What Was Hamas Really Trying to Accomplish on October 7?
Three years after the October 7 massacre, Hamas's promises to repeat the attacks raise urgent questions about genocidal intent, the regional forces behind the organization, and the future of Gaza.
By Hayvi Bouzo
The most disturbing truth about October 7, 2023, may not be what Hamas accomplished that morning, but what its leaders intended to accomplish next.
For hours, Hamas-led terrorists moved through southern Israel, entering homes, attacking communities, massacring young people at a music festival and abducting civilians. Families were murdered in their living rooms and bedrooms. Children and elderly people were taken hostage, while others were hunted as they attempted to escape. Approximately 1,200 people were killed, and 251 were abducted into Gaza.
The violence ended not because the attackers had exhausted their ambitions, but because Israeli forces eventually stopped their advance. What followed offered a chilling insight into Hamas's intentions.
On October 24, 2023, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad openly defended the assault, declaring that Hamas would repeat October 7 until Israel was eliminated. His words deserve to be remembered as clearly as the atrocities themselves. He was not expressing remorse for the murder of civilians. He was promising further attacks until Israel ceased to exist.
Three years later, that declaration remains essential to understanding not only what Hamas did on October 7, but what it intended to accomplish and what it might attempt again if given the opportunity.
When ideology becomes action
Hamas's founding charter of 1988 called for Israel's destruction and contained explicitly antisemitic language. Its revised 2017 political document altered some of that rhetoric but continued to reject Israel's legitimacy. For decades, these declarations were often discussed as expressions of ideological extremism. October 7 demonstrated what that ideology could look like when translated into organized violence.
The deliberate targeting of civilians was not simply an unintended consequence of an assault on military positions. A detailed investigation published in July 2024 concluded that killing civilians and taking hostages were central objectives of the planned Hamas-led attack, rather than isolated actions or deviations from the operation.
That finding carries particular significance given that the investigation was conducted by Human Rights Watch, an organization with a history of criticism toward Israel. It has itself faced accusations of anti-Israel bias, including from its founder, Robert Bernstein. Yet its investigators documented deliberate killings, hostage-taking and other crimes against humanity committed by Hamas-led armed groups. The importance of those findings lies in the evidence assembled, regardless of one's opinion of the organization.
The New York Times, in its October 2023 reporting on the massacre, similarly documented the attacks through footage, photographs and survivor testimony. Together, these investigations established that civilians were not merely caught in the fighting. They were deliberately targeted.
Under the United Nations Genocide Convention, genocide requires specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The desire to eliminate a state is not, by itself, legally identical to the intent to destroy a protected population. However, when declarations calling for Israel's elimination are accompanied by organized massacres of Israeli civilians and explicit promises to repeat those atrocities, the question of genocidal intent becomes impossible to ignore.
I believe Hamas's actions and declarations make a compelling case that October 7 represented more than an effort to terrorize Israel or gain political leverage. They provide powerful evidence of a broader destructive ambition, one that its leaders were prepared to pursue through the repeated targeting of civilians.
The regional networks that sustained Hamas
Hamas did not develop its military capabilities in isolation. Its political infrastructure and armed operations benefited from decades of regional relationships, financial networks and external assistance.
Iran's Islamic Republic has provided Hamas with funding, weapons and military training as part of Tehran's broader strategy of supporting armed organizations hostile to Israel. The relationship reflects a regional approach in which Iran has used non-state actors to extend its military and political influence beyond its borders.
Qatar's relationship with Hamas followed a different model. Doha hosted the organization's political leadership and provided extensive financial assistance to Gaza, including money for public-sector salaries, fuel and payments to vulnerable families. These Qatari financial grants helped sustain the Hamas-run administration at a time of severe economic hardship.
These arrangements must be examined carefully. Humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians is not equivalent to financing terrorism, and the Qatari transfers were not all payments to Hamas's military wing. Nevertheless, supporting the administrative structures of an organization that simultaneously maintains an armed apparatus raises legitimate questions about indirect financial benefits and the allocation of resources.
