The Founding of Hamas

On 9 December 1987, as the uprising that became the First Intifada spread across the occupied territories, seven leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, headed by Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, met in Gaza City and agreed to establish an organizational framework through which the Brotherhood would conduct jihad against the occupation. They named it Hamas — the Arabic acronym of Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement.

The founding was a turning inward of a much older current. The Brotherhood had been present in Gaza for decades; Yasin, chosen to lead it there in 1968, had built its base through al-Mujamma’ al-Islami, the Islamic Center he founded in 1973, with its mosques, clinics, and schools. Through the early 1980s the Brotherhood’s focus on preaching and social work over armed action had drawn criticism — the founders of Islamic Jihad split away over precisely this — and when the intifada erupted, the leadership judged that it must join the fight or lose its public.

On 18 August 1988 the movement issued its charter, describing itself as “an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine,” declaring Palestine “an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day,” and taking as its motto: “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path.” That text — with its citation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — became the reference point for the movement’s adversaries for three decades, until Hamas issued its 2017 Document of General Principles accepting a state on the 1967 lines as a formula of national consensus. From the 1987 meeting in Gaza City to its takeover of the Strip twenty years later, Hamas grew into the largest Islamist force in Palestinian politics and the PLO’s principal rival.