A Brief History of Peace Talks Between Israel and Hamas

In December 1987, in the wake of the outbreak of the (first) Intifada, the charity organization known as the Islamic Collective, renamed itself Hamas.

It wasted little time in issuing a peace proposal to Israel, one that is almost completely forgotten today. On June 1, 1988, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar traveled from Gaza to Tel Aviv to submit the offer to then Defense Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. If Israel wanted peace, it had to declare its intention to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, release Palestinian detainees and allow Palestinians to name representatives to negotiate a deal with Israel. 

Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, also agreed to negotiate with Israel in 1988 if Israel acknowledged the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and the right of return to their land.

But the offers fell on deaf ears. For decades, Israel had refused to allow the Palestinian refugees to return home. For decades, Israel had been building settlements in Palestine. In fact, Israel had tripled its settler population in the occupied territories over the previous six years (1982-1988) and had imprisoned thousands of Palestinians over the previous six months of the uprising. Hamas’s demands were non-starters for Israel.

But it’s not just that Israel was unwilling to meet Hamas half way. It's that Israel kept making the problem worse. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, Israel continued to confiscate more land, arrest more Palestinian youth and expel more Palestinians from Palestine. 

Hamas was saying: let’s share Israel-Palestine.

Israel was saying: the part of Israel-Palestine that’s ours is ours, and the part of Israel-Palestine that you want is also ours.

A decade of violence passed and Hamas began to talk about peace again. In 1997, Hamas’s leader Shaykh Yassin proposed to his Israeli counterparts “the idea of a cease-fire of 30 years between Israel and the Palestinians.” This anecdote was leaked by the former Mossad operative Efraim Halevy, so we don’t know the full story. Israel has long sought to paint Hamas as the embodiment of pure evil, hence their hesitancy to publicize the news about Yassin’s peace feelers.

But Hamas leaders have continued to reformulate this idea, especially in the mid-2000s. In 2004, Yassin repeated his call for an end to the violence. “Hamas is prepared to accept a temporary peace with Israel,” he said, “if a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” 

It wasn’t just Yassin. Hamas’s second in command, Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, independently told Reuters in 2004: “We accept a state in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. We propose a 10-year truce in return for [Israeli] withdrawal and the establishment of a state.”

Hamas’s peace offers in 1988, 1997 and 2004 may as well have been plagiarized from UN Resolutions 194 and 242, which similarly called on Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return their homes and to withdraw from territories it occupied in 1967.

But Israel had the same problem in 1997 and 2004 that it had in 1988: it was actively involved not in relinquishing but in expanding its control of occupied Palestine. The late 1990s and early 2000s marked another period of rapid settlement growth, new apartheid road construction, more military outposts, frequent land confiscations and an increase in the number of roadblocks and checkpoints, including a massive separation barrier. Rather than ending its occupation of Palestine, Israel was cementing it.

And so, instead of talking to Hamas’s political leaders, Israel decided to assassinate them. Israel killed Yassin in March 2004 and Rantissi in April 2004.

The assassinations triggered massive demonstrations across the Arab world and an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy for Hamas. A poll conducted shortly after the killings found that, for the first time in its history, Hamas was the most popular movement in Gaza and the West Bank. If the purpose of killing Hamas’s leadership was to weaken Hamas, then Israel made a massive strategic blunder, one it is repeating in real time. Israel gave Hamas its great gift to date: A founder-cum-martyr. Whoops.

Hamas rode the wave of support in the January 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, defeating its main rival, Fatah, 44% to 41% of the vote.

Hamas’s leaders seized the moment and called Israel to the negotiating table, pressing for a diplomatic solution to the conflict. “We Hamas are for peace and want to put an end to bloodshed,” wrote Ismail Haniyeh in the Guardian on March 31, 2006. “Peaceful means will do if the world is willing to engage in a constructive and fair process in which we & the Israelis are treated as equals.”

I guess it wasn’t so complicated after all? The Palestinians wanted a fair process, and they wanted to be treated as equals. How extreme!

In 2007, Hamas’s political chief, Khaled Mashal, agreed on the principle of pragmatism. “Hamas changed a lot and great efforts have been made to conform with the realistic positions of Palestinians & Arabs,” he told CNN in 2007. A year later, he was even more specific about Hamas’s interest in a political, rather than military, resolution. “We agree to a [Palestinian] state on pre-67 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital with genuine sovereignty without settlements but without recognizing Israel.”

These public statements paved the way for a truce signed between Israel and Hamas on June 19, 2008. Hamas and other militant groups agreed to stop firing rockets at Israel if Israel agreed to halt air strikes and other attacks and ease its blockade of Gaza.

From June 19, 2008 until November 4, 2008, Hamas fired 0 rockets and mortar shells at Israel and restrained other Palestinian groups, according to Israeli spokesman Mark Regev (on 9 Jan 2009).(Although Israel did not ease the blockade, which was already a violation of the agreement.)

On Nov. 5th, 2008, Amnesty reported that the ceasefire had held up. In fact, it was "the single most important factor in reducing civilian casualties & attacks on civilians to their lowest levels since the outbreak of the uprising (intifada) more than 8 years ago.”

But then, on 4 Nov. 2008, Israel brazenly broke the ceasefire, invading the Gaza Strip with ground troops and killing 6 Palestinians. “The Israeli military concluded Hamas likely wanted to continue the ceasefire despite the raid." In other words, Israel’s belief was that it could disrupt the ceasefire without disrupting the ceasefire. Israel wanted to have its cake and eat it too.

Apparently, Hamas was of the view that that’s not how ceasefires work. A period of historic quiet quickly turned to historic violence. Less than two months later, Israel decided to wage full-blown war on Gaza’s 1.5 million residents, killing 1,400 Palestinians, including 700-900 civilians and 288 children. Eventually, a ceasefire was reached, and the war ended. A UN fact-finding mission, known as the Goldstone Report, concluded: Israel's wartime goal was to "punish, humiliate & terrorize a civilian population" in Gaza. 

Then, in November 2012, Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin was working to mediate another truce between Israel and Hamas. Baskin reported that Hamas was likely going to accept the deal. The harder part, for Baskin, was to convince Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to accept it as well.

Hours after Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari (the "all-powerful man in charge") received a draft of a permanent truce agreement, Israel assassinated him. The result was an escalation in violence & another war on Gaza, in which Israel killed 171 Palestinians, mostly civilians.

In 2017, Hamas presented a new charter advocating for “a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of 4 June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.” 

Hamas’s proposal once again echoed international law. And, once again, Israel rejected it outright. “Hamas is attempting to fool the world, but it will not succeed,” a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the time.

Fast forward to the current ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel. For a while, Israeli negotiators seemed to think they could get their hostages back without committing to a permanent ceasefire.

Over the past two months, though, Netanyahu has made it increasingly clear his goal is "total victory,” i.e., not a ceasefire with Hamas but the complete annihilation of Hamas (1, 2, 3, 4).

Netanyahu’s desire to subvert ceasefire talks has become so apparent that even the right-wing English publication, the Jerusalem Post, ran a headline that read, “Netanyahu actively sabotaging” hostage deal, [unnamed] sources say.”

This week, Netanyahu removed any doubt about his intention after ordering the assassination of the person he was negotiating a ceasefire with, Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Hamas has sought an end to hostilities with Israel in 1988, 1997, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2012, 2017 and 2023-24. But Israeli leaders have shown great hostility to ceasefires, truces and peace deals with Hamas. If only the Palestinians had a partner for peace.