Why Hamas believed the status quo was more dangerous than its 7 October gamble
Sami Al-Arian writes in Middle East Eye on 7 October 2026:
he 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.
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.