A senior Hamas leader has said that he would not have supported the October 7 attack on Israel if he had known what the consequences would be for the Gaza Strip. Senior Hamas politburo member Moussa Abu Marzouk's remarks about the aftermath of the war were rejected immediately by Hamas who said his words were "taken out of context."
Abu Marzouk, in an interview with The New York Times, claimed that he wouldn't have approved the assault, had he known about the outcome. "If it was expected that what happened would happen, there wouldn’t have been October 7," Abu Marzouk said, asserting that he wasn't privy to the information.
He called Hamas's survival a "kind of victory" despite Israel's military campaign in Gaza, comparing it to a regular person surviving a boxing match with someone like Mike Tyson. But, he added, it was unacceptable to call the war a win for the Hamas. "We’re talking about a party [Israel] that lost control of itself and took revenge against everything," Abu Marzouk claimed. "That is not a victory under any circumstances."
Abu Marzouk added that he was open to discussing the potential disarmament of Hamas in Gaza but refused to give details about what the "disarmament would look like."
The senior leader's statement is in contrast with the ones made by another politburo member Ghazi Hamad who declared that "October 7 was just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth" and Hamas was willing to pay the price.
Soon after the interview was published, the Hamas leadership released a statement countering the remarks. "The occupation’s aggressive and destructive behaviour is the cause of the destruction in Gaza. The October 7 epic marks a strategic turning point in the Palestinian national struggle," Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said. Hamas also claimed Abu Marzouk’s comments were “incorrect and taken out of context."
On Abu Marzouk's statement about disarmament, Hamas said it held "onto our resistance weapon as a legitimate right, and what was attributed to Moussa Abu Marzouk does not represent the movement’s stance."