It is not as though I was unaware that Hamas was a jihadist terrorist organisation. After all, I grew up in a town that was a prime target for rockets from Gaza, routinely fired by Hamas’s military wing. One of my biggest fears as a child during the Second Intifada was hearing ‘Allahu Akbar’ on a bus just before the explosion of a suicide bomber.

This bloody jihadist lust came from the very top of the chain of command

This bloody jihadist lust came from the very top of the chain of command

And yet, when I saw on October 7 the scale of brutality, in what became the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, I suddenly realised how little I, like most Israelis, had understood Hamas’s jihadism.

For years – on the right and left, from IDF intelligence to the prime minister’s office – there had been a thriving misconception that Hamas was becoming more moderate. Now we know that this was wishful thinking, combined with Hamas’s clever strategy of deception. Threatened by the presence of radical Islamist movements in Gaza such as Isis, and blinded by the hope that Hamas would mature, Israelis projected their liberal worldview onto jihadists, believing that Hamas was the lesser evil. This distracted us from Hamas’s ‘eliminationist’ and ‘genocidal anti-Semitism’.

Amos Harel, a prominent military correspondent for the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, recently published his influential investigative Hebrew-language book 06:29: Anatomy of a Failure, in which he outlines new evidence about the jihadist elements behind the October 7 attack. Harel recounts the testimony of Major General Amir Baram, then deputy chief of staff of........

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