Michael Jacobs, Ken Stein, and Scott Abramson, February 15, 2025
These entries cover the 2023-2025 Hamas-Israel War, the Hamas-Israel relationship over time, and statements by Hamas leaders about destroying Israel. Endorsement of Hamas to become a critical negotiating partner for Israel appears in a separate listing, with former President Jimmy Carter the most notable public figure to provide a full-throated embrace Hamas as a legitimate political for negotiations with Israel.
The entries assembled cover the last quarter century; some are from Arabic sources. Entries included are meant to describe Hamas’s political history, their role in the competition for leadership within the Palestinian community, and their relations with Middle Eastern countries, particular Iran. The timeline might be best used along with a detailed monthly (updated) annotated bibliography of Hamas..
The high points in Hamas’s history are its founding in 1987, its takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2006, the five wars with Israel, including the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Israel’s response that killed an estimated 18,000 Hamas terrorists and operatives, the Israeli killing of its prominent leaders (Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar) in July and October 2024, the implementation of the first state of a January 2025 cease-fire agreement with exchanges of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.
Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, was founded in the Gaza Strip in December 1987. In August 1988, the movement issued its charter, declaring its unyielding determination to use jihad to replace Israel with Palestine. Hamas traces its ideological roots to the Muslim Brotherhood, organized in Egypt in the late 1920s and advocated Islamic-based government and rejected Western cultural penetration, secularism, individual rights, and democratic freedoms. With poverty growing in the Gaza Strip, Hamas’s mosque networks delivered food, mentoring, education, afternoon day care, medical assistance and religious indoctrination. Support for a fervent Islamic path was catalyzed by individual mosque leaders who rejected Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s peacemaking with Israel in the 1970s. The Islamic revolution in Iran that toppled the secular Shah and ingested fundamentalist Islamic ideology across countries in the Middle East landed on favorable ears in the Gaza Strip as well. During the First Intifada, starting in late 1987, Hamas urged Palestinians to confront Israeli authorities in the West Bank and Gaza. It coordinated labor strikes against Israel and conducted a campaign to try to make Muslims adhere to a strict Islamic code.
In 1988, Hamas issued its charter, remarkably like the 1964/1968 PLO Covenant, calling for armed struggle against Israel and the liberation of Palestine, with an emphasis on Islamic fervor and doctrine to guide the Palestinian present and future. In 2006, Hamas in a coup against the Palestinian Authority that was ruling the Gaza Strip at the time after the 2005 unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip to test Palestinian intentions in self-rule, eventually evolved a massive autocratic control over the Gaza population.
Hamas leaders brought vast sums of cash from Qatar and other Arab sources to build a huge underground infrastructure of tunnels and military organization to keep a tight grip on the 2.4 million Palestinians there. One of its stated goals was to ensure a prolonged capacity to sustain any Israeli attacks against their rule. On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel killing more than 1200 and kidnapping more the 240. It became the flashpoint for the Hamas-Israel War which lasted more than 15 months, which included Israel’s assassination of its most prominent leaders in 2024.
The war in Gaza resulted in the displacement and killing of thousands of Palestinians as they fled from Israel’s retaliation to the October 2023 attack. The war was the Israel’s longest in Israel’s history, costing it several thousand dead and injured. Deaths and injuries to Palestinians including Hamas operatives were put between thirty and forty thousand, with millions displaced from their homes. The war though initiated by Hamas and joined by Hezbollah, evolved into major military and missile clashes between Israel and Iran. Both countries found the other’s policies and political leaders to be their number one physical and ideological enemies.
February 12, 2025 – By the terms of the January 2025, Cease-fire agreement, Hamas had released 33 hostages, which included one American and five Thai nationals, while Israel freed nearly 2,000 Palestinians from jails, held for various reasons. To sustain implementation of the agreement, Qatar, Egypt and the US were regularly engaged in sustaining the cease-fire’s duration.
February 4, 2025 – President Donald Trump proposed relocated Gaza’s two million plus Palestinians to other countries transforming Gaza he said into the “Rivera of the Middle East’ under U.S control. Izzat al-Risheq, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, labeled Trump’s statements as “racist” and a clear attempt to eliminate the Palestinian issue, emphasizing that Palestinians are deeply rooted in their land and will not accept any plan aimed at uprooting them. Sami Abu Zuhri, another senior Hamas official, warned that such statements are a “recipe for chaos and regional tensions,” asserting that Gaza’s residents will not allow such plans to be implemented. Other Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt rejected Trump’s proposal out of hand; Israeli reaction to his idea for Gaza’s future was mixed depending on current political outlooks and party identities. (source)
January 30, 2025 – Israel officially ceased cooperation with the United Nations Works Relief agency for Palestine Refugees, following legislation passed by the Israeli parliament on October 28, 2024. The Israeli government cited is anger at UNWRA staff for being centrally affiliated with Hamas and the attack on October 7, 2023.
January 19, 2025 – In the first Israeli hostage for Palestinian prisoner exchange, three Israeli women returned to Israel and 90 Palestinian security prisoners were taken to the West Bank town of Betunia. On both sides there was celebration for the return of those held; in Israel, several government officials condemned the cease fire deal and exchange while others insisted that nothing stand in the path of return the remaining 94 hostages or their bodies held by hamas. The exchange fulfilled the early part of the three parts phased Hamas-Israel cease fire agreement, scheduled to last for 33 days. Enormous skepticism existed in Israel that the agreement would be implemented whereby Hamas would release all the hostages and turn the Hamas-Israel cease-fire into some unknown duration. Cease fire terms included large expansion of humanitarian supplies into Gaza.
