What Does Hamas Actually Want?

Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 fundamentally reshaped the perception of the militant group, which had been thought by Israel to be veering away from violent confrontation. But it has not always been clear what Hamas actually sought to accomplish strategically with its assault. And with Israel attempting to destroy the organization— so far unsuccessfully — its role in the future of a devastated Gaza is far from assured. For perspective on Hamas’s motivations and tactics, I spoke with Leila Seurat, author of the book The Foreign Policy of Hamas.

We’re about three months into the war in Gaza. But despite Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion, which have killed more than 23,000 people, Hamas continues to fire rockets into Israel, and its leadership has not been eradicated. Certainly the group’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, is still alive. From Hamas’s perspective, has this whole thing been, in a twisted way, a win? 
Yeah, I think we can talk about a kind of victory. We need to recall Hamas’s first objectives and think about how it is really a victory concerning those first objectives.

Just after October 7, Hamas leaders declared three main objectives. The first was to capture Israeli soldiers in order to achieve a prisoner exchange. The second was to respond to attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank and to protect Al-Aqsa Mosque from settlers. The Hamas leaders, if you remember, claimed to have acted on behalf of Al-Aqsa, which is why the operation was called Al-Aqsa Flood. The third objective was putting the Palestinian cause at the center of international concerns and preventing the consolidation of regional agreements between Israel and Arab countries.

There are other kinds of objectives that relate to long-term strategy:  weakening Israel’s military apparatus, physically encircling the state of Israel on different fronts, targeting Israel from Lebanon. Another aim, at the level of public opinion, is to raise international awareness of the plight and injustice of the Palestinians. So I would say you have different kinds of objectives: the three I first mentioned and then the more broad, long-term strategy of the movement.

Now we can look at the results. The first objective — the prisoners — I think it’s too early to say. A second agreement between Israel and Hamas has been blocked now that Israel has killed Saleh al-Arouri. But for the other objectives, we can assess that yes, it’s a kind of victory. Even more — I would say that the results have been above Hamas’s expectations. At the regional level, the plan worked very well because the strategy of uniting the front has involved not only the West Bank and Lebanon but also Iraq and Yemen.

Yeah, although Hamas might have thought that Hezbollah and Iran would immediately instigate a new war, which hasn’t happened, at least not yet. 
But I think their objective is not to have a war in the traditional sense. I think they just only want to see different forces surrounding Israel and giving Israel difficulty. This is working, and it’s working very well, I think. For me, it’s quite clear that this will lead to a rebalancing shift against Israel.

Much of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed. Do you think on October 7, that’s what Hamas expected to happen — this level of Israeli response?
No, I don’t think so. If we put ourselves in Hamas’s shoes, I think we have to recognize that the plan didn’t go as they expected. Because one, Hamas didn’t know about the Nova Music Festival, which was acknowledged by Israeli police. Two, they did not expect to take the Erez Crossing so easily. This situation quickly allowed civilians to join the battlefield. It was a mess at the end.

I know Hamas is not one voice speaking in unison here. But what do they want to happen now? What does the end game of this conflict look like to them? Israel has said that Hamas can have no role in the leadership of Gaza — it has to be controlled by someone else. What does Hamas say to that?
I think it was last week when Ismail Haniyeh said in a speech, three times in a row, that every single person who thinks that Hamas can be eradicated and removed from any kind of deal or solution is — they say wahm, or Sarab, in Arabic. It means that it’s unrealistic, that it’s a kind of illusion. The day al-Aruri was killed, he gave a speech, and he repeated this too. Hamas has said it many times. For them, it’s like there is no way anyone can put them out of the game.

I think what Hamas would like to see is first a ceasefire as soon as possible to stop the massacre. Second, I think they want to obtain the best possible deal in negotiations, which will follow the ceasefire, meaning to exchange “all the prisoners for all.” The best deal would be, of course, to include Ahmad Sa‘adat and Marwan Barghouti. That would be an additional victory for them. There is no doubt that the deal would sanctify the fact of victory on the ground, which they have achieved, and nobody can say otherwise.

Let’s say they get what they want in terms of a ceasefire and prisoner negotiations. Then what? 
The day after?

Yeah. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, obviously. But I’m trying to figure out how they see it.
I think the Biden administration knows that Hamas cannot be beaten, and so they’re going to deal with Hamas, even though they will not recognize them. Biden may be waiting out Benjamin Netanyahu so he can work more with Yoav Gallant or someone else — it seems like he has already started to plan with Gallant. I don’t know if you noticed, but Gallant said there will be Palestinians controlling their own security apparatus. He has distinguished himself from Netanyahu, and there is huge conflict between all of them in the military apparatus.

