As we begin the fourth year of a war that has brought the near-total destruction of Gaza, calls for Hamas to surrender administrative authority and evacuate the Strip are intensifying. For Gaza to have any viable future, it is argued, the group’s political and military wings must be dismantled. While Hamas’s fate is a critical question, charting a meaningful path towards recovery is impossible without addressing the realities that gave rise to it in the first place.
What is happening today in Gaza is directly related to the origins of the Palestinian-Israeli question, which has little to do with any particular armed group. Hamas did not exist in 1948, when hundreds of Palestinian villages, including Naj and Huj, were depopulated and destroyed during the Nakba – the Palestinian catastrophe that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel – to make way for the establishment of Sderot, Or HaNer and numerous other Israeli cities and villages built upon their ruins. The group had not yet been established in 1967, when the Arab-Israeli War took place and Israel initiated its military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while simultaneously seizing and unilaterally annexing East Jerusalem—actions that actively set the stage for the broader Israeli settlement project.
In the following decades, the occupation profoundly affected Palestinian society. That, combined with growing religious influence—as the number of local mosques tripled from 200 to 600 between 1967 and 1987 — and a vacuum left behind by a fading secular nationalist leadership, prepared the ground for the rise of faith-based nationalist factions. The outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987 was a political turning point that directly triggered the creation of Hamas.
The group was established by a group of Palestinian men, including three prominent figures. Ibrahim al-Yazouri, was born in Bait Daras, near today’s Ashdod, and was just eight years old when soldiers of the Haganah killed members of his family and expelled the survivors to Khan Younis, south of Gaza City. Another founder, Abdulaziz al-Rantisi, was born in Yibna—a village near Jaffa whose ruins now sit beneath the Israeli city of Yavne.
He was only a year old when Israeli forces expelled his family to Khan Younis. Lastly, Ahmed Yassin, was born in al-Jura, a village near Ashkelon that was razed to the ground by the Israeli military. He was 12 years old, when he and his family had to flee their home and settle in al-Shati refugee camp on the Gaza coast.
Highlighting this history should not be misunderstood as an attempt to downplay Hamas’s responsibilities. However, the group’s actions cannot be separated from the historical context and the role the State of Israel has played throughout this process. Unlike the self-proclaimed ISIL (ISIS) and other groups that have emerged in recent years—which lack deep roots in local societies and rely on obsolete ideologies—Palestinian factions are deeply intertwined with local society and national identity.
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