The Palestinian Authority has transitioned in its presentation of the October 7 attacks from initially celebrating and praising the assault, to defending the legitimacy of the actions while acknowledging the devastation they brought to Palestinians, and ultimately to blaming Israel for the attack itself, according to a new analysis by Palestinian Media Watch of statements by Palestinian Authority officials and Fatah’s official media channels.
The shift, according to PMW, reflects a changing emphasis rather than a complete reversal of the PA’s position. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, officials and official media portrayed October 7 in terms of Palestinian resistance and heroism. As the war continued and the scale of the devastation in Gaza grew, the rhetoric increasingly focused on defending the attack as legitimate resistance while emphasizing the consequences for Palestinians. By 2025, some senior PA and Fatah officials had gone further, arguing that Israel itself had wanted or benefited from the October 7 attack and was therefore responsible for the events that followed.
PMW also assessed, based on Palestinian polling on Hamas’s actions, that the sentiments expressed by the officials have mirrored those of the wider population.
Between November 22 and December 2, 2023, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) reported that 83% of West Bank Palestinians viewed Hamas’ attack as the “correct decision.”
On the same day Hamas invaded, the PA-official media site published “Fatah is participating in defending our people everywhere, and we emphasize to the Fatah members in particular and to all our people that we must strengthen the cohesion in this heroic battle,” and a month later, when data for the PCPSR poll began being collected, Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub told Kuwaiti media that “October 7 was… full of epics and acts of heroism.”
Defending the legitimacy of the Hamas’ attack
By 2025, PMW assessed that the emphasis in statements by Palestinian officials had begun to change. Rather than primarily celebrating the attack and its perceived successes, officials increasingly defended the legitimacy of the actions while highlighting the destruction and suffering that followed in Gaza.
One of the most notable shifts was among officials from the PA’s Religious Affairs Ministry. Weeks after the attacks, the ministry posted on Facebook, “The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, and the rock or a tree will say: ‘Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him’; except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.”
However, the ministry’s advisor Mahmoud Al-Habbash took a notably different tone in an interview in March 2025, focusing on defending the attack as legitimate resistance rather than celebrating its perceived successes.
“What Hamas carried out on October 7, I start from the assumption that resistance is legitimate. We agreed from the start that the resistance is legitimate, and no one can dispute the legitimacy of the resistance… What happened on October 7 is a legitimate thing, okay? It’s legitimate,” he said.
Similarly, PA President Mahmoud Abbas said in an interview with Al-Hayat Al-Jadida in June 2025 that “As important as the goals that Hamas attempted to achieve through this attack may have been, they are not comparable to the damages and heavy losses that the Gaza Strip residents… have suffered”
Palestinian population ‘enthusiastically embraces’ terror against Jews, Israelis
A poll in October 2025, months after the officials’ comments, found that support for Hamas’s attack dropped to 59% in the West Bank.
“The Palestinian population, guided by its PA leaders, enthusiastically embraces terrorism against Jews and Israelis,” PMW assessed.
By August 2025, Palestinian officials had shifted their narrative again, moving beyond defending the attack or emphasizing its consequences for Palestinians to blaming Israel for the attack itself. Officials claimed that Israel had wanted the invasion because it would provide a justification to “eliminate the Palestinian cause.”
Al-Habbash said on his YouTube channel that “the Israeli occupation wanted what happened on October 7. It completely wanted this and perhaps even strived for it, because it wanted the result. It wants to eliminate the Palestinian cause and put an end to the Palestinian existence through expulsion, killing, and reoccupation.”
In October, he said on his YouTube, “When we want to know who is behind something, we need to see who benefited from it. Who benefited here? Before October 7, Netanyahu was taking his last breaths…and Israel was boiling inside like a cauldron. Then October 7 came to give Netanyahu breathing space and to reunite the Israeli arena against the entire Palestinian people.”
Palestinian Authority’s narrative says Oct. 7 was ‘heroic’
Similarly, in August, Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub posted on Facebook that “The Israeli government is the only one responsible for what’s going on, for the suffering, whether for the Palestinians or some Israeli civilians who were killed on October 7.”
Itamar Marcus, founder and director of PMW, told The Jerusalem Post, “In the Palestinian Authority’s twisted narrative, the horrors committed on October 7 – the rape, torture, beheadings, families burned alive, and the slaughter of 1,200 people – constituted a heroic and lawful exercise of self-defense against Israel. The PA’s leaders spread this justification throughout Palestinian society, allowing it to reach even children in PA schools.”
Insisting that Abbas needed to condemn Hamas’s attack not for the devastation Gaza experienced as a consequence of the Israel-Hamas war, but for the war crimes the group committed that day, and in the years that followed against the hostages, Marcus said that the Palestinian Authority should not receive international recognition or praise for its “Reform.”
“There can be no credible discussion of a ‘reformed’ PA until Mahmoud Abbas personally and unequivocally condemns the October 7 atrocities in public and dismisses every official and influential figure who praised or justified them,” Marcus said. “Countries and leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron, whose recognition of a Palestinian state rested on the false assertion that Abbas had condemned the attack, must suspend that recognition until the PA repudiates its current messaging and publicly denounces the atrocities.”
