Shlomi Eldar wrote the book on Hamas. Then, after Oct. 7, he rewrote it. “Getting to Know Hamas,” published in 2012, became “Hamas: From Social Movement to War Crimes.”
Eldar, a well-known journalist in Israel, spent years reporting from Gaza and has interviewed numerous Hamas leaders. He had the personal phone number of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (killed by Israel in July). Which is to say that he likely understands Hamas as well as any Israeli — or thought he did. After Oct. 7, he had to do some soul searching. For decades he believed that Hamas, brutal as it was, had boundaries. Their use of violence, Eldar argued, had been “calibrated” to avoid a catastrophic response from Israel. Though their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam precluded them from striking a comprehensive peace deal with Israel, they were looking for some kind of accommodation with the Jewish state. How did he know? Because they told him.
Eldar’s views on Hamas pre-Oct. 7 were, to quote a source of mine in Israel, “uncommon.” His criticism of the Israeli military didn’t win him friends among swathes of the Israeli public. His focus on the Palestinian narrative led some in Israel to dismiss him as overly sympathetic to their cause (Haaretz once ran a cartoon in which a Palestinian woman, sitting in the rubble of her home after it was destroyed by Israel, turns to her husband and says, “Call Shlomi Eldar.”) As a reporter for Haaretz and Israeli TV — as well as an award-winning documentary filmmaker and a contestant on Israel’s “Master Chef VIP” — he had the attention of a sizeable number of Israelis.
Then came Oct. 7. There was no more believing that Hamas — perpetrator of heinous suicide bombings and kidnappings, among other horrors — was calibrating its use of violence, no way they hoped to reach an accommodation with Israel. Had Eldar been wrong about Hamas all along? Or had something fundamental changed inside the terrorist group that led it to commit the worst act of mass murder in Israel’s history?
After news broke that Israel had killed Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, I wanted to understand how Eldar’s views had evolved — and what he thought was likely to come next. He was in town to talk with Stanford students and we met on Oct. 18, the day after Sinwar’s death was announced. Our discussion has been edited for length and clarity.
What do you think the killing of Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, means for the future of Hamas?
I’m not sure that Hamas will exist as we know it. It will be a totally different movement from now on. The basis of Hamas was promising the Palestinians social help, and to be an alternative to PLO. They also promised to fight Israel and maybe to free Jerusalem or other territories. They failed. And they brought the Palestinians back 100 years — back to poverty, to suffering, to destruction.
Hamas was elected in 2006 because of the corruption of the PLO. Now they are themselves a corrupt government, corrupting people in the Gaza Strip. They don’t care about the people. The only thing they brought them was death.
Israel has assassinated all of the leaders of Hamas: Ismail Haniyeh, Sinwar, Salah al-Arouri in Beirut. Of the figures who are still alive, most Palestinians don’t even know them. They’re anonymous. When you assassinate a military leader of Hamas, they have many, many others to replace him. But when you assassinate the political figures, everything has to begin again.
Are you saying that Sinwar was unique in that he was both a military and a political figure?
Yes. When he was released from Israeli prison in 2011, he started to prepare to invade Israel. He and his friends who were released were all from the military wing, and they took control over Gaza. In 2017, Sinwar was elected [to lead Hamas in Gaza] and deported all the old leaders. They deported Ismail Haniyeh to Qatar in 2021 because they wanted to do whatever they wanted.
Hamas was founded as a social movement. This was all the institutes that Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin built — schools, helping people by zakat, charitable money that they give them, food, sports, senior housing. Then, in December 1987, Hamas established a military arm and Yassin used calibrated violence. If they exaggerate in attacking Israel, it’s dangerous. So Hamas had two branches: the military wing and the social movement. It was constant combat between the two branches. When Sinwar was released from Israeli prison, he erased the line between the political group and the military arm.
I know you believe that assassinating Sinwar was necessary. If even Shlomi Eldar has moved to the right on such issues, is that a good indicator that Israel as a whole has shifted to the right?
I don’t think assassinating Sinwar is a matter of right or left. Sinwar was a monster, and he needed to die. For us it’s like Bin Laden.
How and when did you get the news?
CNN called me.
