You think you're going to get a better answer by asking that here rather than by reading the Wikipedia article or a media company's summary of what Hamas is?!
As neutrally as possible:
Hamas is an organization in the area of historical Palestine. It has been governing the Gaza Strip, a small piece of land between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, since 2007.
Ever since then, Israel has been blockading the Gaza Strip. Every few years, eg. in 2014 and 2021 and now again, Hamas fires rockets at Israel or otherwise attacks it, to which Israel responds with airstrikes.
Palestinian narrative: Israel is a settler colonial state that has taken away Palestinian land and is imprisoning Gazans in Gaza. Fighting against that is legitimate resistance against oppression. Israel's goal is ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Israeli narrative: Israel is a safe haven for the historically oppressed Jewish people. Arabs have plenty of other countries for themselves. The aim of Hamas is to eliminate the Jewish state and maybe even the Jewish people. Israel is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties in its airstrikes against Gaza.
The actual truth: There is no such thing as the actual truth. There is a reason why this is the most difficult conflict in the world.
inb4 people with strong opinions on both sides tell me their opinion is obviously right and the above is nowhere near neutral
75Adding onto this: the conflict has been going on since way earlier than hamas emergence.
30Of course. If you read older history, you'll notice that this used to be an Arab-Israeli conflict with Arab states on one side and Israel on the other. They fought wars against each other like in 1948, 1967 and whenever the Yom Kippur War was.
Nowadays Arab states and Israel aren't anywhere near as hostile to each other as they used to be, so the conflict now is mostly between Israel and Palestinian organizations (PLO, Hamas).
15
No matter what "narrative" you seek to believe, the fact is that Hamas hasn't been firing every once in awhile - They have been firing rockets and mortars regularly. Sometimes daily. You can see a list here and more info here
These attacks almost exclusively target civilians. more than 20,000 rockets in the past 20 years.
Additionally, airborne arson attacks are carried out..
edit:fixed links
9Point taken. The point was mainly that the escalations (to which Israel responds with airstrikes or invasions) happen every few years. Most of the time, people in other parts of the world don't really hear about what's going on there in the media. The times when we do are probably because such an escalation happens (e.g. now).
Your links don't work for me by the way, I can see in the source code what you meant to link to, but they don't display as links for me.
8Largely ineffective rocket attacks. See these charts for what near daily rocket attacks and near daily snipers, police beatings, etc, do for relative casualties between Israeli and Palestinian peoples.
0
Bravo. This is the right answer.
5It's used to put nails in
4TLDR
The Holocaust cannot possibly be true because "enlightened centrists" cannot handle truth and simply declares "there is no such thing as the actual truth."
1The funny thing about this comment is that it tells me nothing about whether you are sympathetic to Israel or to the Palestinians, they might both write exactly this and think they've completely destroyed me.
I looked into your comment history and see you're pro-Palestinian, but I would not have been able to guess this just from this comment.
1
The aim of Hamas is to eliminate the Jewish state and maybe even the Jewish people.
Should be in the "actual truth" section, as this was confirmed by hamas many times.
-3
Some kind of dip made from chickpeas. 🤷🏻♂️
42Hamas is a terrorist organization currently engaged in a war with Israel. They are the defacto rulers of the Gaza strip, and most of their members are in Gaza. However, many Hamas leaders live outside of Gaza.
They are listed as a terrorist organization by the US, Canada, UK, the EU, and more.
Their charter declares their goals to be the violent destruction of Israel, the establishment of an Islamic caliphate in the land of Palestine, and killing all Jews worldwide.
36Their charter doesnt state that. It was changed in 2017. Their current charter clearly states their conflict isn’t with Jewish people.
“Palestine is a land that was seized by a racist, anti-human and colonial Zionist project that was founded on a false promise (the Balfour Declaration),”
The Islamic Resistance Movement "Hamas" is a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means. “
https://palwatch.org/storage/documents/hamas new policy document 010517.pdf
Netanyahu helped Hamas get their funding so the moderate party in Palestine would get less support
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/israel-gaza-netanyahu/675597/
8Bruh, how can you say that and not immediately start thinking "maybe i shouldnt"???
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas-Charta
The 2017 edit of it is just propaganda. Otherwise they wouldnt keep killing civilians-2Found the Hamas propagandist.
-5
They are listed as a terrorist organization by the US, Canada, UK, the EU, and more.
Not hard to see how we are clearly taking sides in this conflict. Sickening.
Palestine and Israel are both awful to each other, and here we pretend to make Israel the good guys and Palestine the bad. As if that's even possible to say which is worse.
1
https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas
Hamas (Arabic: حماس, acronym of Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, Arabic: حركة المقاومة الاسلامية, literally "Islamic Resistance Movement") is a Palestinian Sunni Islamist militant group. It was started in 1987 during the First Intifada by Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi as the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood organization in Egypt. In the 2006 Palestinian election, Hamas got 74 of 132 seats in parliament and controls the Gaza Strip. The group wants to build a Palestinian state based on Sharia law in the area that is now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip. Hamas does not recognize the State of Israel.[2] it has been designated a terrorist organization by many countries due to its attacks, including suicide bombings and rocket attacks.
26Depending on the narrator, they're either freedom fighters or terrorists. The question should be why and how does Hamas exist? They didn't pop up one moment and started killing people.
If you're really interested, read some different sources or listen to some podcasts from both sides and you'll have a bigger sense of things.
8or listen to some podcasts from both sides
And listen to podcasts from a third party. Try to find sources that are as objective as possible.
11Yes, I have Podcast addict and just subscribed to various news podcasts, some European, some American, British, middle eastern, ...
I still have to find one Israeli source to see their point of view and one Palestinian or pro Palestinian.
1
It’s an organization that controls the palestinian people. It’s a government, but there hasn’t been an election in seventeen years.
That’s about all I know
5Well sorta, technically they're only the adhoc government of occupied Gaza.
0
A leftist terrorist organization hell-bent on worldwide Jew and further down the road complete genocide
-7Basically what right wingers think antifa is, except in Palestine
-8the meanest guy in the prison yard
-10
