User:ImTheIP/Hamas-temp

Origins
Hamas origins can be traced to the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. The Muslim Brotherhood sought an Islamic revival in the Muslim world to counter secularism. In the 1930s it established many local branches in Mandatory Palestine. Following the Nakba in 1948, which shattered Palestinian society, the Muslim Brotherhood was one of the first organizations to reestablish itself among the Palestinians.

When Israel occupied the Palestinian territories in 1967, the Muslim Brotherhood members did not take active part in the resistance, preferring to focus on social-religious reform and on restoring Islamic values. This outlook changed in the early 1980s and Islamic organizations became more involved in Palestinian politics. The driving force behind this transformation was Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian refugee from Al-Jura. Despite an accident in the early 1950s that left him wheelchair bound and his family's poverty, Yassin persevered and became one of the most cherished Islamic preachers in the Palestinian territories.

In 1973, Yassin founded the social-religious charity Mujama al-Islamiya in Gaza as an offshoot to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Israeli authorities had no problem with Yassin's charity and they even assisted it as they saw it as a useful counterbalance to the secular and belligerent Palestine Liberation Organization. That changed in 1983 when Yassin founded the first military cell of the Palestinian Mujahidin and he was imprisoned for two years.

The first unit of Hamas was formed in December 1987 by physician Abd al-Aziz Rantisi and the student leaders Salah Shehade and Yahya Sinwar at the same time as the First Intifada erupted; the first popular uprising against the occupation. Yassin was not directly connected to the organization but he gave it his blessing. In a meeting with the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood in February 1988, it too gave its approval.

Creating Hamas as an entity distinct from the Muslim Brotherhood was a matter of practicality; the Muslim Brotherhood refused to engage in violence against Israel, but without participating in the intifada, the Islamists tied to it feared they would lose support to their rivals the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the PLO. They also hoped that by keeping its militant activities separate, Israel would not interfere with its social work.

Funding
In 1973, Yassin founded the social-religious charity Mujama al-Islamiya ("Islamic center") in Gaza as an offshoot to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Israeli authorities encouraged Yassin's charity to expand as they saw it as a useful counterbalance to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor of Gaza at the time, recalled that they even funded his charity: "The Israeli goverment gave me a budget, and the military government gives to the mosques". Israel's religious affairs official in Gaza, Avner Cohen, later regretfully concluded that Hamas was created by Israel. He claimed to have warned his superiors not to back the Islamists.

In 1984 Yassin was arrested after the Israelis found out that his group collected arms, but released in 1985 as part of a prisoner exchange. He continued to expand the reach of his charity in Gaza.

First Intifada
In the first years of the Intifada, Hamas violence was restricted to Palestinians; collaborators with Israel and individuals it defined as "moral deviants," that is, drug dealers and prostitutes known to enjoy ties with Israeli criminal networks. Over 200 collaborators has been killed by early 1990. In Western media this was reported as typical "intercommunal strife" among Arabs.

Hamas first strike against Israel came in the spring 1989 as it abducted and killed two Israeli soldiers. At the time, Shehade and Sinwar served time in Israeli prisons and Hamas had set up a new group, Unit 101, headed by Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, whose objective was to abduct soldiers. Israel reacted by conducting a thorough manhunt in Gaza and by arresting hundreds of Hamas leaders, among them Yassin who was sentenced to life in prison. These mass arrests of activists and another wave of arrests in 1990 devastated Hamas and forced it to adapt; its command system became regionalized to make its operative structure more diffuse, and to minimize chances of being detected.

Hamas's military branch, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was created in 1991. During the 1990s the al-Qassam Brigades conducted numerous attacks on Israel, with both civilian and military victims. In December 1992 Israel responded to the killing of a border police officer by deporting 415 leading figures of Hamas and Islamic Jihad to the southern Lebanon, which Israel occupied at the time, and it was there that they established contacts with Hezbollah and learnt how to construct suicide- and car bombs. The deportation provoked international condemnation and a unanimous UN Security Council resolution condemning the action. According to the Congressional Research Service, citing a 1993 opinion piece from The New York Times, Hamas admitted to having executed Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israeli authorities in the early 1990s. A transcript of a training film by the al-Qassam Brigades tells how Hamas operatives kidnapped Palestinians accused of collaboration and then forced confessions before executing them.

