What is Hamas Thinking Now? Journalist On Rare Interview w/ Top Hamas Leaders

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, INTERNATIONAL HOST: Next, ceasefire negotiations in Cairo between Israel and Hamas have reached a delicate phase, that’s according to the mediator Qatar. Six months after it launched that brutal terror attack on October 7th, murdering over a thousand Israelis, some 1200 and still holding more than 100 hostages. What are Hamas’s next moves? Michel Martin spoke with Akbar Shahid Ahmed, HuffPost senior diplomatic correspondent, who’s interviewed two Hamas leaders.

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MICHEL MARTIN, NPR CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Akbar Shahid Ahmed, thank you so much for speaking with us.

AHMED: Thank you for having me, Michel.

MARTIN: Obviously, we’re very intrigued by the piece that you posted in Huffington Post titled, “What is Hamas Thinking Now?” You know, Hamas is an organization that a lot of people are used to talking about, but not many people have the opportunity to speak to. So, the first question I had for you is, what gave you the idea to try to go to some senior members of the leadership?

AHMED: Absolutely. So, being based here in D.C., you know, we get to hear a lot from U.S. government spokespeople, right, we have a lot of foreign officials coming and going, Europeans, Israelis, and to some extent, some Palestinians, right? But if we think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and this moment since October 7th, Hamas is an integral part of the story, right? Like them, hate them, denounce them, whatever your feelings are, you have to deal with them, right? They are the people who set off this episode of fighting, and they are who Israel is, you know, in Gaza with U.S. support, fighting as we speak today. So, my editors and I, in the fall and kind of winter, started to think, how can we try to get that perspective, right, to frame it in a way that informs our audience, does so responsibly. And it was quite a challenging endeavor, both the logistics of it and the kind of taking on that responsibility, right, of talking to these people and to some extent, giving them a platform to reach a major American audience. But —

MARTIN: Well, say a little bit more about why you think that’s important. Because, you know, I think people do know that Hamas is considered a terrorist organization, you know, by the United States and other governments. So, just — if you would just — for people who just questioned the lot — the interview itself, would you just say more about why you think it was so important to do?

AHMED: So, Hamas, as you mentioned, is listed as a terror organization by the U.S., by the E.U. In fact, a lot of Americans can face legal penalties for engaging with Hamas to some extent, right? So, there’s a real barrier and systemic reluctance to engaging with them. From our point of view, we felt this is a viewpoint that we want to not only convey, to some extent we do get Hamas messaging, right? We get their documents, we get their statements, but we want to really challenge it and press it and engage with it and ask them tough questions and take that kind of hour, two hours to sit with them and say, let’s talk about civilians. Let’s talk about the fact that many Palestinians are not supportive of you. Let’s talk about your ruling Gaza. Let’s talk about your vision. And you can’t do that unless you’re having a conversation or a dialogue.

MARTIN: So, who did you wish to speak to? And what role do they play in the Hamas organization?

AHMED: I wanted everyone. I wanted Khaled Mashal, the former head of Hamas. Khalil al-Hayya, one of the top negotiators, Mousa Abu Marzook, and Basem Naim. And I was able to get the latter two, Mousa Abu Marzook, who is — has been the second in command of Hamas. He’s been a major figure since their founding in the ’80s. Actually, has lived in the U.S. for a while, has lived in various countries, but always been central to their operations and it’s actually designated as a terrorist by the U.S., especially designated national. He’s under sanctions because the U.S. says he’s funneled. He’s been one of the chief founders. I also spoke with Basem Naim, who is really interesting because he is someone who was Gaza-based, has always been Gaza-based. He was a minister in Hamas’ administration in Gaza. His wife and children are still in Gaza. He happened to be out of Gaza, he said accidentally, in his word, prior to October 7th and hasn’t been able to return.

MARTIN: I have to start with October 7th. What is their point of view about what they were trying to accomplish on October 7th and do they think they accomplished it?