Turkey, meanwhile, maintained political relationships with Hamas while also serving as a base for financial networks linked to the organization. In July 2026, the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions targeting Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas financial networks, including entities it identified as charities used to channel money to Hamas's military wing.
These findings also underscore Hamas's ideological origins in the Muslim Brotherhood and the importance of the transnational networks that have supported it.
The distinctions among Iran's direct military assistance, Qatar's financial and diplomatic engagement, and Turkey-based political and financial networks are important. But so is the larger question: how have these overlapping relationships allowed Hamas to preserve its capabilities and political influence despite its documented record of violence?
Hamas's contempt for Palestinian lives
The brutality of Hamas cannot be understood solely through its attacks on Israelis. Palestinians in Gaza have also suffered under its rule, and Hamas's treatment of its own population offers important insight into the nature of the organization.
For years, Hamas invested heavily in an extensive underground tunnel network intended to protect its fighters and military infrastructure. Yet in an October 2023 interview, senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk argued that protecting Gaza's civilians was the responsibility of the United Nations and other parties. The contrast was devastating: an organization that built underground protection for its combatants while leaving ordinary families without comparable shelter.
Its repression of Palestinians has been even more direct. In October 2025, footage emerged showing armed men publicly executing individuals accused of collaborating with Israel. Reuters verified the footage's location and reported confirmation from a Hamas source that members of armed factions, including Hamas, had carried out the killings. The victims' identities and allegations against them could not be independently established.
The executions revealed a familiar instrument of authoritarian control: public violence intended to enforce obedience through fear. Hamas has also faced allegations of torture, arbitrary detention and violent repression of its political opponents.
These abuses are not secondary to understanding Hamas. They demonstrate that the organization's willingness to use violence extends beyond its confrontation with Israel to Palestinians who live under its authority. The people of Gaza deserve protection not only from the devastation of war, but also from armed rulers who deny them meaningful political freedom and accountability.
The painful familiarity of Syria and Iran's regional axis
I was born in Syria, and images of civilians subjected to deliberate brutality carry a particular weight for me. Under Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian regime systematically tortured prisoners, bombed residential neighborhoods and killed innocent civilians. Its forces also used chemical weapons, including the April 2018 chemical attack on Douma, which the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons attributed to Syrian government forces.
For Syrians, these were not merely allegations exchanged between political adversaries. They were documented atrocities committed by a regime that survived for years with the military and diplomatic support of powerful allies.
The connection to Hamas and Hezbollah is not incidental. Assad's Syria formed a central component of Iran's regional axis, providing a strategic corridor through which Tehran could support Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hamas, despite significant ideological and political differences with Assad and periods of tension during the Syrian civil war, remained another major beneficiary of Iran's regional strategy.
These organizations and regimes were not identical, nor did they always share the same interests. What united them was a regional structure in which Iran supplied resources, military capabilities and political backing to partners willing to use violence in pursuit of strategic objectives.
Syria's position as a supply corridor was crucial to Hezbollah and Iran's broader regional influence, a relationship whose strategic importance became especially clear following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime.
Russia and China also played important, though different, roles in sustaining the Assad regime's international position. Russia provided military intervention and diplomatic protection, while Iran and Hezbollah contributed directly to Assad's military survival. China offered diplomatic support, including through its use of veto power at the United Nations.
In 2014, Russia and China blocked a UN Security Council resolution that would have referred the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court. The decision prevented that particular avenue of international accountability even as evidence of atrocities continued to accumulate.
For those of us who witnessed Syria's suffering, the lesson was painful. International institutions could document atrocities, but powerful states could still shield their partners from meaningful consequences.
Iran offers another troubling example. In his September 22, 2026, address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Donald Trump stated that the Islamic Republic had killed more than 72,000 of its own citizens that year. Days later, in an interview with TIME, he placed the figure between 72,000 and 75,000. While these estimates have not been independently established, Trump's statements drew international attention to the extraordinary scale of repression alleged against the Iranian regime.
