Before the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip, former Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas senior official Mahmoud al-Zahar and the spokesman for the movement’s military wing Abu Obeida all promised that if Israel attacks Gaza, it could expect all sorts of surprises. And, indeed, we must admit that Hamas has managed to surprise.
But the surprise isn’t the firing of long-range rockets (ever since Operation Pillar of Defense, it has been established that Hamas has rockets that can reach Tel Aviv). It is the fact that despite its miserable situation, after so many people wrote the movement off and predicted its demise, Hamas still dares to fire dozens of rockets at Israel in what is commonly seen as a suicidal move.
On July 4, my colleague Ben Caspit published an article in Al-Monitor titled, “Hamas is fighting for its life.” He wrote how two basic assumptions of the Israeli security system were disproved in a single day. “[T]he last thing Hamas needs right now is a round of violence,” he was told by a senior security official, who assumed that Hamas had been deterred and wanted silence at all costs. The second assumption was that a third intifada would not break out. The Palestinians were too tired, drained and beaten down after many long years of conflict.
The research units of Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet, as well as academic researchers and other authorities on the movement, are constantly analyzing Hamas in an attempt to foresee what it will do next. The problem is that the tools most of them apply in this analysis are based on more familiar Western patterns of logic and therefore irrelevant to the Islamic movements in the Middle East. Logic would dictate — which is also the source of the flawed assumption — that if Hamas is in a state of crisis and its leaders are concerned for the future and fate of their movement, they would keep a low profile. They would not dare getting into another clash with Israel, especially one where the outcome is known in advance.
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