A senior Hamas official said last week that the terror group will repeat terrorist attacks on Israel like the one it conducted on Oct. 7 "again and again."
"We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do this again and again," said Ghazi Hamad, Hamas's top spokesman, on a Lebanese TV network. The Oct. 24 clip was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. "The Al-Aqsa flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight."
Al-Aqsa Flood is Hamas's name for the Oct. 7 attacks that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, as terrorists rampaged through southern Israel.
"Israel is a country that has no place on our land," Hamad said earlier in the interview. "We must remove that country because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation and must be finished. We are not ashamed to say this with full force."
Hamad also said "the occupation must come to an end." Asked whether he meant an occupation in the Gaza Strip, he replied that he meant "all the Palestinian lands" and answered, "Yes, of course," to the interviewer's question of whether that entailed the "annihilation of Israel."
"The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears," Hamad said. "It is Israel, not us. We are victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On Oct. 7, Oct. 10, Oct. 1,000,000—everything we do is justified."
He also claimed the terror group had not intended to kill civilians in the Oct. 7 attacks.
"We did not want to harm civilians," Hamad said, "but there were complications on the ground, and there was a party in the area with [civilian] population. It was a large area across 40 kilometers."
Hamad made a similar claim days later in an interview with the BBC's Hugo Bachega, who pressed him on that assertion. After Bachega kept questioning him, Hamad ended the interview.