October 26, 2024 – In a proportional Israeli response to Iran’s October 1 missile attack, in a pre-dawn attack, the Israeli Air Force dispatched more than one hundred aircraft to Iran, targeting multiple military facilities. Targets included military bases, air defense systems, missile production facilities, and factories used to produce fuel for Iran’s long distance missile arsenal. The attack left the Iranian regime with virtually no air defense systems against what might be another Israeli attack, should it come. The Israelis did not target either Iran’s oil facilities or score direct hits on its nuclear weapons production capabilities. The US government responded by warning Iran not to respond to this Israeli action. Israel’s attack occurred ten days prior to the US presidential election, with little comment from either major candidate about the attack. For Israel, it was the most complicated and furthest preemptive attack against an enemy carried out in the nation’s history.
October 16, 2024 – The IDF kills Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. The mastermind of the October 7 massacre, Sinwar had been the prime target of an Israeli manhunt ever since he organized the attack. For decades, he had been among the most virulent and uncompromising advocate for hating Israel and killing Jews. The attack stunned Israeli society while elevating Hamas’s prestige among most Palestinians and others who despised Israel’s existence
October 13, 2024 – A Hezbollah launched drone strikes the Israel’s Golani Brigade’s barracks outside the town of Binyamina, 20 miles south of Haifa. Four soldiers are killed and more than 60 injured, several critically.
October 3, 2024 – Less than a week after the elimination of Hassan Nasrallah , Israel assassinates the late Hezbollah chief’s presumptive successor, Hashem Safieddine. Nasrallah’s cousin, Safieddine headed Hezbollah’s executive council, his official election as secretary general just days away.
October 1, 2024 – In reprisal for Israel’s assassination of two of Iran’s most favored clients, Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Iran fires 181 ballistic missiles at Israel. Besides being the second-ever direct Iranian attack against Israel – the first April 13 — the bombardment is the single largest ballistic missile attack in history. Israel, the US Navy, and Jordan intercepted all but several dozen missiles. Damage occurs to an Israeli military base, a restaurant, school and a Palestinian is killed.
September 30, 2024 – After months of cross-border incursions, Israel initiates a limited ground invasion of Lebanon. The invading Israeli commandos are supported by air cover and artillery barrages from inside Israel. More than a million Lebanese flee northwards away from the fighting in the south and in Beirut, with hundreds of Lebanese, Hezbollah fighters killed or wounded. Israel’s objective was too free totally southern Lebanon of Hezbollah actions and threats against northern Israeli population centers, so that Israeli’s (some 65,000) could return to their homes evacuated in October 2023, when Hezbollah launched attacks there, to support Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel
September 29, 2024 – Dozens of Israeli aircraft carry out strikes against the Houthis at the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah in Western Yemen. Israelis target fuel installations, power plants, and docks–retaliation for the Houthis’ unsuccessful ballistic missile attack against Israel the previous day before.
.September 27, 2024 – The IDF assassinates the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. For 32 of Hezbollah’s 40 years in the organization, he led the group’s transformation from a band of guerillas into a disciplined to highly equipped fighting force. Hezbollah focused on Israel’s destruction. The assassination of Nasrallah is a major coup for Israel, as it goes a long way in restoring Israeli deterrence and Israeli prestige since the erosion of both on October 7. His killing along with a dozen other Hezbollah commanders severely dented, the organization’s command and control, but those killings did not stop Hezbollah attacks against the Israeli population.
September 17 and 18, 2024 – Killing dozens and wounding thousands, an Israeli intelligence operation, blows up thousands of pagers and handheld radios booby-trapped with explosives, purchased by Hezbollah. This Mossad operation culminated in years of planning in multiple countries.
September 9, 2024 – In its largest sortie in Syria since the April 1 attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Israel that killed multiple Iranian Revolutionary Guard leaders, this strike hits a military installation near Masyaf, in northern Syria, where chemical arms were reportedly manufactured and Iranian technicians housed.
August 31, 2024 – The IDF recovers the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel beneath Rafah. had been murdered by Hamas, slain execution style, few hours before their corpses were found. Days later it was discovered that the hostages had been kept under torturous conditions.
July 31, 2024 – Israel assassinates Ismail Haniyeh, the chairman of the Hamas Politburo and one of the organization’s most senior leaders. Haniyeh was killed while on a state visit in Tehran. An explosive had been planted in the guesthouse for visiting dignitaries two months previously and detonated remotely. His killing did not alter Hamas’s guerrilla warfare against Israel in the Gaza Strip.
July 30, 2024 – Israel embarks on a targeted assassination campaign aimed at picking off Hezbollah’s senior leaders, beginning with Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s preeminent military commander, and culminates two months later with the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, dozens of high ranking organization officials and wounding thousands of Hezbollah operatives by the end of September.
July 27, 2024 – Hezbollah fires an Iranian-made rocket at the Druze village of Majdal Shams near Mount Hermon, killing twelve soccer-playing children, all Druze Israelis. In reprisal, Israel begins a sweeping campaign of targeted assassinations days later.
July 24, 2024 – Amid the Biden administration’s calls for a ceasefire and faltering attempts to achieve one, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint session of Congress, where he focuses on Iran as the core culprit in the region for anti-Israeli and antisemitic actions. Netanyahu becomes only other foreign leader, beside Winston Churchill to address the congress four times. (source)
July 20, 2024 – Israel carries out airstrikes against the Yemeni port city of Hodeida, a stronghold of the Houthis. The day before, the Houthis executed a drone attack, evading Israeli air defenses, near the American diplomatic mission in Tel Aviv, killing one and injuring five.