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Hamas Actually Believed It Would Conquer Israel
(Ha'aretz) Shlomi Eldar - I flew to Cairo to meet Gazans who fled from the war, some of them old friends. Sufyan Abu Zaydeh, 64, former minister of prisoner affairs in the Palestinian Authority, had been living in Jabalya. He said that when he saw a military jeep go by his home, carrying a woman abducted from Israel, and saw how dozens of jubilant local residents surrounded it, "I knew that Gaza was finished....I told my wife that the Israelis were going to run over us with tanks and that they would destroy everything....They will level all of Gaza." "There were many statements by Hamas before Oct. 7, and we in Fatah would laugh. For example, someone from Hamas wrote on Facebook: 'Remember, in another few months the al-Qassam men will get to Ashkelon, enter the jail and free all the prisoners.' That was the atmosphere. It was hard for us to grasp that they believed that with 3,000, 5,000 or even 10,000 armed militants they would conquer Israel. That's insane. But when you believe that God is sending you to do his bidding, there's no one to argue with. The signs were out there the whole time." For the past two years, the Hamas leadership had been talking about implementing "the last promise" - a divine promise regarding the end of days, when all human beings will accept Islam. But outside the hard core of the Hamas leadership, talk of an apocalyptic showdown was considered no more than a pipe dream, intended to serve the PR purposes of Sinwar in order to divert public discussion away from the distress of Gazans. Only a few realized that these were not just fantasies but a concrete plan. Another friend whom I met in Cairo is 60, a former high-ranking figure in Fatah, who left Gaza a month ago to save his family. He said the entire Hamas leadership had been taken captive by the Sinwar group's deranged idea of an all-out battle. "So strongly did they believe in the idea that Allah was with them, and that they were going to bring Israel down, that they started dividing Israel into cantons, for the day after the conquest. One day, a well-known Hamas figure calls and tells me with pride and joy that they are preparing a full list of committee heads for the cantons that will be created in Palestine. He offers me the chairmanship of the Zarnuqa committee, where my family lived before 1948."