It is not as though I was unaware that Hamas was a jihadist terrorist organisation. After all, I grew up in a town that was a prime target for rockets from Gaza, routinely fired by Hamas’s military wing. One of my biggest fears as a child during the Second Intifada was hearing ‘Allahu Akbar’ on a bus just before the explosion of a suicide bomber.
This bloody jihadist lust came from the very top of the chain of command
And yet, when I saw on October 7 the scale of brutality, in what became the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, I suddenly realised how little I, like most Israelis, had understood Hamas’s jihadism.
For years – on the right and left, from IDF intelligence to the prime minister’s office – there had been a thriving misconception that Hamas was becoming more moderate. Now we know that this was wishful thinking, combined with Hamas’s clever strategy of deception. Threatened by the presence of radical Islamist movements in Gaza such as Isis, and blinded by the hope that Hamas would mature, Israelis projected their liberal worldview onto jihadists, believing that Hamas was the lesser evil. This distracted us from Hamas’s ‘eliminationist’ and ‘genocidal anti-Semitism’.
Amos Harel, a prominent military correspondent for the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, recently published his influential investigative Hebrew-language book 06:29: Anatomy of a Failure, in which he outlines new evidence about the jihadist elements behind the October 7 attack. Harel recounts the testimony of Major General Amir Baram, then deputy chief of staff of the IDF, who joined the battle in Kibbutz Be’eri, where one of the worst massacres took place. Next to the body of a Hamas terrorist, Baram found a handwritten document, which he took with him. It was a letter written before the attack by a Hamas platoon commander to his subordinates. The letter praised jihad and martyrdom and explained that ‘the Jewish enemy’ is an incurable disease. It said the required treatment was ‘decapitations and the ripping out of hearts and livers.’
Gleeful mutilation and beheadings of victims were livestreamed by terrorists on October 7. There are still families searching for the heads of their loved ones, who had to be buried without them. Beheading was practised against children as well; Israel’s National Centre of Forensic Medicine presented, shortly after the attack, disturbing evidence of a 12-year-old girl who was shot in the head and then decapitated.
This bloody jihadist lust came from the very top of the chain of command. Harel cites two other operational orders for the October 7 attack. One, published in 2025 by Al Jazeera, was drafted by Mohammed Deif, the longtime commander of Hamas’s military wing and one of the principal architects of the attack. In it, Deif explained that the aim of the operation was ‘to humiliate the Jews and annihilate them at the hands of the servants of Allah.’
The second order was published in 2024 by the German newspaper Bild. Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, then commander of Hamas’s Gaza Brigade, gave his battalion commanders an order that opened with the following words: ‘With faith in the Promise of the End Times, and in Allah’s decisive support for His servants waging jihad, the leadership of the military wing has authorised the launch of the major military operation, Al-Aqsa Flood.’ Harel explains that ‘the Promise of the End Times’ – also known as the ‘Second Promise’ – is an Islamic prophecy, as understood within Hamas’s ideological framework, of an ultimate victory over the forces of infidels, involving the liberation of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the annihilation of the Jews.
Yet it seems that the West largely ignores the jihadist-religious core of the October 7 attack, and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more generally. Here in Britain, institutions primarily view it through a geopolitical lens, while showing remarkably little curiosity about what jihad meant to the men who crossed into Israel for a holy war.
Britain spent the weeks after October 7 debating whether ‘jihad’ really meant jihad. When the word was shouted at an Islamist rally in London, the Metropolitan Police told the public that it could also mean an inner spiritual struggle. Indeed, jihad, an Arabic term meaning ‘striving’ or ‘struggle’ in the service of God, can be a cute, peaceful struggle to fundraise for environmental projects. But it also has a long-established violent meaning: armed struggle for a religiously defined cause. Angry protesters waving jihadi flags shortly after the massacre probably should have rung more bells.
The sanitisation was sometimes literal. In the BBC’s infamous 2025 documentary Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone references to ‘the Jews’ were repeatedly rendered as ‘Israelis’ or ‘Israeli forces’, while ‘jihad’ became ‘battle’ or ‘resistance’. A woman who spoke of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar waging ‘resistance and jihad against the Jews’ appeared in the English subtitles as saying that he was merely ‘fighting and resisting Israeli forces’.
I understand the tendency to rationalise Hamas and jihadist movements using terms rooted in geopolitics or Western post-colonial guilt. But these are dangerous projections, and one day they will clash with a very brutal reality.
Palestinian affairs expert Dr Michael Milshtein, who served as head of the Palestinian arena in the IDF military intelligence directorate and was among the lone voices warning about the misconception surrounding Hamas, explained in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Globes: ‘The attempt to impose a rational logic on Hamas’s actions reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. Whenever someone asks me that, I tell them the parable of the frog and the scorpion.
‘The scorpion asks the frog to carry him across a river. The frog says: “You’ll sting me.” The scorpion replies: “Why would I? If you drown, I drown with you.” It sounds perfectly rational. But halfway across, the scorpion stings her. As they are both sinking, the frog asks: “Why did you do that?” And the scorpion answers: “Because I’m a scorpion”.’
Hamas leaders spent years openly discussing the theological and practical implications of ‘the Promise of the End Times’, which provided the ideological ground for the October 7 attack. This is the sobering lesson for all of us: listen to your enemies – and believe them.
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