Is Hamas a Religious Organization?

Not much has been said since October 7 about the religious nature of the current war. Anshel Pfeffer, a columnist at Israel’s Haaretz, broached this touchy subject in a recent article. “None of the international coverage and commentary on Hamas’s massacre in Gaza border communities, and the war it triggered, has addressed its religious aspects,” he wrote. Hamas’s fighters incessantly invoke God and use religious language, and at some point one must “take them at face value” and “listen to what they actually say.” Like Zionism, he wrote, Hamas is “rooted in religion,” and that makes the present conflict “fundamentally religious.”