On August 3, Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, sat across from Piers Morgan for a half-hour interview. Most viewers remember the denial. Hamad said he was “100%” confident that Hamas never committed crimes against civilians, and that whatever happened at the Nova music festival, in the kibbutzim, and in the homes set on fire was, at most, a “mistake” by individuals.
The denial was shocking, and rightly so. It was also the predictable part of the interview. The important part came some 15 minutes later, when Morgan asked whether October 7 had been a strategic failure, given what it brought down on Gaza.
Hamad conceded that “we paid a big price” and moved straight to the profit column. Israel is isolated. Its prime minister is wanted by the International Criminal Court. And, in his words, “All the world now, they put the Palestinian cause on the table.”
Before October 7, he said, there were only Security Council meetings and Arab statements that changed nothing on the ground. Now there are “strategic achievements.” He closed the answer by saying Hamas had not changed.
This was a profit-and-loss statement, delivered by one of the people who signed off on the investment.
The massacre dividend
For Hamas, the massacre was an investment. The killing, the rape, and the abductions were meant to provoke a harsh Israeli response, the images from Gaza that followed, and the international pressure those images would generate. Call it the massacre dividend: the political return a terrorist organization extracts from its own atrocity once the world translates it into urgency to “solve the issue.”
Gazans paid the price. Hamad himself left the Gaza Strip before October 7 and never went back, as he acknowledged in the same interview. The dividend is being collected in European capitals, and Washington may be next.
Whoever rewards a massacre with statehood is inviting the next one, and not only in Israel. Paris and London are within range as well.
The Israeli wall
On the Israeli side, the picture is the reverse. The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs has measured public opinion seven consecutive times over 30 months. Opposition to a Palestinian state has held steady at 64% to 68% of the public, and at 75% among Jewish respondents in the latest wave. Total support, including conditional support tied to recognition and demilitarization, has not exceeded 25% in any survey.
One figure is rising sharply. Concern about an October 7-style attack from Judea and Samaria climbed from 62% in February 2025 to 77% in September 2026. Even among left-wing respondents, a majority now shares that concern.
A poll captures attitudes at a given moment and cannot predict how the public will respond to sustained pressure. But three years on, this is no longer post-traumatic shock. Israelis understood Hamad’s sentence better than most of the West: a state established now would be credited to the massacre.
Pressure from outside
Europe reads the same map and draws the opposite conclusion. In September 2025, the European Commission proposed suspending part of Israel’s trade preferences under the EU-Israel Association Agreement. The proposal stalled, and Spain’s attempt to revive it in spring 2026 ran into broad opposition. Yet the economic lever is now legitimate in Brussels, and it has advanced alongside a wave of European recognitions of a Palestinian state. All this on a continent where the Islamist voice, in the street and at the ballot box, grows louder every year.
In Washington, the process is slower, but it cuts across party lines. If Democrats retake Congress in November’s midterms, the wing that wants to condition aid to Israel and impose sanctions will gain committees, budgets, and a platform.
And on the same Morgan episode, Joe Kent, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, called for ending American funding of Israel and spoke of a new political movement on the Right. By 2028, the issue will be on every candidate’s desk.
Hamad was right about one thing: the issue is back on the table. The question is who will pay for it, the slaughtered or the slaughterers.
What is required
For anyone who still believes a Palestinian state would end the conflict, Hamad supplied the answer in the same interview. When Morgan told him he supports a two-state solution and a full Palestinian state, Hamad shot back: “So why should Israel exist?”
At the end of the interview, when asked three times for a yes or no on whether he still believes Israel should be annihilated, he would not say no. Instead, he called Israel “a big burden on the shoulder of the world” and said the world “should reconsider the existence of Israel.”
For Hamas, a Palestinian state is a stage. The destination has not moved.
Jerusalem must stop treating recognitions of a Palestinian state as symbolic gestures, and should put Hamad’s words before every international forum: Hamas itself is declaring that recognition is a reward for October 7. European capitals must understand that every economic measure against Israel tied to the demand for statehood is recorded in Gaza as a return on the investment.
In Washington, in both camps, anyone who talks about sanctions should answer one question: How much is he willing to pay an organization that has openly admitted the massacre was worth it?
The writer is the communication director of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA) and a former senior editor in Israeli and international media.