Beyond the president's figures, Iranian human rights organizations have independently documented widespread executions, arbitrary detention and the violent suppression of political dissent. The Islamic Republic's repression of its own population cannot be separated from its regional activities. The same regime that has devoted enormous resources to supporting Hamas, Hezbollah and other armed organizations has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to use violence against Iranians demanding greater freedom and political accountability.
As someone born in Syria, I find it impossible to ignore how quickly some conflicts become international emergencies while other atrocities gradually disappear from public attention. The suffering of Syrians, Iranians, Israelis and Palestinians should never be measured by the political usefulness of their stories.
The question of genocide and the evidence of intent
The war in Gaza has also generated an intense international legal and political debate over allegations of genocide. The scale of Palestinian civilian suffering makes careful examination of these allegations essential, including the actions of the Israeli military, the conduct of Hamas and the requirements of international law.
One important element in that debate is intent.
Israel has maintained that its military campaign was directed against Hamas rather than the Palestinian population. It has cited evacuation warnings, advance notifications and other civilian-protection measures as evidence of its efforts to distinguish between military targets and civilians. The effectiveness and sufficiency of those precautions remain matters of scrutiny, particularly given the scale of casualties and destruction in Gaza.
On October 7, by contrast, Hamas-led fighters deliberately attacked civilians, and senior Hamas officials subsequently promised to repeat the operation. These declarations provide direct evidence that deserves careful consideration in any assessment of the organization's objectives.
On October 7, 2026, marking the third anniversary of the Hamas massacre, 78 retired American military leaders and legal experts signed an open letter rejecting allegations that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).
The signatories, including former senior military commanders with extensive combat experience, argued that the available evidence did not establish the specific genocidal intent required under international law. They pointed to Israeli military precautions, humanitarian measures and the distinction between civilian casualties resulting from warfare and the deliberate destruction of a protected population. They also emphasized the difficult operational realities of fighting armed organizations embedded within densely populated civilian areas.
Their assessment represents an important contribution by experienced military and legal professionals to a debate that has generated sharply different conclusions among international institutions, legal scholars and human rights organizations. It underscores why the question of intent cannot be separated from a careful examination of military conduct and the evidence surrounding it.
The definition of genocide and the evidence of intent remain central to understanding the ongoing debate over allegations of genocide in Gaza. That same standard of scrutiny should be applied to Hamas. Its ideology is documented. Its deliberate attacks on civilians are documented. Its leadership's promises to repeat October 7 are documented. Any serious discussion of genocidal intent must be prepared to examine those facts with equal attention.
The question is not whether the suffering of one population diminishes the suffering of another. It is whether the international community is prepared to apply consistent standards when examining the intentions and conduct of all those involved.
October 7 revealed the limits of Hamas's reach, not its ambitions
Three years after the massacre, the world continues to debate the meaning of October 7. Yet perhaps the most important distinction is between what Hamas wanted to accomplish and what it was ultimately able to achieve. October 7 may not have revealed the limits of Hamas's ambition. It may have revealed the limits of its reach.
The deliberate massacre of civilians, the organization's longstanding ideology and the subsequent promises of its leadership point, in my view, to a compelling case for Hamas's genocidal intent against Israelis. Its repression of Palestinians in Gaza further reveals an organization willing to sacrifice civilian lives in pursuit of its objectives and preservation of power.
Any lasting peace must confront these realities. Leaving Hamas armed and capable of governing through violence would preserve the conditions for further conflict, while denying Palestinians the prospect of accountable leadership and a more stable future. Hamas's disarmament and removal from coercive control over Gaza are therefore not merely Israeli security objectives, but essential elements of a political future in which both Israelis and Palestinians can live without fear.
October 7 revealed more than what Hamas was capable of doing. It revealed what its leaders were prepared to do again. No credible resolution of the conflict can afford to ignore that warning.
Hayvi Bouzo is a Syrian-born American broadcast journalist, Co-Founder and Co-Editor of Middle East 24 (ME24), and Co-Founder and Executive Director of Yalla Productions. She has spent nearly two decades covering U.S. and Middle East foreign policy, interviewing guests at the highest levels of American government and politics. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Jerusalem Post, and Khaleej Times.