Founded in 1987 in Gaza, Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) is a Palestinian Islamo-nationalist group, which emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood movement.
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Its charter, drafted in 1988, calls for the destruction of Israel. Article 20 of a document amended in 2017 states that "Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, within the limits of June 4, 1967, with the return of refugees and displaced persons to the homes from which they were expelled, as a formula of national consensus." This is an implicit recognition of Israel. But so far, Hamas is not ready to explicitly recognize the Jewish state.
Hamas rests on four centers of power: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, prisoners in Israel, and the Palestinian diaspora.
The Political Bureau and the military wing (the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades) are its main governing bodies. Some of the members of the Political Bureau are housed abroad, mainly in Qatar, Turkey and Lebanon. It sets out the overall strategy of the Islamist group, whose priority is to put an end to the Israeli occupation of the occupied territories (West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip). The military branch deals with the operational aspects of the armed struggle against the Jewish state.
Since 2003, after a wave of suicide bombings that killed a significant number of Israeli civilians, Hamas has been considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, in addition to the Jewish state. Israel has vowed to "annihilate" it, after the unprecedented attack it carried out on October 7 – 1140,<> dead, the majority of them civilians.