Hamas first suicide bombing took place at Mehola Junction in the West Bank in April 1993 using a car parked between two buses, carrying soldiers. Aside from the bomber, the blast killed a Palestinian that worked in a nearby settlement. The bomb design was flawed but Hamas would soon learn how to manufacture more lethal bombs.

Israel outlawed Hamas in September 1989.

Popular support
Hamas popular support rose as a consequence of its involvement in the First Intifada. In 1989 fewer than three percent of the Palestinians in Gaza supported Hamas. In 1993 that number had increased to 16.6% in Gaza and 10% in the West Bank.

The al-Qassam Brigades
Hamas reorganized its units from al-Majd and al-Mujahidun al-Filastiniun into a military wing called the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades led by Yahya Ayyash in the summer of 1991 or 1992. The name comes from the militant Palestinian nationalist leader Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam who fought against the British and whose death in 1935 sparked the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. Though its members sometimes referred to themselves as "Students of Ayyash", "Students of the Engineer", or "Yahya Ayyash Units".

Ayyash, an engineering graduate from Birzeit University, was a skillful bomb maker and greatly improved Hamas' striking capability, earning him the nickname al-Muhandis ("the Engineer"). He is thought to have been one of the driving forces in Hamas' use of suicide bombings, arguing that "we paid a high price when we only used slingshots and stones. We need to exert more pressure, make the cost of the occupation that much more expensive in human lives, that much more unbearable". Prior to his assassination by Shin Bet in 1996, almost all bombs used on suicide missions were constructed by him.

Oslo years


In February 1994, Baruch Goldstein a Jewish settler in military fatigues massacred 29 Muslims at prayer in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in the West Bank during the month of Ramadan. An additional 19 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the ensuing riots. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin condemned the massacre but fearing a confrontation with Hebron's violent settler community, he refused to withdraw them, and Hamas swore to avenge the deaths. In a communique it announced that if Israel didn't discriminate between "fighters and civilians" then it would be "forced ... to treat the Zionists in the same manner. Treating like with like is a universal principle."

At the end of the 40-day mourning period for Goldstein's victims, on April 6, a suicide bomber blew up his car at a crowded bus stop in Afula, killing eight Israelis and injuring 34. An additional five Israelis were killed and 30 injured as a Palestinian detonated himself on a bus in Hadera a week later. Hamas claimed responsibility for both attacks which were the first suicide bombings in Israel. The attacks may have been timed to disrupt negotiations between Israel and PLO on the implementation of the Oslo I Accord.

The Dizengoff Street bus bombing in October was the first successful attack in Tel Aviv.

In late December 1995, Hamas promised the Palestinian Authority (PA) to cease military operations. But it was not to be as Shin Bet assassinated Ayyash, the 29-year-old leader of the al-Qassam Brigades on January 5, 1996 using a booby-trapped cellphone given to Ayyash by his uncle who worked as an informer. Nearly 100,000 Gazans, about 11% of the total population, marched in his funeral. Hamas resumed its campaign of suicide bombings which had been dormant for a good part of 1995 to retaliate the assassination.

In September 1997, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the assassination of Hamas leader Khaled Mashal who lived in Jordan. Two Mossad agents entered Jordan on false Canadian passports and sprayed Mashal with a nerve agent on a street in Amman. They were caught however and King Hussein threatened to put the agents on trial unless Israel provided Mashal with an antidote and released Yassin. Israel obliged and the antidote saved Mashal's life. Yassin was returned to Gaza where he was given a hero's welcome with banners calling him the "sheikh of the Intifada". Yassin's release temporariliy boosted Hamas' popularity and at a press conference Yassin declared: "There will be no halt to armedoperations until the end of the occupation ... we are peace-seekers. We love peace. And we call on them [the Israelis] to maintain peace with us and to help us in order to restore our rights by peace."

