typeReports

Tareq Baconi traces the group from its inception in the Muslim Brotherhood, to an armed resistance group, and then a democratically elected party. How did the group rise to power in Gaza? What were the conditions under which they adopted violence as a strategy? Did October 7 go as planned, or was there a miscalculation? And how is Tareq making sense of this moment in time, in the face of the ongoing genocide by Israel against the people of Palestine?

I was too young to have witnessed this myself; I was only two in 1985. The entry in Tata’s diary, dated August 20 of that year, notes that she had heard deeply upsetting news on TV. I assemble the rest of the scene with recycled anecdotes, which is easy to do, because that evening has become the stuff of family folklore.

As Gaza's misery deepens, secret flights approved by Israel offer a way out. But many fear they are laying the groundwork for a silent population transfer. Al-Shabaka's US policy fellow Tariq Kenney-Shawa speaks to The New Arab about the issue.