Three Years After October 7, The Truth Is Out

This week marks three years since Hamas fighters crossed into Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023, and did what their founding charter promised they would do. We have spent three years debating ceasefires, hostages, tunnel networks, and international law. We have spent almost no time reading the document Hamas itself published in 1988 to explain, in its own words, why any of this happened. That document is still the single best guide to understanding what occurred — not because it predicts actions or reveals tactics, but because it names the theology, and the theology hasn’t changed in 37 years.

Start with the name. Hamas is an Arabic acronym — Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement — and the word Islamic isn’t decoration. Article One of the 1988 charter states the group’s program plainly: “The Movement’s programme is Islam. From it, it draws its ideas, ways of thinking and understanding of the universe, life and man.” Not a Palestinian nationalist program borrowing religious language for legitimacy. Islam itself is the source and the method.

The charter’s own slogan removes any ambiguity: “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” Four theological clauses, none of them political in the ordinary sense. Hamas isn’t simply a group that happens to be Muslim, nor is it an “extremist” distortion of Islam as written. It is a movement that has defined itself, in its founding text, as the armed application of Islam against the Jewish state. What Hamas’s leaders and fighters say and do isn’t an attempt to distort a religion — it is a pursuit to apply it and fulfill its commands.

Hamas’s charter doesn’t stop at vague hostility. It frames the conflict not as a political enmity with a state, but as a religious loathing of anything Jewish. For Hamas, the conflict with Israel is a cosmic one. The charter quotes Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna’s declaration that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” Obliterate — not negotiate with, not coexist beside. The document explicitly rules out diplomatic settlement: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”

Fanciful Westerners and dishonest apologists assure us that jihad is merely inward piety and spiritual self-control. Hamas disagrees. It classifies jihad not as private devotion but as an armed religious obligation binding on every Muslim — one that requires expelling non-Muslims from “Muslim” land. Hamas didn’t invent this Islamic category. It inherited the doctrine of jihad as the divinely prescribed duty that activates when Muslim “territory” is perceived under attack. For Hamas, Israel’s existence itself is the triggering offense.

Three years of hostage negotiations have obscured a simple fact: this was never framed by Hamas as a war over borders. It has always been framed explicitly as a war over sovereignty belonging to Allah, administered on behalf of the umma, against a people the charter repeatedly identifies not as Israelis but as infidel Jews.

Khaled Meshaal made this explicit six days into the war, when he called on Muslims worldwide to fill the streets in jihad, declaring, “this is a moment for the application.” Application of what, exactly? Of jihad as classical Islamic scholars define it — armed struggle against non-Muslim power, owed as worship, not improvised as grievance. Hamas and its allied theorists have since folded Israel and its Western backers into a single target they call the “Crusader-Zionist alliance” — a modern label for what medieval jurists called dar al-harb, the abode of war: all territory outside Islamic rule, legitimately subject to jihad until it submits or is subdued.

In that framework, American and European support for Israel doesn’t complicate the theology; it completes it. The United States and Israel become a single civilizational enemy, Crusader and Jew joined under one banner, exactly as the term is designed to suggest.

Three years on, Western commentary still prefers “militant group” and “political wing” to the words Hamas uses about itself. That erroneous vocabulary isn’t analysis — it is cowardly avoidance, and it costs lives. This refusal to name the Islamic sources and their devastating literal application will only ensure the repetition of massacres against non-Muslims, while the world remains in ignorance. The only thing that would actually help is simple: the ability to see the next attack coming because we understood the last one correctly. Hamas told us what it believed in 1988. It told us again in the days after October 7. Still, many refuse to take the terrorists at their own word. We are the ones who have spent three years pretending not to have heard it.

The hostages taken that morning, the families murdered in their homes, the young people killed at a music festival — they weren’t victims of a border dispute that spiraled into violence. They were victims of a theology that published its intentions decades in advance and has never once revised them.

Three years later, honoring them requires more than mourning. It requires finally reading what Hamas actually wrote.

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A. S. Ibrahim holds two PhDs in Islamic Studies. He is the author of “Sharia Versus the U.S. Constitution: Why Americans Must Choose Freedom” and “Islam and the West.” He has also authored “Muhammad’s Military Expeditions” (Oxford, 2024), “A Concise Guide to the Life of Muhammad” (Baker Academic, 2022), “Conversion to Islam” (Oxford, 2021), “Basics of Arabic” (Zondervan, 2021), “A Concise Guide to the Quran” (Baker Academic, 2020), and “The Stated Motivations for the Early Islamic Expansion” (Peter Lang, 2018), among others. Follow him on X: @al2ostaz

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