Although the suicide attacks by the al-Qassam Brigades and other groups violated the 1993 Oslo accords (which Hamas opposed), Arafat was reluctant to pursue the attackers and may have had inadequate means to do so.

Impact of the Hebron massacre
The Hebron massacre had a profound effect on Hamas' militancy. For its first seven years, it attacked only what it saw as "legitimate military targets," Israeli soldiers and military installations. But following the massacre, it felt that it no longer had to distinguish between military and civilian targets. The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank, Sheikh Ahmed Haj Ali, later argued that "had there not been the 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, there would have been no suicide bombings." Al-Rantisi in an interview in 1998 stated that the suicide attacks "began after the massacre committed by the terrorist Baruch Goldstein and intensified after the assassination of Yahya Ayyash." Musa Abu Marzouk put the blame for the escalation on the Israelis: "We were against targeting civilians ... After the Hebron massacre we determined that it was time to kill Israel's civilians ... we offered to stop if Israel would, but they rejected that offer."

According to Matti Steinberg, former advisor to Shin Bet and one of Israel's leading experts on Hamas, the massacre laid to rest an internal debate within Hamas on the usefulness of indiscriminate violence: "In the Hamas writings there is an explicit prohibition against indiscriminate harm to helpless people. The massacre at the mosque released them from this taboo and introduced a dimension of measure for measure, based on citations from the Koran."

Expulsion from Jordan
In 1999 Hamas was banned in Jordan, reportedly in part at the request of the United States, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. Jordan's King Abdullah feared the activities of Hamas and its Jordanian allies would jeopardize peace negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, and accused Hamas of engaging in illegitimate activities within Jordan. In mid-September 1999, authorities arrested Hamas leaders Khaled Mashal and Ibrahim Ghosheh on their return from a visit to Iran, and charged them with being members of an illegal organization, storing weapons, conducting military exercises, and using Jordan as a training base. Hamas leaders denied the charges. Mashal was exiled and eventually settled in Damascus in Syria in 2001. As a result of the Syrian civil war he distanced himself from Bashar al-Assad's regime in 2012 and moved to Qatar.

Popular support
While the Palestinians were used to the idea that their young was willing to die for the struggle, the idea that they would strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves up was a new and not well-supported development. A poll taken in 1996 after the wave of suicide bombings Hamas carried out to retaliate Israel's assassination of Ayyash showed that most 70% opposed the tactic and 59% called for Arafat to take action to prevent further attacks.

In the political arena Hamas continued to trail far behind its rival Fatah; 41% trusted Arafat in 1996 but only 3.2% trusted Yasssin.

Second Intifada
The deepening of the occupation, which contrasted with Palestinian hopes of greater political freedoms and economic gains, led to popular discontent and the Second Intifada that began in September 2000. This uprising was much more violent than the First Intifada and led to the death of almost 5000 Palestinians and over 1100 Israelis. While there was a large number of Palestinian attacks against Israelis, the Palestinians' most lethal violence were suicide attacks; in the first five years of the intifada a little more than half of all Israeli deaths were victims of suicide attacks. Hamas was responsible for about 40% of the 135 suicide attacks in the period.

Israel has, according to Tristan Dunning, never responded to repeated offers by Hamas over subsequent years for a "quid pro quo" moratorium on attacks against civilians'. It has engaged in several tadi'a (periods of calm), and proposed a number of ceasefires. In January 2004, Yassin, prior to his assassination, said that the group would end armed resistance against Israel for a 10-year hudna. in exchange for a Palestinian state in the Palestinian occupied territories, and that restoring Palestinians' "historical rights" (relating to the 1948 Palestinian exodus) "would be left for future generations". His views were quickly echoed by al-Rantissi, who added that Hamas envisaged a "phased liberation". Israel killed Yassin in March in a targeted Israeli air strike, and then al-Rantisi in a similar air strike in April.

Hamas would be the beneficiary of this growing discontent in the 2006 Palestinian Authority legislative elections.

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