Hamas
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Hamas is the Palestinian movement that carried out the October 7 attack. Asked whether it is a terrorist organization, John Kiriakou answers that "an argument could be made that it's a freedom-fighting organization... dedicated to the liberation of its people." He frames the attack as the product of decades of subjugation, pushed "over the edge" by the election of the hardest right-wing government in Israeli history under Benjamin Netanyahu. Elsewhere, Kiriakou calls Hamas a "bloodthirsty terrorist organization," alongside Palestinian Islamic Jihad, saying it formed around 1990-91 and has ruled Gaza since Israel's 2005 withdrawal. He also notes that Hamas is officially labeled a terrorist organization by only 13 of the more than 100 member states of the United Nations.

On motive, Kiriakou says Hamas itself stated in the week after October 7 that the impending Israel-Saudi diplomatic normalization deal was what finally drove the group to launch the attack. Asked directly, in a separate interview, whether he considers Iran's regional allies destabilizing, Kiriakou again resists the label: "With the exception of targeting civilians on October 7th, I think that Hamas was created to liberate the Palestinian people from Israeli oppression", arguing that terrorism is often "in the eye of the beholder."

No longer a fighting force

By mid-2026 Kiriakou's assessment was that Israel's stated war aim had been overtaken by events: Israel "say that their goal is to destroy Hamas. Well, Hamas for all intents and purposes no longer exists, at least not as a fighting force." He couples this with a point about the organisation's capabilities before the war, asking how many planes, tanks and artillery pieces Hamas had even before October 7, and answering himself: none. From that he concludes that the campaign's actual objective is the removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza rather than the destruction of an army.

"In part", the formulation Kiriakou defends on air

Asked directly by Piers Morgan whether Hamas is a terrorist group, Kiriakou declined both available answers and gave a divided one: Hamas "is essentially a freedom fighting group, but as it pertains to attacking civilians on October 7th, yes, if the point was to attack civilians, that's an act of terrorism. That's the definition of terrorism." Pressed on whether the attack itself was a terrorist attack, he answered "in part", because it "specifically targeted a music festival with a purpose of killing or injuring civilians for a political purpose."

He refuses the inference the question is built to produce. Asked what his problem with Israel was if he would concede that much, his answer was that a concession about Hamas licenses nothing: "You cannot have as a policy to just kill everybody. That's not a policy. That's called genocide. There's a word for that."

Kiriakou adds two claims about the attack's background. The first is that Israel funded Hamas and that this "was a policy decision taken by Benjamin Netanyahu"; the second is that there were "weeks full of intelligence indicating that an attack was coming."

As a resistance organisation

Asked whether Hamas would meet a foreign peacekeeping force the way the Afghans met an invasion, going to ground, studying the enemy, probing, and eventually flooding the field, Kiriakou's answer is that it very well could, with the qualification that Gaza has no mountains and the tunnels cannot hide anyone forever. What it can do instead is take off its uniforms and slip back into civilian life, waiting on the call from commanders, because it is organised in cells: a classic resistance organisation.

The peacekeeping arrangement itself he treats as a question rather than a conclusion. Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Tunisia, Indonesia and Turkey have agreed to send troops and are afraid of those troops ending up in armed conflict with Hamas, Muslim armies shooting Muslims, Arabs killing Arabs. Whether that was Donald Trump's design or simply how it worked out, Kiriakou leaves open.

The 2026 disarmament talks

With the Iran war under way, mediators in Cairo handed Hamas a proposal to surrender all its weapons to a new Gaza authority. Hamas declined to answer until it saw how the Iran war turned out.

John Kiriakou's assessment was that the stalling would work: "as crazy as it might sound, Hamas is actually in the catbird seat right now. The Israelis can't force them to take this deal because they're preoccupied in both Iran and Lebanon."

The underlying reason, in his framing, is that two and a half years of bombardment had not produced the result it was meant to: "the Israelis flattened Gaza, but they didn't flatten Hamas. They're still the only game in town." That conclusion generalises at air wars are overrated.

Reconstitution

Asked in March 2026 whether Hamas might strike again or be planning something, Kiriakou answered from the state of its backers: it would be hard to believe at that stage "because their patrons have kind of been taken out, at least temporarily."

His forecast beyond that is of a cycle rather than a threat: "I think we should expect Hamas to reconstitute itself. It will never be a real threat to Israel, and it will result in Israeli counterstrikes and counterattacks that would dwarf anything that Hamas could do to the Israelis. So, kind of more of the same, I think."

See also

- October 7 attack
- Itamar Ben-Gvir
