Hamas political bureau official Ghazi Hamad praised the October 7 attacks during a livestream with the pro-Palestinian NGO Masar Badil at the end of June, stating that they had challenged the normalization of ties between Arab states and Israel and that the war had sold the Palestinian cause to the West, the Middle East Media Research Institute published on Friday.
The same official had previously told Lebanese media that Hamas would repeat October 7 "again and again."
The interview, titled "Al-Aqsa Flood and the Palestinian Resistance Today," saw both Hamad and interviewer Khaled Al-Rehab praise the October 7 attacks on southern Israel - where Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and murdered over 1200 people.
“We say long live October 7, which has brought the Palestinian struggle to the top of the agenda of global politics,” Al-Rehab said in the opening remarks.
Hamad told Al-Rehab that thanks to Western support and its strong economy, Israel “reached the level of normalization with countries in the region to reinforce itself as an element of the region,” but the attacks “turned the tables on this whole view.”
The hostages held captive in Gaza
Hamad claimed that Hamas had sent terrorists to target “the Gaza Brigade of the Israeli army, and the goal was to destroy this brigade and to take some soldiers as prisoners.”
However, Hamas killed a large number of civilians on October 7, including foreign workers and fellow Palestinians. Many of the remaining hostages in their captivity have never served in the Israeli military. One-year-old Kfir and 5-year-old Ariel Bibas, who remain in Gaza, were civilian children abducted.
When previously confronted with this in an interview by the BBC in October, Hamad stormed out.
During the interview, Hamad claimed Hamas did not intend to kill any civilians during its assault.
When the interviewer stressed that many civilians were killed and asked if Hamad believed that Hamas’s murder of civilians in their beds was justified, Hamad ripped off his microphone and responded, “I want to stop this interview,” before storming out.
October 7 pushed countries to recognize Palestinian statehood
Hamad proceeded to celebrate the change in “foreign perception of the occupation.” He noted that international organizations and universities had cut ties with the Jewish state in addition to whole countries “break[ing] their contact with Israel.”
Universities in the West have seen a myriad of pro-Palestinian action by protest groups attempting to have universities sever ties with Israel. Some campuses have seen encampments set up, in which protesting groups trespass and set up unauthorized camps on campus.
In some of these encampments, access to university facilities has been blocked - with only those condemning Israel being able to access services and sites they paid for.
“The seventh of October was able to slap at the progress of the normalization of effort, and this is, of course, a very important political success,” Hamad asserted.
While the Hamas official claimed that the movement wanted to see an end to the destruction resulting from the war the terror group started, he maintained, “It's very important [for people] to see even this angle of what's happening.”
Hamad posited that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had failed at all his objectives in the war - returning the hostages and destroying Hamas.
“In every single region that [the IDF] attack and then they leave, the resistance restructures itself and repositions itself in that region again,” Hamad claimed. “So, it's very important to see that the occupation is failing. It's failing in Gaza; the resistance is still functioning. The leadership of the resistance is still functioning. The steadfastness of the people is still present.”
On the topic of a ceasefire-hostage deal, Hamad asserted that “resistance is the clear option for the Palestinian people. The capitulations and the negotiations all have not been able to offer the Palestinian people any kind of solutions.
"We are working very actively towards negotiating the positions and what's happening on the ground, but through the consultation with the different factions, we were able to really come to very specific points that we can't go back on.”
Claims Israel is tearing itself apart
Hamad accused Netanyahu and his government of “trying to stick to their positions, their extreme positions” while Israel rallied against them.
He asserted, "If you are steadfast in the negotiation process, then the occupation steps back. So, Netanyahu knows that any negotiation with Hamas, any agreement with Hamas, would lose him his seat. And without an agreement with Hamas, he will not be able to get the hostages and get the prisoners out. He is faced with the dilemma…”
Pointing to the weekly protests for a hostage deal, Hamdan said that “there's a fragmentation in Israeli society that we haven't seen before,” and he felt it was increasingly likely that Israel was starting to dismantle itself with internal divisions.
“Netanyahu, what he wants, is to reach a point where he turns Gaza into what he turned the West Bank, a very controlled area,” the official claimed.
Despite a message conveyed by a Qatari source on a growing acceptance of a two-state solution, Hamad reasserted Hamas’s position that “Having peace with Israel is not possible. There is not one Palestinian child who will accept peace with this occupation.”
Hamad later clarified, “So, I will say in brief that we will never accept anything less than the historical Palestine. We do not believe in a two-state solution. We will never recognize Israel, and [although] we might accept the creation of a Palestinian state or a Palestinian entity on the '67 borders with its capital as east Jerusalem, we would never recognize Israel… We hold fast in refusing to accept the two-state solution, refusing to recognize Israel, and holding fast to historic Palestine and the resistance as a strategy of struggle."
Despite the pogroms committed against Jews by Arabs during the time of the British mandate and Hamas’s continued attacks against Jews, Hamad claimed, “What we are talking about is a Palestinian land where Jews can live because this is our land that we were kicked out of, and we welcomed the Jews after World War II and after their extermination in Europe.”
Hamad proceeded to claim that October 7 had achieved in a single day what more than 30 years of Fatah’s efforts couldn’t - growing recognition of a Palestinian state. “We saw that the seventh of October has given us this recognition and not the negotiations,” he said.