preview

Essay on Hamas

Better Essays

Write a Profile of a Terrorist Group

Hamas: The Group’s Origins

“Hamas is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement”.

A long history of suicide bombings and other attacks on Israeli civilians and military targets has earned Hamas a well deserved reputation as a murderous terrorist organization. Hamas’s origins stretch back decades through the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine; and Hamas took it current shape during the early years of the intifada. Hamas was not only formed to resist an Israeli state, but also was firmly against the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) dominance in the Palestinian National movement. By the late 1980’s the PLO’s role as the forerunner of Palestinian nationalism …show more content…

The Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was born in 1937 in Jura, small village near the town of Majdal. In 1948 he and his family were forced to move to Gaza after his village was destroyed during the Arab-Israeli War. At the age of 22 in 1960 Yassin married one of his relatives Halima Yassin together having eleven children. In 1984 Yassin was arrested and sentenced to 13 years in jail for the illegal possession of arms, his establishment of a military organization and for his public rhetoric calling for a jihad against non Muslims and the annihilation of Israel. Yassin was arrested and released from Jail several times, before he officially co-founded Hamas with Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi in 1987, they originally called the movement the Palestinian Wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. “By 1989 he ordered Hamas to kidnap Israeli soldiers inside Israel, to murder them and bury their bodies in a manner that would allow Hamas to negotiate the exchange of bodies for Hamas prisoners, who he hoped would be released from jails in Israel”. His demise came when he was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2004 as he was leaving a Gaza City mosque.

The current Hamas spiritual leader Yunis Al-Astal was born in 1956 in the Gaza city of

Get Access