Why did Hamas attack Israel on October 7?
At the time of writing this, 520 Israeli soldiers had been killed and 12,500 wounded, and over 3,000 have sustained life-altering injuries.
Meanwhile, Gaza has been devastated. The Palestinian civilian population has suffered nearly 100,000 casualties. Estimates so far put the killed at 27,000, 70% of whom are women and children. About 80% of buildings in northern Gaza have been destroyed, while some 70% of all urban structures have been levelled. More than 1.8 million civilians have been internally displaced with little to no supplies of food, fuel, water, medicines and other basic necessities of life.
The destruction brings us back to the decision to attack Israel. What did Hamas plan to achieve? Sceptics say Israeli casualties pale in comparison to what the Gazans have had to suffer. So, what is the endgame? What are the scenarios going forward?
A child in Gaza born in 2007 has already gone through four wars (leaving out several other aerial ground attacks outside of those wars) and if she is still alive, is witnessing the fifth genocidal war.
These are genuine questions, asked in good faith. But by focusing on the immediate and the everyday statistics they miss out on the broader picture, the history of the conflict, events that led to the attack and the second- and third-order effects of the current war.
Let’s begin with the simple recorded fact that life for the Palestinians pre-October 7 was a daily hell of arrests, house demolitions, settler violence and raids that regularly killed and injured Palestinians not just in Gaza but also the Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank and East Jerusalem).
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs, from 2008 to May 2023 (before the attack), 6,735 Palestinians were killed by Israeli state and non-state violence — 5360 in Gaza and 1331 in the West Bank.
By comparison, 314 Israelis were killed for the same period — 52 in Gaza, 141 in the West Bank and 120 in Israel.
During the same period, 157,415 Palestinians were injured in Israeli violence — 62,998 in Gaza, 94,368 in the West Bank and 91 in Israel. For the same period, 6,364 Israelis were injured, 3,940 in Israel, 2,318 in the West Bank and 106 in Gaza. The complete data, its sources, definitions of fatalities and injuries and methodology can be accessed here.
A child in Gaza born in 2007 has already gone through four wars (leaving out several other aerial ground attacks outside of those wars) and if she is still alive, is witnessing the fifth genocidal war.
According to Defence for Children International, “Each year approximately 500-700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12 years old, are detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system. The most common charge is stone throwing.” Complete statistics can be found here.
B’tselem, the Israeli NGO, Prisoner Support for Human Rights Association, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have detailed reports on Palestinian prisoners (all categories) in the Israeli prison system. Many are also detained without any charge under administrative detention. Many more are kept in military facilities and the prison system does not have any records of such detentions. According to a November 20, 2023 report by B’tselem, “At the end of 2020, the IPS [Israel Prison Service] adopted a new policy and stopped providing B'Tselem with the requested figures. Instead, it has since published some data on the IPS website every three months. The first year this occurred (July 2020 through September 2021), the figures published were partial and therefore are not included here.”
2023 was the most violent year for West Bank Palestinians in terms of settler attacks. A Relief Web report says that even before the October 7 attack, “Israeli forces had already killed 234 Palestinians in the West Bank this year [2023], while settlers were responsible for nine more killings.”
This slow, structured violence has many other menacing aspects: state-sponsored illegal settlements on Palestinian lands, destruction of their orchards, control of water supply, military and police checkpoints that dot OPTs and make travel for Palestinians a daily nightmare, separate roads for Palestinians, separate license plates et cetera. These everyday hardships and humiliations are fully recorded by rights organisations, including such Israeli volunteers that belong to Machsom (Hebrew for checkpoint) Watch.
In November 2022, Israel elected a new Knesset with Benjamin Netanyahu putting together a coalition government that has been widely described as the most rightwing government in the history of Israel. Netanyahu included in the cabinet two extreme rightwing members, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, both illegal settlers who believe in forcing the Palestinians out of their lands.
Yesh Din (Volunteers for Human Rights) is an Israeli organisation working in Israel and the West Bank since 2006 and records incidents of settler violence. According to their stats, 2023 was the most violent year for West Bank Palestinians in terms of settler attacks. A Relief Web report says that even before the October 7 attack, “Israeli forces had already killed 234 Palestinians in the West Bank this year [2023], while settlers were responsible for nine more killings.”
On the external front, Netanyahu openly stated that he had ensured Israel’s security by normalising with the Arab neighbourhood through the Abraham Accords. Efforts were afoot to normalise with Saudi Arabia to take the policy to the finish line. The approach was meant to make the Palestinian issue irrelevant. Israeli officials were also indicating that Arab states could take in the Palestinians to finally resolve this “problem.” In September last year, Netanyahu took a map of Israel to the United Nations and brandished it. It included the OPTs, Gaza and the entire Golan Heights as part of Israel, open evidence of Israel’s Eretz Yisrael policy.
