Senior Hamas official praises Oct. 7 massacre, claims it undermined Arab-Israeli normalization

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A senior Hamas official who belongs to the terror group’s political bureau praised the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on southern Israel during a livestream interview in June.

The interview with the terror group's senior official, Ghazi Hamad, was published by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) on Friday. During the interview, titled, "Al-Aqsa Flood and the Palestinian Resistance Today," Hamad and the interviewer Khaled Al-Rehab praised the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis and the abduction of 250 Israelis into Gaza from southern Israeli border communities.

“We say long live October 7, which has brought the Palestinian struggle to the top of the agenda of global politics,” Al-Rehab said.

In addition to embracing the murder of Jews in Israel, Hamad claimed that the Oct. 7 attack undermined further normalization between Israel and the wider Arab world. He argued that Israel “reached the level of normalization with countries in the region to reinforce itself as an element of the region,” but claimed that the Oct. 7 atrocities “turned the tables on this whole view.”

“The seventh of October was able to slap at the progress of the normalization of effort, and this is, of course, a very important political success,” Hamad added, referring to the 2020 U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords, when Israel normalized its diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

During the interview, Hamad downplayed the surprise invasion and brutal massacre of mostly Israeli civilians, claiming that Hamas dispatched operatives across the border on Oct. 7 to attack “the Gaza Brigade of the Israeli army" with the goal "to destroy this brigade and to take some soldiers as prisoners.”

In a BBC interview last October, the Hamas official denied the terror group had killed countless Israeli civilians, despite filmed footage that was published. When BBC confronted Hamad, he abruptly ended the BBC interview.

He also welcomed what he described as a changing "foreign perception of the occupation" and praised some universities and governments for "breaking their contact with Israel."

Following the Oct. 7 attack, Hamad made headlines by vowing that Hamas would perpetrate more attacks on Israelis.

“We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight,” Hamad stated in an interview with a Lebanese TV channel.

“Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation, and must be finished. We are not ashamed to say this, with full force,” Hamad added.

The Hamas official claimed that Israel had failed to achieve its objective to destroy Hamas in the current war.

“In every single region that [the IDF] attack and then they leave, the resistance restructures itself and repositions itself in that region again,” Hamad argued. “So, it's very important to see that the occupation is failing,” Hamad stated.

In early August, Israel Defense Forces estimated that since Oct. 7, it had eliminated approximately 17,000 terrorists in Gaza, including much of the terror group’s top leadership. This includes military commander Mohammed Deif and his deputy Marwan Issa, as well as the former political leader Ismail Haniyeh. Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran last month in a bomb attack it has accused Israel of committing.

In addition, military analysts generally agree that Hamas has depleted most of its rocket and missile arsenal.

MEMRI is a research organization dedicated to analyzing Middle Eastern events and translating Middle Eastern news from various languages, including Arabic and Farsi sources, into English.