For months, leaders of Hamas have defended the militant group’s decision to launch the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, even though it ignited a devastating Israeli offensive that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and reduced the territory to rubble.
Hamas has declared “victory” over Israel, and some of its officials have vowed that their fighters will carry out more Oct. 7-style attacks in the future.
But now one of Hamas’s top officials is publicly expressing reservations about the assault, which also touched off a humanitarian crisis that displaced nearly two million and led to critical shortages of food and health care.
Mousa Abu Marzouk, the Qatar-based head of Hamas’s foreign relations office, said in an interview with The New York Times that he would not have supported the attack if he had known of the havoc it would wreak on Gaza. Knowing of the consequences, he said, would have made it “impossible” for him to back the assault.
Mr. Abu Marzouk has said that he was not informed about the specific plans for the Oct. 7 attack, in which roughly 1,200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage, but that he and other Hamas political leaders had endorsed its overall strategy of attacking Israel militarily.
“If it was expected that what happened would happen, there wouldn’t have been Oct. 7,” as far as he was concerned, he said.
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