Unfortunately you’re right, it doesn’t say a whole lot.
While Hamas may appear to have fulfilled its declared short-term goals of deterring Israeli violations of Al-Aqsa Mosque and taking hostages to bargain for the release of Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails, it does not appear to have a long-term end game.
and later
Three days into Hamas’s surprising and overwhelming attack, it is not clear what its end game is and what it can do to reap long-term benefits. Its priority has seemed to be to take both military and civilian hostages to help deter aggressive Israeli retaliation and later exchange them for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
Which contradicts the idea in the OP article stating about Hamas’ “demands.”
The closet thing I could find was this:
The Hamas leadership has said that the objectives of the attacks are ending “Israeli violations”, securing the release of Palestinian prisoners, and “returning to the project of establishing a state”.
Which are certainly objectives, but not specific enough to be demands.
Searching for “hamas’ list of demands” online, there are several articles similar to the one above that reference it, but no list of demands that I can see. The closest things I can find are the 1988 and 2017 Hamas charters, which aren’t particularly specific other than the original one calls for the eradication of Israel and the Jews, and the revised one just calls for the eradication of Israel… which isn’t exactly a demand as much as an aspiration, and is kind of a moot point because it doesn’t seem like something that would be accepted by Israel.
So I’m still looking for an actual list of demands…
Which are certainly objectives, but not specific enough to be demands.
Not really? “Release Palestinian prisoners” and “stop Israeli violations” at least are definitely demands, and from what I found they also want Israel to stop flying drones over Gaza. That said, yeah, I guess not much has been made public.
Well for an actual “list of demands” I would expect things like “release these people:” followed by a list of names, and “stop doing these violations:” followed by a list of the violations they are accusing Israel of. “Release everybody” and “stop doing bad things” are technically demands, but they’re not the kind of things you’d expect in an actual list of specific demands. Those certainly work as summaries of the demands, but I was hoping that some news agency would have an actual list of the specific things Hamas is demanding in order to release the hostages rather than just “do everything we want.” I’ve seen them mention the drones in another article, which I suspect must be one of the things on the actual list.
“Release everyone” is one of their actual demands. Usually Hamas milks hostages for as many Palestinian prisoners as they’re worth, and this time they have a lot of hostages so it should be in line with historical “exchange rates”, so to speak, given that many of the hostages are soldiers, which have more value as hostages. Good point on the violations thing, though, it’s frankly perplexing that they nobody is publishing an actual list.
Thank you for properly seeking sources for information instead of just blindly believing what someone on a forum tells you.
