Hamas is a resistance movement, and calling it terrorist is a political choice

The fuller answer

Hamas has written down what it is for, twice, and both documents are public. That is the strongest position anybody is handed in an argument of this kind. You are not characterising a movement. You are reading it out and asking which part you have misunderstood.

Which is why you do not need the word “terrorist”, and are better off without it. It is a designation, it differs by country, and an opponent who knows that will make you spend the whole exchange defending a label instead of quoting a text.

Lead with 1988, and read it out

The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement was published on 18 August 1988. Its preamble states that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”.

Article Seven closes with a hadith, adopted as the movement’s own programme. “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.” The text adds that “Only the Gharkad tree … would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews”.

Article Twenty-Two carries the conspiracy material, and note how it refers to its subject, because it matters when you cite it. It says “they” and “the enemies” rather than naming anybody. “With their money they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.” It goes on: “They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there.” Article Thirty-Two names the source: “Their plan is embodied in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.”

Make one point about those passages, then move on. They do not say Zionists, or Israelis, or the occupation. They say Jews. Anybody telling you this hostility is directed at a state has to account for a founding text that names a people, borrows a Tsarist forgery, and puts its enemy behind trees on the Day of Judgement.

Cite it correctly or it costs you. The word appears in the Introduction, in Article Seven and in Article Thirty-Two. It does not appear in Article Twenty-Two, which says only “they”. Hang the point on Twenty-Two and the first person who looks it up will find no such word, and will use that to discard everything else you said. Quote the articles that carry the noun.

Article Thirteen closes the remaining exit. “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”

“They moderated in 2017”

This is coming, so meet it with the text rather than with scepticism.

The 2017 Document of General Principles and Policies is a more careful piece of drafting, and part of the change is real. Concede that part first. The Protocols material is gone. Article 16 states that “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion”. Article 20 accepts “a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967” as “a formula of national consensus”.

Now read the rest of Article 20, which most people quoting it have not. The same article opens by saying Hamas “rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea”, and offers the 1967 formula “without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity”. Article 19 states that “There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity”. Article 25 calls armed resistance “the strategic choice”.

And the fact that settles it: the 2017 document does not mention the 1988 Covenant at all. It does not amend it, replace it or revoke it. Hamas figures said so at the time. Khaled Meshaal, presenting the document, called the original charter a historical document belonging to an earlier stage, which is not revocation. Asked about a state on the 1967 lines, he said “this does not necessarily mean that we would have to recognise Israel”. Mahmoud al-Zahar put it more plainly still: “The charter is the core of (Hamas’s) position and the mechanism of this position is the document.”

A movement that had changed its mind had one sentence available to it, and did not write that sentence.

Resistance is not the disputed part. The method is

Here is where most advocates on your side overreach, and lose.

Do not argue that people under occupation have no right of resistance. You will be handed the 1982 General Assembly resolution on liberation from foreign occupation, and Additional Protocol I, which extends the law of international armed conflict to peoples fighting alien occupation. Conceding this costs you nothing, because the law does its work at the next step.

The law of armed conflict binds every party regardless of which of them is in the right. The rule of distinction, at Article 48 of Additional Protocol I, requires parties “at all times” to distinguish between civilians and combatants and to “direct their operations only against military objectives”. The Red Cross states that it applies regardless of the conflict’s underlying cause or nature. There is no provision anywhere that relaxes it for the party with the better claim.

So the argument is not that resistance is impermissible. It is that deliberately killing civilians and taking hostages are prohibited whatever the cause, and that a cause cannot launder a method.

That prohibition is not a debating position. On 21 November 2024 Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Mohammed Deif, commander of Hamas’s military wing, for crimes against humanity of murder, extermination, torture and rape, and war crimes including taking hostages. Judges issued that, not a government, and not a proscription list.

Say the next part yourself, before somebody says it to you. The Court terminated those proceedings on 26 February 2025 and the warrant fell away, because Deif was dead. It did not lapse because the case was weak. Judges examined the evidence and found it met the standard, and the accused was killed before he could be tried. An opponent who lands that correction on you unprepared has taken the point. An advocate who supplies it has kept it.

