Hamas’s internal discussions in the years preceding 7 October reveal a leadership increasingly convinced that the status quo itself had become a strategic threat.

Gaza came first. By 2023, the siege had lasted more than 16 years, and more than 2.2 million Palestinians were confined to a narrow coastal strip, with movement, trade, and economic and social life heavily restricted. Movement into and out of Gaza remained tightly controlled.

Even before the current war, unemployment stood at around 44 percent in the second quarter of 2022, and youth unemployment exceeded 60 percent later that year.

More than 80 percent of Gaza’s population lived below the poverty line, and 1.2 million Palestinian refugees depended on emergency food assistance from Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, to meet their most basic needs.

Hamas governed Gaza but could not end the siege. Periodic confrontations imposed costs on the Zionist regime but failed to alter the basic equation. Destruction was followed by limited reconstruction, negotiations produced temporary easing and the blockade remained.

The choice, therefore, was never simply between war and peace. The existing situation itself involved continuing violence, strangulation and deterioration.

The West Bank presented a different but equally urgent danger. Settlement expansion was steadily destroying what remained of the territorial basis for a Palestinian state. By 2023, roughly 750,000 Israeli settlers were living in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in settlements that are illegal under international law.

The prisoners added a fourth pressure. More than 5,000 Palestinians were being held in Israeli prisons before 7 October, including women and children, while more than 1,200 were detained without charge.

The fifth development, normalisation, may have been the most consequential of all. By 2023, Hamas was increasingly concerned about a regional transformation that threatened to marginalise the Palestinian question altogether.

The 2020 Abraham Accords had demonstrated that Arab governments could normalise relations with Israel without resolving the Palestinian issue, and the Biden administration was now pursuing the far more consequential prize of normalisation between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The symbolism became unmistakable on 22 September 2023, barely two weeks before 7 October. Standing before the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu presented his vision of a “new Middle East”, centred on normalisation and an economic corridor linking Asia and Europe through the region.