Hamas group explained: Here’s what to know about the group behind the deadly attack in Israel

What is Iran’s relationship with Hamas?

Hamas has had ties to Iran for decades, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In the early 1990s, the Iranian regime hosted conferences as a “counterweight to the ongoing Arab-Israeli peace process” at which Hamas delegates “began developing high-level contacts in Iran.”

In 1992, Israel began deporting Hamas leaders to Lebanon. Iran and Hezbollah, a Tehran-backed Islamist militant group and Lebanese political party, hosted Hamas members and taught them how to build suicide bombs. According to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s analysis, Iran began “sending the group up to $50 million annually.”

In recent years, Iran has provided military hardware to Hamas, particularly missiles, according to research by the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan research institute in Washington. Iranian officials also disclosed that some Hamas operatives went to Tehran for training and that Iran has shared missile technology with the group.

Current and former U.S. officials say the unprecedented scale and sophistication of Hamas’ recent attack indicate that Iran most likely played a significant role. The Iranian regime publicly praised Hamas for the surprise attack Saturday, including staging street celebrations. But a spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said on Monday that Tehran had played no role in the attack, dismissing such allegations as “politicized.”

When was the last conflict between Hamas and Israel?

Israel and Hamas waged an 11-day war in 2021 that killed 248 Palestinians and 12 Israelis. The conflict began when dozens of Palestinian families faced possible evictions from their homes in East Jerusalem’s historic neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah as part of a long legal battle with Jewish settlers. Clashes among Israeli police, Palestinian worshippers and nationalist Israelis led to days of violence in and around Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Hamas then launched more than 2,000 rockets primarily targeting Ashkelon and Tel Aviv. Many were brought down by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. For Israelis, the rocket barrage, which killed a dozen people, was the most deadly attack on their soil since 2014. 

The U.N. said that Israeli forces may have committed war crimes during the conflict and that Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket fire was also a clear violation of the rules of war. Some Palestinians praised Hamas for defending them, and a poll taken at the time found that 53% of Palestinians viewed Hamas as most capable of representing the Palestinian people. Only 14% chose Fatah. 

How has Hamas changed in its 30-year history? 

For decades, Hamas called for the destruction of Israel. In 2017, 30 years after its founding, the group issued a new charter that appeared to stop short of that goal. The document, known as the Hamas 2017 charter, was the first time the group had shown a willingness to accept a Palestinian state that would fall within the borders that existed in 1967, consisting of the West Bank, Gaza and all of Jerusalem. 

Hamas' charter describes the Palestinians as “a people who have been let down by a world that fails to secure their rights and restore to them what has been usurped from them, a people whose land continues to suffer one of the worst types of occupation in this world.”

The move was seen as an attempt by Hamas to improve its relations with the Egyptian government by breaking away from the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been outlawed in Egypt. Hamas, however, stuck to its hard-line refusal to acknowledge Israel’s existence, referring to it as a “Zionist entity,” or consider any previous Israeli-Palestinian peace deals, such as the Oslo Accords. Israel and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas both rejected the charter.