AHMED: That’s one of the most striking things. You know, I think October 7th is such a touchstone of trauma for Israel and for many people, you know, with links to Israel who were affected by that and what’s happened since. From that point of view, despite everything that’s happened since right, we’re talking about close to 34,000 Palestinians, at least dead. Of course, 1,100 Israelis, most of them civilians also dead, many hostages still in Hamas’ control. Hamas still believes it was worth it. Their argument is, we wanted to draw back global attention to Israel-Palestine. We felt it was slipping away. We felt the U.S. didn’t care about a resolution to this conflict. And to some extent, we felt Arab states had stopped caring, and so we really needed this kind of big explosion. In their telling, their narrative is, this isn’t about October 7th, per se, you know, specifically they use this phrase, history didn’t begin on October 7th. So, they’re talking about this kind of, obviously, decades long Israeli policy of subjugating Palestinians to a large degree, right? And they’re also talking about the last few years, in which you’ve seen a very far-right administration in Israel, and you’ve seen these rising attacks by settlers in the West Bank, attacks on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, this kind of sense of the window is closing. And so, from their point of view, we’re talking about Israel-Palestine. So, for all what they would see as collateral damage, and it’s a very, very heavy tool, for all of that, to them, it’s still worth it.

MARTIN: Do they agree, or do they at least acknowledge what the Israelis and other governments have been saying is that they essentially hide among the civilian population, that they basically, they are using civilians as human shields? How do they respond to that?

AHMED: They argue, look, we were the administration of this place, right? From 2006 onwards, Hamas was running Gaza. So, lots of government officials, police officers, anyone who’s there in that administration is Hamas linked. So, to say they are hiding within the civilian population from Hamas’s point of view, well, that’s just the people who lived there.

MARTIN: So, their argument is they are the civilian population. They are the civilian population. Interesting. OK. Were they trying to kill as many people as possible? What do they say about that?

AHMED: I press them on, look. the majority of the people that you killed on October 7th, we know indisputably were civilians. They were civilians. We know that their argument — and it’s so interesting that they’re not trying to deny that or disavow it to the extent to which actually some folks abroad have tried to do, they’re saying it was chaos. We only talked to the military targets. We did not mean for civilians get killed, but they were not denying that the majority was civilians.

MARTIN: A music festival is a military target? I mean, what? Wait, I’m just —

AHMED: Right. And I think —

MARTIN: So, they say — but they actually say that they were not trying to kill civilians, that they said it was some sort of, what, a logistical or tactical breakdown or something of that nature?

AHMED: But the way we put it in the piece was to say they really deflected the blame from the attackers to the attacked, right? They said, well, you know, Israel should have been defending better. And because there were not strong Israeli forces on the other side of the border, once Hamas and the others who were with them broke through, that’s why so many targets were attacked. And they argued that — in their telling, thousands of people, that’s a really high estimate. We didn’t feel comfortable putting that in the piece, but that’s really what they estimate. Certainly, we know that many people who were not initially involved in the attack from Gaza did come through into Israel and carry out some of those atrocities.

MARTIN: Do they acknowledge raping women? Do they acknowledge using sexual violence as a tool of war?

AHMED: They have not acknowledged that. They are refusing to acknowledge that so far.

MARTIN: But how do they account for all of the people who’ve lost their lives? Surely, they have lost some of their own relatives and loved ones.

AHMED: Many. I mean, we saw the top Hamas leader abroad, Ismail Haniyeh, his children and grandchildren were killed in an Israeli strike just last week, right? So, many of them have lost family members. One of the people I met, you know, who was helping coordinate the interview, I asked about his family back in Gaza. He said, yes, you know, my mother was hit by shrapnel on her head. I lost two nieces. I — you know, I’ve lost these various uncles. And it’s so striking, I mean, that they are — they’re able to talk about that. They do acknowledge it. They, they seem visibly, genuinely upset. And then in their telling, it’s worth it.

MARTIN: It’s worth it?

AHMED: In their telling, we, the people of Gaza knew what we were signing up for. There’s a real argument to be had there, right? Did all the people of Gaza really agree to launch this attack and suffer the war that followed? But that’s their telling. Simultaneously, they want to say, this operation was worth it, but it didn’t go the way we wanted it to go, because there was chaos, civilians were killed, and also, so much of their message, so much of their posturing, right, and what they said, and even when I pressed them was, we are willing to go to a negotiating table. They’re not willing to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, but they both reaffirmed that they are standing by this 1967 borders idea, right? This idea of Palestine does not need to exist necessarily in all the places where the State of Israel is now. It could exist in just the West Bank and Gaza. And the fact that they were saying that, paradoxically with the classification of the attack, is an attempt to moderate from them, right?

MARTIN: Interesting.

AHMED: So, they want to be seen as we don’t want to keep fighting. And one of them did explicitly say to me, I say in the piece, you know, we are using violent tools because the Israelis are pushing us towards this. So, they don’t — they also want to be seen as moderate and rational to some extent.

MARTIN: Do they acknowledge that there is really no way to know how many people in Gaza feel about their leadership since they have not had elections since, when, 2006? How do they talk about that?

AHMED: I’ll take a step back. I think, you know, I was able, prior to the war, in 2019, I was able to actually report from Gaza and talk to a lot of people on the ground there and experience it before the destruction and kind of be there at the period of Hamas rule, right? And talk to people about what that felt like. I think, important to remember, yes, people who live there did not have a chance to vote. We have had surveys. We have had people speak up against Hamas rule, and they do acknowledge that. So, I did press them on a couple of surveys done by quite respected Palestinian pollsters. And I said, look. I talked to people when I was in Gaza in 2019, who said — I vividly remember this one woman, I’ll never forget, right. She said, I have not been able to practice as a lawyer since Hamas took over because I refused to cover my head in court. Because I don’t want to do that. That’s not my belief. Their argument is, we tolerate everyone, we understand that there are some people who are more secular, we understand there are people of different ideologies. They are not — they accept that they do not speak for all or even the majority of the Palestinian people. I think what’s so striking is that they say — and this is really hard to dispute, polls in the West Bank, in Gaza, do show that the majority of Palestinians are supportive of resistance towards Israel. And the narrative that Hamas is saying is not, we think everyone is supportive of us as Hamas and everything we want to do, but they are saying, we think the Palestinians are sick of the status quo, want to see a change, and we are the only people aggressively doing something to change it.

MARTIN: What are they willing to accept? What is their end goal of how this conflict ends? Are they willing to fight to the last Palestinian?

AHMED: I think they would say no. I think they would say, it’s not our policy that is about fighting, fighting, fighting. They’re arguing knowledge us, bring us into a political process, which the U.S., right, is not willing to do. So, the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, is who the U.S. negotiates with and Israel, negotiates with, it’s been very clear from the U.S. and Israel side, we will not see Hamas in that party and we won’t deal with them. They’re saying we are an indisputable part of the Palestinian fabric. And I was struck, Michel, by how much they wanted to present themselves as not only speaking for every last Palestinian. They said, we’re talking to other Palestinian factions, even ones who they have hated and have open fighting with, like Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. And they said, well, we want to reach a deal among the Palestinians. Let us do that. And then let us negotiate. Essentially, they’re saying, you can’t exclude us from that Palestinian body politics. So, that’s the part of the paradigm that needs to shift. But I was also struck, to your point, about endgame by a sense of urgency that they seem to feel in terms of, in their framing, that Israel is getting more conserved in the right-wing, right? And especially after October 7th, and polls do show us this, support within Israel for giving Palestinians the state has diminished, right?

MARTIN: Yes.

AHMED: And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly said, I’m not going to give Palestine a state. We’re not going to have a reward for October 7th. And I do think that was this kind of concern on their side, genuine or not, but certainly they want to express it, that we may be losing — the window may be closing, Israel may be getting even more hardline, and then where do we go? Then we’re locked into conflict, which they say they don’t want.

MARTIN: Interesting. What are some of your, your takeaways?

AHMED: I was shocked by how much they wanted to talk about U.S. and Israeli politics, frankly. I mean, I did not expect them to be name checking various ministers in the Israeli cabinet or, you know, asking me what I thought about like the youth protest movement. And I think that is another interesting thought of how they see themselves and want to be seen. They want to be seen as a political actor. You can argue, we’re never going to tolerate that. That they’ve done too many horrible atrocities. But that’s what they are saying. We want to be seen as part of a global political conversation and the fact that they are tracking where might Biden be because of the election? How is he reacting to voters in Michigan and Wisconsin? I was really struck to be —

MARTIN: You mean, by state? You mean they had that granular — an interest in some of the political developments in the United States. You know, I have been remiss. The hostages. Was that always part of the plan.

AHMED: Yes.

MARTIN: What can you tell us about that?

AHMED: Explicitly, that was part of the plan, and they’ve told me as much. And there’s a history to that, right? So, often, Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups have been able to get a lot of Palestinian political prisoners out by taking a relatively small number of Israelis and doing these swaps. In their argument, they would say, we only tried — wanted to take military hostages, only soldiers. I pushed them on how many hostages are still alive, Michel, because I think that’s a really — it’s a really important question. We know there’s more than 100 who are not back yet. How many of those are corpses? How many of those are alive? They told me, at that time, 40. We’ve now seen negotiations that maybe they only have up to 20. But I think something important to remember is their definition of hostage and who’s a civilian is quite different from the U.S. and Israel’s.

MARTIN: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Children? There are children taken hostage. How could those not be — are they not —

AHMED: Children, older people, yes, but they would classify even off duty soldiers as combatants, which is not a classification that the U.S. and Israel would use. So, there’s a little bit of, like, talking across wires in that way.

MARTIN: I think there is a historical precedent for people who have used terrorist means and violence to achieve political goals being brought into governments. I think that we saw that in Northern Ireland, where the IRA has become a, you know, part of the political sort of dialogue once they agree to lay down arms. We’ve seen that in Colombia. So, do you think it’s possible that there’s a way that this group, which has committed acts of terrorism, could be persuaded to make some sort of a deal, where they lay down their arms in exchange for being seen as a legitimate political actor?

AHMED: I’ll respond to you in two ways, Michel. I think the first is to think about the players on the board, and who would need to make that possible. So, Hamas would need to both acknowledge its own responsibility for these militant acts, right, for the violence, for these atrocities, and to kind of walk away from some of the open antisemitism and promises to wipe out the entire State of Israel that they’ve had. I was struck by how much U.S. officials, sources of mine, reached out and were really interested in this piece, right, really almost grateful that this piece came out, really curious because they are not able to have that interaction. And what that said to me is that certainly at levels of the national security establishment, there’s an awareness of what you’re saying, right? That the precedent is there, that Hamas is part of this fabric, and what can you do? And the other aspect of that is just the readership response that we’ve had. That’s really said to me that that maybe there’s a possibility here for a different kind of conversation about this group and engagement with them. We’ve had one of the highest levels of reader engagement of any piece we’ve had in five years, right? Readers have gone deep into this piece. So, it’s a 6,000-word behemoth. I mean, this is not a joke. Readers have gone really far down, something we can track. And I think they are almost solved for understanding and seeing this kind of engagement and presentation of these viewpoints with appropriate context. Do I think that will happen? I think there’s a lot of people who don’t want that to happen. But I was shocked by how much the Hamas figures, to a large degree, were presenting themselves, take it seriously or not, but in their argument, at least test it. They were saying, just test us, try it and test it and see what happens. And I think the question is whether the U.S., Israel, other players can get that.

MARTIN: Akbar Shahid Ahmed, thank you so much for speaking with us today.

AHMED: Thank you so much, Michel.