So it wasn’t one of your sources in Gaza.
I think they didn’t know. I think the Israelis knew before the Palestinians. It started with the picture leaked to social media. I called my friend Yuval Bitton, he was a dentist [who saved Sinwar’s life in an Israeli prison] and the head of intelligence for the prison service. And he knows his teeth, so he immediately recognized that this is Sinwar.
When they called and said Sinwar is dead, what was your first reaction?
To tell you the truth, I was happy. For many, many reasons. I think that it’s the beginning of the end of the war. Israel showed to their enemy that we can do our job. We didn’t eliminate Hamas, but we changed Hamas.
When I heard that 1,200 Israelis were killed in the attack on Oct. 7, the first thing I thought was, “What the hell are Sinwar and Deif thinking?” [Mohammed Deif was head of the Hamas military wing, killed in an Israeli strike on July 13.] It’s amazing, because I knew immediately that the Israeli retaliation will be hard. And I asked myself, do they believe that they can beat Israel like that? I think they did.
In September 2021, Hamas organized a conference at the Hotel Commodore in the Gaza Strip. They called it “The End Days.” They prepared a document, an agreement between the people who participated in this conference, that showed they believed soon they would conquer Israel. They divided it into cantons and appointed people to be mayors in these cantons. And they discussed what to do with the Jews after. For example, they could deport everyone, they could kill everyone. Or if they find Jewish people who could be used for the Islamic Palestinian state that they rebuild after they ruin Israel, they could keep them alive. Doctors, for example, or technicians. They convinced themselves that they could do it. You can only explain this [miscalculation] by religious belief. Otherwise, they are just lunatics.
Israeli intelligence failed to understand what had been going on in the Gaza Strip after Sinwar took control in 2017 until October 2023. In April 2014 [three months before Operation Protective Edge], Netanyahu got from the Shin Bet a secret document about Sinwar’s plan. The head of the Shin Bet and his deputy came to him directly and showed him: “Look, there is a plan to invade Israel by tunnels, kidnap, kill civilians, kidnap as many as they can, and start a war.” They suggested that Israel attack Gaza and assassinate Sinwar. Netanyahu hesitated; he didn’t want to start a war.
When Hamas was founded in 1987, Israeli leaders actually supported it because they wanted the group to be a counterbalance to Yasser Arafat. Then in 2014, Netanyahu decided to allow Qatar to fund Hamas to act as a counterbalance to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the PA. Did he not learn the lesson of history?
No. No. He did it for political reasons. Netanyahu was elected in 2009 with the slogan “strong against Hamas.” Netanyahu is always trying to find an enemy. This is a way to control people — you frighten them. In 2014, after Protective Edge in Gaza that lasted 51 days, he realized that he couldn’t eliminate Hamas and could no longer say “strong against Hamas.” So then he had to find another enemy, and he found one: Mahmoud Abbas. But the more important reason was political. He knew that if Israel had any discussion with Mahmoud Abbas, any peace agreement, any compromise with the West Bank, he would lose the settlers’ support.
You talked about the intelligence failure leading up to Oct. 7. But you’ve also said that you were maybe more surprised than anyone by Oct. 7.
Because I’m a journalist. I didn’t receive any intelligence reports, and there were many intelligence reports, like the one from 2014. Netanyahu denied that any threat reports were brought to him. [Defense Minister Yoav] Gallant came to him and said you know, our security is collapsing because of the judicial reforms. And Netanyahu didn’t want to hear him.
The thing you missed was what? That Sinwar was totally in charge now? And that Sinwar’s approach to dealing with Israel was much different than other leaders of Hamas?
Ismail Haniyeh all the time tried to find … not peace, but some kind of an accommodation. I didn’t know that Sinwar was a totally different guy — he wasn’t trying to relieve [the suffering of] his people and find an accommodation. He had another goal; Sinwar thought he could conquer Israel or free Jerusalem. He also wanted to release his friends from Israeli prison. At an October 2011 rally in Gaza, he said “We will not give up until we release all the prisoners from the Israeli prison.” The same day, he started to prepare himself and his plan.
