Sinwar had already tried several of them. After assuming leadership in Gaza in 2017, he pursued reconciliation with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas