Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
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Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
They meant it.
Since the shocking Hamas attack on Oct. 7, in which Israel says about 1,400 people were killed — most of them civilians — and more than 240 others dragged back to Gaza as captives, the group’s leaders have praised the operation, with some hoping it will set off a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them.
“I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times.
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The assault was so devastating that it served one of the plotters’ main objectives: It broke a longstanding tension within Hamas about the group’s identity and purpose. Was it mainly a governing body — responsible for managing day-to-day life in the blockaded Gaza Strip — or was it still fundamentally an armed force, unrelentingly committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state?
With the attack, the group’s leaders in Gaza — including Yahya Sinwar, who had spent more than 20 years in Israeli prisons, and Mohammed Deif, a shadowy military commander whom Israel had repeatedly tried to assassinate — answered that question. They doubled down on military confrontation.