Former Ra’am leader: Hamas killed no civilians, hostages are ‘prisoners of war’

Abdulmalik Dehamshe, former leader of the Islamist Ra’am party, stirred up a storm after a series of statements he made in an interview with Makan, the Arabic-speaking outlet of the ‏Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, in which he justified Hamas’s bloody incursion into Israel on October 7 and cast doubt on the accounts that took place in that horrific day.

In the interview, Dehamshe claimed that those who were taken into Gaza on October 7 were not “hostages” but rather "prisoners of war," which Hamas took in order to free the other prisoners of war who are in Israeli prison.

He then asked the surprised anchors: "Are the prisoners in Israel not human beings? Do they not have the right to be freed?"

The anchors then attempted to confront him with the fact that the hostages were innocent civilians, but Dehamshe replied, in a matter resembling some of the talking points relied by Hamas officials on various occasions, that those who took civilians were in fact Gazan civilians who went into the Envelope following Hamas militants, rather than Hamas militants themselves.

When the anchors tried to push back and asked whether Dehamshe is in fact legitimizing what took place on October 7, the former MK replied simply: "There is no need for me to grant legitimization - it's a legitimate act, everyone who fights their occupier has international legitimacy according to international law."

When asked whether there is international legitimacy for raping women, murdering children, and burning them alive, Dehamshe answered: "Show me one picture of a Hamas man who murdered a child or murdered a woman! We did not see such murders.” Then he quickly added: “Maybe there was, in fact, murder, but if there was - it was done by [Gazan] civilians who came in, not Hamas! All of Gaza came in!”

Dehamshe then pointed to a video showing a horrified woman held by Hamas captors in her home with her children, lauding the Hamas terrorist who had just broken into her house under a barrage of rockets for the fact that he had asked her permission to eat some bananas and told her not to be afraid because “they are Hamas.”

When pushed again regarding the hundreds of civilians killed and kidnapped, Dehamshe answered with a mere “Hamas fought and killed and took prisoners from the Israeli police and army. That's what Hamas did."

Finally, Dehamshe added: "Where is the assurance that there was a murder of Israeli citizens? Or the accusations about sexual or non-sexual things?"

Who is Dehamshe?

Dehamshe served as a Knesset member between 1996 and 2006 and is still regarded highly in the Islamic Movement. As a lawyer, he represented his past Hamas founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and has lauded the terrorist leader multiple times. He also served time in Israeli prison for security-related issues.

This is not the first time in which Ra’am members cast doubt about some of the accounts of the October 7 massacre. Already in November, MK Iman Khatib-Yassin cast doubt on the fact that babies were killed and women were raped during the massacre, which led to her being scolded by party leader MK Mansour Abbas.

Ra’am, short for the United Arab List, is an Islamist party representing the legitimate southern branch of the Islamist Movement in Israel. Ra’am traces its ideological roots to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is also the ideological stem of Hamas. The party came under scrutiny in the past years for reported relations with Hamas-affiliated actors in Türkiye, as reported by The Jerusalem Post in February. In March, Israeli Bank Leumi blocked the Ra’am-related charity “Ighatha 48” due to reported ties to Hamas-related actors in Istanbul.