If you stopped constantly dehumanizing palestinians for a second, maybe you’d recognize Hamas began due to the terrible material conditions of Occupation, and has the goal of ending the occupation. Maybe you’d even recognize collective punishment has been a deliberate Israeli tactic for decades with the Dahiya doctrine. Hamas is very different from ISIS, but they both were born out of Terrorism from Israel and the US respectively. Hamas wants an end to the Apartheid, not genocide. That claim is both untrue, and holds no weight when Israel is currently engaging in genocide. This is about the state of Israel being founded on ethnic cleansing and it’s most recent ethnic cleansing campaign. Not Jewish people, stop being antisemitic by thinking they’re the same.
Hamas in its early days, according to former Israeli officials, was seen by the government of Israel as a counterweight to the PLO. Israel supported Hamas as a way to break the PLO’s hold on the region. Retired official Avner Cohen, who worked in Gaza in the 1990s and oversaw religious affairs in the region, told the WSJ in 2009, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation."
In the 2006 election, Ismail Haniyeh led Hamas as the head of Hamas’ parliamentary bloc, while the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, led Fatah, as well as the PLO and Palestinian National Authority (PNA). (Haniyeh is now chairman of Hamas’ political bureau, and Abbas remains in his positions, as of this writing.) With Haniyeh at the helm, Hamas won around 44% of the votes across the region, according to a 2006 ABC News report, a total that secured a majority of seats in the legislature under election rules.
And in the backdrop of the 2006 election were geographic and political divides between Gaza and the West Bank. Contrary to what Bennett claimed, Israel restricted Palestinians from moving in and out of Gaza, as well as between the strip and the West Bank, since at least the 1990s, after the first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, according to Al Jazeera. In addition to Gaza’s borders, the Israeli government controlled its coastline and airspace, allowing for military incursions into the territory, and, in 2007, established the blockade on goods and people that still exists as of this writing.