If a deal happens, it’ll be a government of technocrats. A government of technocrats means, concretely, that Hamas is not in the government. But it’s a way of saying that they’re part of the deal.

In 2014, Hamas made a deal with Fatah for this kind of government. They’ve been talking about technocratic governments for I would say a decade. They know that for a government to be recognized, it will not include any official Hamas figures, and they don’t have any problem with that. They will agree on it, but they want to be part of the reconstruction first.

So in this scenario, Hamas is de facto part of the government and Israel has been left more vulnerable. Is Hamas content with that, even if they don’t destroy Israel altogether? 
Yes, of course. Hamas has been a really pragmatic movement since 2005, when they decided to be part of the electoral process before the victory of 2006.

There are many, many cases of this. The reconciliation agreements of  2005, 2006 — the prisoner agreement, etc. All the reconciliation agreements since then. Even in their own documents — the general policies published in 2017 recognized the borders of ’75. We shouldn’t see them as if they’re playing a double game. For them and for all the Palestinians, it’s a liberation struggle. But they’re engaging with armed struggle and negotiations and politics at the same time. For them, there is no contradiction, and they’re working on all the different fronts.

What does liberation look like to Hamas?
For Hamas, and for the Palestinians, it can be either a two-state solution or a one-state solution. If you ask this question to a Hamas leader, he would say, “I don’t have the answer, because I’m not the one who decides. I’m not going to talk about what the Palestinians will want in the future. We’re just dealing with the national liberation struggle at the moment.”

So there’s not necessarily a clearly defined goal. It’s about getting to a better position day by day.
Of course. You know why? Because on the Israeli side, there is no clear position. Sometimes they talk about achieving an agreement, but they don’t know what this agreement would look like. Most of the time they say that they don’t want the Palestinians to have a state. There is no clear vision.

You wrote a recent essay in Foreign Affairs about the fact that the Hamas leadership in Gaza, even before October 7, was getting more powerful compared to the leadership in foreign capitals like Doha. How are these two factions aligned or not aligned now, do you think? Are they on the same page, and do they want the same things?
I think they want the same thing. But they have disagreements, as in any political organization. That might be sometimes seen as ideological, but it doesn’t mean that one guy is more moderate than this other guy. It’s just competing for a position in an organization. I don’t think Hamas is more divided than any other organization. Of course, where you sit influences the way you see things. I would say that there are no ideological differences, but that Hamas in Gaza has regained the political supremacy within the movement to the point that it is now leading the whole movement, on the battlefield and also on the communication level.

This is pretty new. If you look at the conflict, the al-Qassam brigades were not very strong on the media side. Now you have all these videos from the battlefield every day. This also explains the gap between the two. It’s not an ideological gap; it’s the fact that everything is concentrated into Gaza.

I wonder whether there’s anger in some corners at Hamas for instigating this latest round of horrible violence. Maybe not right now, but when the rebuilding effort begins. It’s not exactly easy to reconstruct the vast majority of the buildings that have been destroyed or damaged. Do you think there’ll be some blowback among the population there?
It’s obviously a monumental cost for the Palestinians, but I think they’re committed to this national liberation struggle. Until now, the Palestinians have not held Hamas responsible for the massacre, as Israel had hoped. I don’t know if you noticed a recent poll in opinion published by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. It recently showed that they’re unanimous in the defense of the Palestinian resistance.

Of course, as you said, the support does not mean that the situation cannot evolve over time, I think particularly in the context of a disease, epidemics. If the deportation of Gazans becomes concrete and implemented, of course Palestinians will be fed up and Hamas will lose everything it has achieved — of course. But for the time being, the massacres have damaged Israel’s reputation in what seems to be an irreversible manner. Legally speaking, also, we should remember that since Israel is the occupying power and the blockade of the Gaza Strip is still considered to be under the control of the organization, it is Israel that is, legally speaking, responsible for the civilians in the Gaza Strip.

It seems as though Hamas could have accomplished many of its goals without all the bloodshed of October 7, which then led to this huge barrage on Gaza. That’s what confuses me. With the Gilad Shalit thing, they kidnapped one person, and they got a thousand prisoners in exchange. It was a great deal for them.
They didn’t want to have civilians. I’m 100 percent sure about this. Hamas in Doha said it’s a burden for them. You can believe them or not. However, I think we can say that with the hostage issue, they managed to transform what was a burden into something positive for them.

We have to recognize that at the international level, October 7 was a success. It has brought the two-state solution back to the top of the international agenda. Western countries’ commitment to Israel is becoming extremely costly, even in the U.S.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.