I never met Sinwar. When he was released from Israeli prison, I called him and tried to interview him for Israeli TV Channel 10. He was a smart guy. He spoke fluent Hebrew. And he said, “Only a live interview, no editing.” Of course, I couldn’t afford to do an interview with the Hamas leader directly, live, without any editing. So this is Sinwar.
You’ve updated your seminal book about Hamas, and I’m wondering what new conclusions you’ve drawn since Oct. 7 that were not in the first book.
Two leaders changed everything, Sinwar and Netanyahu. I have a new chapter about Netanyahu’s policies since 2009, and especially after 2014 [when he helped] change Hamas by feeding the monster.
On Oct. 7 there were only 600 soldiers and 12 tanks [on the Gaza border]. In the West Bank there were 32 battalions — all of the Israeli army was in the West Bank. Why? Because of Netanyahu’s conception that [Abbas] is a burden and Hamas is not an enemy anymore.
And of course, Sinwar’s personality changed Hamas, totally. I have a friend who was the head of the Fatah in the Gaza Strip during the first intifada. Today he’s living in Ramallah. He was forced to leave Gaza after the Hamas military coup in 2007. He used to tell me, “You always say, Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, but it’s not Hamas anymore. As long as Sinwar is breathing, Hamas is Sinwar, and Sinwar is Hamas.”
You know a lot of people in Gaza and a lot of people who are in Hamas. Is there a story they’ve told you about Sinwar that you think in some way exemplifies who he was?
One of my friends was an affiliate for the Fatah movement in Gaza. He met Sinwar several times, and Sinwar was very proud to show him the tunnels. He told him, “I must show you something very big that I’m planning now.” My friend told me, “I didn’t want to see. I told him very clearly, ‘You’re a madman. You have to spend the money to relieve the pain of the people, not by building tunnels.’” He said that Sinwar was laughing.
When I went to see the IDF film of footage taken from Hamas body cameras, it was brutal. You saw Hamas doing things that no army would do. When they killed people, when they burned babies, they didn’t feel anything. I could see it in their eyes. For them it was like killing … not even animals. I don’t think that they were on drugs. For them, the Jewish people, or the Israelis, they’re not human. And that’s what happened in Gaza since Sinwar returned.
When you talk about people like Haniyeh as being relatively moderate compared with someone like Sinwar, and being willing, or at least saying they’re willing, to come to some kind of accommodation with Israel, in retrospect do you think it was just wishful thinking?
No, it was not wishful thinking. In 1994, I didn’t know who Ismail Haniyeh was. He had just come back from [southern Lebanon] where Israel had deported more than 400 members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad after Hamas killed an Israeli border policeman. One day I was reporting in Gaza, in the Shati refugee camp, near the beach. I saw a young boy, I think he was between 9 and 11 years old, and he had green eyes, which is not typical in the Gaza Strip. He was a smiley boy, and he told me, “When I grow up, I would like to be a suicide bomber and kill you all.” And then I felt a hand on my shoulder; it was a tall man, very handsome I must say, very charismatic, with green eyes. It was Ismail Haniyeh. He told me, “I’m his father. Don’t listen to him. He is just saying what he is hearing here in the refugee camp.”
He invited me into his house and told me, “I have a proposal. Go to your prime minister…” It’s a funny thing, they think that if you are an Israeli and they meet you in Gaza, you have a direct line to the prime minister. He asked me to deliver a message to Yitzhak Rabin. And his proposal was, we agree to a 25-year hudna (cease-fire) on three conditions. First, release our prisoners from the Israeli prisons. Second, Jerusalem. And third, withdraw to the ’67 borders.
If you think about it, this was the Oslo agreement. And if the Oslo agreement hadn’t collapsed after the Rabin assassination, there would have been a Palestinian state [along the terms Haniyeh was proposing]. It was his proposal.
Have you talked to anyone in Gaza since Sinwar was killed?
Yes, to my friends. They are not leaders, just people. They are happy. And I must tell you, I think that 80% of the Palestinians in Gaza are happy. Even before Oct. 7, most of them hated Hamas because of the corruption. They replaced PLO corruption with Hamas corruption. They knew that Hamas took care only of themselves or their family, and they took all the money to build tunnels. They knew that the disaster, the second Nakba, was because of Sinwar.