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Hamas: Origins, Governance, and Life Under the Blockade

To understand Hamas is to understand that it did not emerge from a vacuum. It was born from a specific place, a specific moment, and a specific failure — the failure of decades of secular nationalist politics to end the occupation or return a single refugee to their home. That context does not excuse violence against civilians. It does, however, explain why a movement founded in the first weeks of the First Intifada grew, over the following three decades, into the governing authority of one of the most densely populated and heavily blockaded territories on earth.

Muslim Brotherhood Roots and the Founding of Hamas

Hamas — an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement — was founded in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a quadriplegic cleric who had spent years building a network of mosques, schools, and charitable associations in Gaza under the banner of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood had maintained a presence in Gaza since the 1950s, deliberately avoiding armed confrontation with Israel and focusing instead on da’wa — religious and social outreach. For years, Israeli military authorities tolerated, and according to several accounts quietly encouraged, this Islamist social infrastructure as a counterweight to the PLO. Former Israeli officials, including the late military commander Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, acknowledged facilitating the Brotherhood’s activities in Gaza during the 1970s.

When the First Intifada erupted in December 1987, Yassin and six associates — among them Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi — formally constituted Hamas as a distinct organization. Its founding charter, issued in 1988, fused Islamic nationalist ideology with explicitly antisemitic language drawn from European conspiracy literature, making it a document that human rights organizations and scholars across the political spectrum, including Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University, have described as both analytically useless as a guide to actual Hamas policy and morally indefensible in its content.

The 2006 Election Victory and Its Aftermath

Hamas’s decision to participate in electoral politics was itself a departure from its founding posture. In January 2006, running on a platform of clean governance and resistance, Hamas won a decisive majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council elections — 74 of 132 seats — in a poll that international observers, including the Carter Center, assessed as free and fair. The Fatah movement, discredited by years of corruption and the stalled Oslo process, was routed.

The international response was immediate and revealing. The United States, European Union, and Israel refused to recognize the Hamas-led government and suspended direct aid to the Palestinian Authority, conditioning engagement on Hamas meeting three demands: recognize Israel, renounce violence, and accept prior PLO agreements. Hamas refused. The resulting aid suspension caused an acute fiscal crisis in Gaza and set the stage for the political rupture to come.

By June 2007, after months of factional violence, Hamas forcibly seized full control of the Gaza Strip, expelling Fatah security forces. The Palestinian political geography split: Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas governed the West Bank under international recognition; Hamas governed Gaza under immediate siege. Israel and Egypt sealed Gaza’s borders. The blockade — imposed formally by Israel in 2007 and maintained, with varying degrees of Egyptian cooperation, ever since — has been described by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as a primary driver of Gaza’s economic collapse, and by the International Committee of the Red Cross as a collective punishment in violation of international humanitarian law.

The 2017 Document: A Revised Political Framework

In May 2017, Hamas published a new political document — not a replacement of the 1988 charter, but a supplement to it — titled A Document of General Principles and Policies. The shift in language was significant. The document dropped the explicit antisemitic passages of the 1988 charter and framed Hamas’s conflict as political rather than religious: “Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish,” it stated, “but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.”

More substantively, the 2017 document expressed acceptance of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders — the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem — as a “national consensus formula,” while explicitly not recognizing Israel’s legitimacy or abandoning the longer-term claim to historic Palestine. Analysts including Tamara Cofman Wittes of the Brookings Institution and Khaled Hroub, a Cambridge scholar who has written extensively on Hamas, read the document as a pragmatic repositioning rather than a ideological transformation. Israel and the United States rejected it as insufficient. Its practical impact on policy was limited, but it marked a documented shift in Hamas’s public political framework that any serious analysis of the movement must account for.

Governing Gaza: Authority, Coercion, and the Weight of the Blockade

Hamas has governed Gaza since 2007 as both a resistance movement and a state-like authority — a dual role that has produced internal contradictions documented by Palestinian and international human rights organizations alike. B’Tselem, Al-Haq, and Human Rights Watch have each documented Hamas’s suppression of political dissent, arbitrary detention of political opponents (including Fatah members and journalists), and the use of torture in Gaza detention facilities. The Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq has documented extrajudicial executions carried out by Hamas during periods of armed conflict. These abuses are not marginal; they are systematic and documented.

At the same time, to assess Hamas’s governance honestly requires accounting for the conditions under which that governance occurs. The blockade imposed after 2007 has, according to OCHA oPt data, reduced Gaza’s import capacity to a fraction of pre-blockade levels, produced unemployment rates consistently exceeding 40 percent (reaching 47 percent by 2018, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics), and made the territory dependent on international humanitarian assistance for basic food security. The World Health Organization has documented chronic shortages of medicines, medical equipment, and electricity — the power supply averaging between 4 and 12 hours per day for much of the blockade period — as direct consequences of restrictions on imports and fuel.

UNCTAD’s 2021 report on the Palestinian economy described Gaza as a territory whose economy has been “de-developed” — a term the late scholar Roger Owen applied to colonial economic arrangements — by nearly fifteen years of closure. In this environment, Hamas has maintained governance by a combination of political control, social service provision through affiliated charitable networks, and coercion. The charitable infrastructure, inherited partly from the Brotherhood’s pre-Hamas networks, has been a genuine source of social support for impoverished families — and, critics including Mkhaimar Abusada of Al-Azhar University Gaza have noted, a mechanism of political loyalty-building.

A Movement Embedded in Palestinian Political Reality

Hamas cannot be understood solely as a terrorist organization, as Western governments designate it, nor as a straightforward resistance movement, as its supporters claim. It is, more precisely, a governing authority with documented human rights violations, an armed wing with a documented record of attacks on Israeli civilians that constitute war crimes under international humanitarian law, and a political movement with documented popular support rooted in decades of occupation, dispossession, and the visible failure of secular alternatives.

The Palestinian people of Gaza — roughly 2.3 million, the majority of whom are refugees or descendants of refugees from the 1948 war — did not choose the blockade. Many did not choose Hamas. Polling by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has shown Hamas’s popularity to be volatile, rising after confrontations with Israel and falling in response to governance failures. What has remained constant is the blockade. What has remained constant is the occupation. Any analysis of Hamas that begins and ends with the movement itself, without that frame, is not a serious analysis of Gaza.

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