It is instructive to recap, as I have noted in these pages before, that Eretz Yisrael has been a consistent motif since the formation of Israel. Even Yitzhak Rabin, who was killed for making concessions to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, is on record in his Knesset speech (barely a month before his assassination) that while Israel’s security required peace with the Palestinians, he (Rabin) did not consider state sovereignty for the Palestinian Authority. Read the full speech here.
This is the pre-October 7 ecosystem in which the Hamas attack happened. Hamas itself has stated that it launched the attack essentially as the culmination of long-building anger over Israeli policies, including recent outbreaks of violence at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the treatment of Palestinians, the expansion of Israeli settlements and Israel’s normalisation with Arab countries at the expense of the Palestinians.
Anyone who observes the conflict closely knows those are potent reasons, especially Israel’s policy to normalise with the Arab states without addressing the Palestinian conflict. However, equally clear is the fact that Hamas did not play a rash hand. It had been preparing for the war for a long time, building its capacity both for fighting the battles that would inevitably come to Gaza and sustaining that fight.
To that end, it created force asymmetry (forcing the Israel Defence Forces to fight on its own terrain and on its own terms). It knows that Israel has the advantage of an air force so it has spent years constructing a highly complex network of tunnels to create its own subterranean asymmetry. You rule one common, we rule the underground. As Mahmoud Ajrami, a veteran Palestinian fighter who has trained a generation of Gaza freedom fighters was reported to have said in 2021, “Bring the beast [IDF] to me, and we will slay it together.”
Netanyahu, who began with the resolve to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and destroy Hamas is now saying, as reported by the Israeli media, that “Let me be clear — Israel has no intention of displacing Gaza’s population.”
The decision involved making sacrifices. But the coin had to be flipped on a simple question: slow extermination and another Nakba (catastrophe) or a fight. Hamas chose the latter.
History tells us that we seek “clarity in war.” The questions I began with are geared towards finding clarity. But as Cathal Nolan argues, clarity “is something [war] does not always deliver.” Nor is victory about statistics: how many slain, how much materiel destroyed. Israel began its campaign confident that it will win. On Day 97, as I pen these lines, it is not so sure, with former Mossad Chief Yossi Cohen saying that “Hamas is more prepared than we expected”.
Similarly, away from the kinetic operations in Gaza, Israel’s war cabinet is facing internal divisions; the families of hostages are protesting every day; Netanyahu’s ratings, already low, have plummeted; Israel’s standing has taken a brutal hit across the world despite the US support; the US support itself is now coming with strings attached as President Joe Biden goes into campaign mode and his own ratings nosedive; South Africa has taken Israel to the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide; the war has expanded horizontally with Hezbollah, Houthis and militias in Iraq and Syria attacking Israel and US-linked interests and everyone is fearing a vertical escalation.
Netanyahu, who began with the resolve to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and destroy Hamas is now saying, as reported by the Israeli media, that “Let me be clear — Israel has no intention of displacing Gaza’s population.” He also says, now, that the “IDF will not permanently occupy Gaza.” On Tuesday, US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken stated at a press conference in Tel Aviv that peace could only come through an integrated, “regional approach that includes the pathway to a Palestinian state.”
“These goals are attainable, but only if they are pursued together,” he said. “This crisis has clarified that you [Israel] can’t have one without the other, and you can’t achieve either goal without an integrated, regional approach.”
The war that Hamas started in retaliation to decades of Israeli settler-colonial persecution of Palestinians is not over yet. But it has already become much bigger than just Gaza, albeit Gaza remains the epicentre.
So badly has Israel done on the social media front of this war, despite having billionaires behind it, that the Anti-Defamation League is now fighting the verb “Israeled” in the Urban Dictionary.
“The term ‘Israeled’ is used to signify claiming something that is not one’s own, in a hostile way,” Jonah Steinberg, director of the Anti-Defamation League for New England told The Times of Israel. “The implication is that Jews have no legitimacy in Israel,” said Steinberg. “The usage also suggests that Israel inherently represents unjust appropriation and that offensive behaviour typifies Israel.” This verb is now like Yeats’ decrepit age that has been tied to Israel as to a dog’s tail.
The war that Hamas started in retaliation to decades of Israeli settler-colonial persecution of Palestinians is not over yet. But it has already become much bigger than just Gaza, albeit Gaza remains the epicentre. This war has multiple kinetic and non-kinetic fronts now, many second- and third-order effects.
There are no clear answers to the endgame. There never are. But certain trends can be seen emerging. One is that it cannot be business as usual. The second, perhaps even more important is a growing realisation in Israel and among its supporters that the days of quick victories over Arabs are over.