Three years after October 7, is supporting Palestine humanity’s litmus test?
Mouin Rabbani writes in The New Arab on 9 October 2026:
Three years after the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led offensive into southern Israel, the motivations and objectives of the attack remain unclear.
It is now a matter of record that negotiations between Hamas and Israel, mediated primarily by Egypt and Qatar, were ongoing throughout 2023 and had reached an advanced stage. The negotiators had agreed on a text and were on the cusp of producing an agreement, but at the last moment Israel’s leadership got cold feet.
The various warnings Israel received during the Autumn of 2023 were primarily intended to persuade the Israeli government to accept what its negotiators had agreed to, because the alternative would be renewed hostilities. The Israeli security establishment responded with a proposal to conduct a wave of assassinations against the Palestinian leadership in the Gaza Strip, but this was rejected by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the grounds that the status quo had served Israel well for many years and should therefore be indefinitely prolonged.
Were the Palestinians seeking to compel Israel to stop dithering and consummate the agreement on the table? Was the Hamas leadership abandoning a process in which it lost faith, instead seeking leverage in the form of captured Israeli soldiers to force Israel into an exchange of prisoners? Or was it determined to shatter the status quo irrevocably?
It is difficult to answer this question with confidence because the October attacks succeeded beyond Hamas’s expectations. Israel was caught completely unprepared, its forces collapsed like a house of cards, and the resulting carnage eliminated the prospect of a renewal of the negotiations.
Hamas acted unilaterally, and it appears doubtful that it anchored its initiative in an expectation that its regional partners, with whom it had not coordinated, would join its campaign. More likely, it anticipated a furious Israeli response that, albeit on a larger scale than previous Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip, would, like them, eventually run its course. This also shaped Hamas’s strategic approach, and there is little evidence it seriously prepared for alternative scenarios.
Israel’s calculations were of course entirely different. If in October 1973 it could at least ascribe its failures to a coordinated operation by two powerful regular armies supplied by the Soviet superpower, in 2023 it faced a more severe crisis. The unprecedented attacks were conducted within its own boundaries, and were administered by a modestly armed militia operating from a besieged, postage-stamp-sized territory Israel had dominated since the 1960s.