A viable new Palestinian politics starts with 7 October

An updated narrative by Hamas of its 7 October attack sidesteps the question of what its concrete objectives were, but Palestinian politics requires an honest debate about exactly this.

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On December 25, 2025, the Islamic Resistance Movement-Hamas published an account of the “motivations and contexts” for its carefully-planned assault on the Gaza perimeter fence and incursion into southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and of “the course of the war on Gaza” in the aftermath. Titled “Our Narrative… Al-Aqsa Flood: Two Years of Steadfastness and the Will for Liberation,” the document is an updated version of the previous account titled “Our Narrative…Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” that was published in January 2024.

Both documents situate the 7 October attack within the historical trajectory of Palestinian dispossession and continuous subjection to Israeli military occupation and violence since 1948, and of the combination of international passivity and complicity in leaving Palestinians to their fate in the face of unceasing colonization and siege in the territories occupied in 1967 and since the 1993 Oslo Accords. They offer little that is substantively new, however, most particularly in relation to what Hamas really sought or expected to achieve through the Aqsa Flood. This is what stands out the most in both narrative accounts: they sidestep completely the question of what the concrete objectives of the Aqsa Flood* were, and of the specific assumptions upon which it was based. (* On a pedantic note, I regard Aqsa Deluge as the more faithful translation of the Arabic “toufan” طوفان.)

What did the key military planners of 7 October, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, really seek or expect to happen in terms of obtaining tangible gains—both material and political—for the people of Gaza and for Palestinians in the rest of the occupied territories and in the diaspora? From this flow further questions about how they planned to shape, if not control, the subsequent course of events—did their thinking go no further than relying on holding a large number of Israeli hostages to contain the inevitable military fallout? And to what extent did they undertake meaningful political assessment in order to anticipate the likely reactions not only of Israel, but also of other Palestinians, Arab publics and governments, and, no less importantly, of key Western states? In other words, did anything other than purely tactical considerations and technical factors shape their military planning?

These questions are pertinent because Hamas’s 7 October attack was not a sudden, spontaneous uprising but rather the fruit of two years of methodical preparation. An uprising could understandably have affective drivers, inarticulate purposes, and inchoate forms, but the Aqsa Flood generated widespread admiration precisely because it was the opposite: meticulously planned and choreographed down to the last operational detail. And yet so much has hinged, not only for Hamas but also for many others, on framing 7 October purely as a broad, all-embracing expression of resistance to injustice and erasure, rather than a military operation intended to secure specific, concrete objectives or bring about well-defined, tangible outcomes in the here and now.

This is ironic, given that Deif himself was entirely specific in his broadcast on October 7, 2023, in which he portrayed the Aqsa Flood as both a means to stop ongoing Israeli policies and a direct trigger for a Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories and in Israel and for all “Arab and Islamic forces [and countries]… to clear out this occupation from our sacred sites and from our land.” These goals were certainly detached from reality, but were concrete in the sense that their failure to materialize could be measured empirically and assessed.

In contrast, Hamas’s official narratives of the Aqsa Flood make its objectives wholly nebulous. For more than two years since the 7 October attack, widespread acceptance of this abstraction has disabled necessary discussion of what the operation was intended to achieve, obfuscated the question of whether or not it achieved its planners’ intended goals, and consequently sidestepped the issue of what responsibility Hamas should shoulder for what happened during that fateful day and for its later outcomes. This includes the issue of harm to civilians and non-combatants in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, that is once again elided—although this too, demands being addressed frankly in any discussion of Hamas’s acts of commission and omission and, more importantly, in debate about Palestinian liberation strategy going forward.

Too many have leaned since then into the notion that resistance is an absolute right and therefore not open to debate, pre-empting critique of Hamas, let alone of 7 October. The abstraction and dematerialization of Hamas that happens when both it and a wider supportive audience transfigure it discursively into “the Resistance,” a term that is moreover fused with its particular credo of “armed resistance,” renders Palestinian politics untethered to politics in the real world and thus prevents lesson learning and material change. Reversing this requires holding political actors, not least of which are Hamas and its rival Fateh, to account on the basis of measurable, stated goals, practical programs and material behaviours, and concrete benchmarks. A viable new Palestinian politics therefore has to start with an honest accounting for 7 October.