For the record of 7 October itself, including what is documented and what did not hold up, use the separate guide on that day rather than arguing it from memory.

What Hamas has done to Palestinians

This is the most persuasive material you have with a progressive audience, and it is the material almost nobody uses.

Hamas won the Palestinian legislative election of January 2006, which international observers judged credible. No Palestinian national election has been held since. The legislative elections announced for 2021 were called off.

In June 2007 Hamas took Gaza by force. Human Rights Watch recorded that its forces captured Muhammad Swairki, a cook for the presidential guard, and “executed him by throwing him to his death, with his hands and legs tied, from a 15-story apartment building”. Fighting took place in and around two hospitals. Human Rights Watch called the willful killing of captives “war crimes, pure and simple”.

During the 2014 war, in an operation Hamas itself called Strangling Necks, Amnesty International documented the extrajudicial execution of at least 23 Palestinians. At least 16 had been in Hamas custody since before the fighting started, several awaiting trial. On 22 August 2014 six men were shot outside the al-Omari mosque in front of hundreds of spectators, including children.

In 2018 Human Rights Watch interviewed 147 people, among them 48 former detainees in Gaza, and documented beatings, stress positions and threats against journalists who wrote critically. It concluded that the torture “may amount to a crime against humanity, given its systematic practice over many years”.

Same-sex conduct remains criminal in Gaza under section 152(2) of the Criminal Code Ordinance of 1936, carrying up to ten years. Be accurate about this: the British wrote that law, and the West Bank repealed its equivalent. Hamas has not. In 2016 it went further, and killed one of its own. Mahmoud Ishtiwi commanded a battalion of the al-Qassam Brigades. Accused of homosexuality and embezzlement, he was held for about a year and shot three times in the chest. In a smuggled note he wrote: “They nearly killed me. I confessed to things I have never done.”

The line you cannot afford to blur

Hamas and the Palestinians are not the same thing, and an argument that treats them as one is both wrong and lost before it starts.

The people Hamas has tortured, executed, silenced and refused to let vote are Palestinians. Everything in the section above is a record of harm done to them. If you present it as an indictment of a people rather than of a movement that rules them without a mandate, you have handed the other side the only thing they need, and you will deserve to lose the room.

Say the distinction out loud, early, before anybody asks you to. It costs one sentence and it protects everything else you say.

Ask what liberation is supposed to produce

Resistance is a means, and nobody is ever asked what it is a means to. Ask.

The 2017 document answers for its authors, which is why it is worth quoting on this rather than on anything else. Article 20 rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea. Article 19 rules out ever recognising the legitimacy of a Jewish state there. So the programme is one sovereignty over the whole territory, and the document does not say what becomes of the seven million Jews inside it.

Put that to whoever is defending the word. What is the population of the liberated territory, who governs it, and what happens to the people already living there who are not in the sentence. If the answer is that they may stay as a minority, ask what protects them and who enforces it, because the Jewish communities of Baghdad, Cairo and Tripoli lived under constitutions promising exactly that and are gone.

That question is answerable in principle and it is fair to ask. Most people using the word have never been asked it, and the room notices which of you had thought about the day after.

The lines

“I don’t need the word terrorist. I’ll read you what they wrote about themselves, and you tell me which part I’ve got wrong.”

“Article Seven is about Jews. It doesn’t say Zionists. Article Thirty-Two cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by name.”

“The 2017 document never revoked the 1988 charter. Their own leaders said so. Al-Zahar called the charter the core and the document the mechanism.”

“Occupied people can resist. Nobody may deliberately kill civilians or take hostages. Those are two separate questions and the second one is settled.”

“Their own text says liberation from the river to the sea. Tell me what happens on the day after that, to the seven million Jews living in it.”

Where this backfires. Quoting the 1988 Covenant at length reads as an attack on Palestinians unless you have already separated the two, which is why that separation comes before the quotations and not after. Leading with proscription invites a fight about which country lists whom, and you will not win it. And if you use the record of Hamas’s abuses against Palestinians without any evident concern for the people it was done to, an audience will hear the point you made and disbelieve every sentence that follows.