by Peter Gregson
Based on Pete Gregson’s talk of 30th May 2026 at www.tiny.cc/hamastalk
In the years of Pro-Palestine demonstrations I’ve attended since Oct 7th 2023, there is rarely a mention of the group at the core of the whole issue: Hamas. For people are fearful to talk about them. But whilst calling for support for Hamas may be illegal, seeking its de-proscription is not. The UK Government’s 2000 Terrorism act permits requesting the de-proscription of any “terrorist” group. You can’t be penalised for calling for de-proscription. Citizens have the right to appeal against proscription if you give a reason as to why its proscription affects you.
Following the events of 7th October 2023, I did exactly that and launched a petition to the Home Secretary. Initially I tried to get the petition before Parliament using the UK Government portal but was told it was beyond Parliament’s remit! So, I launched it online on Go-Petition, promoted it using 20,000 flyers – which I took to all the demonstrations around London and Scotland – and started getting signatures.
By January, the online petition had 45,000 views and 1,410 signatures which, though fearing arrest, I took to Downing St. My two supporters and I had our photo taken outside No. 10 and were welcomed into the building by police carrying a big box with Hamas Petition written on it.
The mainstream media was completely absent, despite my mailing 270 journalists – not one of whom decided to cover it. Only Russia Today, Al Jazeera, the Canary and Middle East Monitor carried it.
I experienced no issue with the police despite threats of being arrested from two of the 650 MPs I had written to on the petition. Unhappily for these two public servants, I had broken no law.
To be clear, although I have previously been in touch with Hamas on a prior campaign to twin Edinburgh with Gaza, they did not request nor have any involvement with this one. Indeed, around this time, an organisation called Riverways Law were asked by Hamas to submit a de-proscription application.
Their submission was much more thorough than my 8-page submission to the Home Secretary. You can check it out in full on their website at https://hamascase.com. It had lots of witness statements, including from members of Hamas describing what they saw on 7th October as well as the impact de-proscription was having on people’s lives. It was a phenomenal amount of work. They asked for de-proscription on three grounds:
a. They said the Home Secretary has a duty to prevent even a suspicion of genocide; the way that the rules are set out, it’s not that she needs to see someone committing genocide in order to stop them – if there is even a suspicion of genocide, it becomes incumbent upon her to act. But because she’s banned Hamas and Hamas is fighting genocide- proscription means she’s undermining that fight.
b. The second issue of course was Freedom of Speech. The Qassam Brigades (the armed wing of Hamas) were banned in 2001 by Tony Blair, but the political part of Hamas was accepted by Britain as being legitimate – they were essentially the government of Gaza. It wasn’t until 2021 when Priti Patel went on holiday to Israel, met Netanyahu and banned Hamas on her return. No vote in Parliament was required. Yet as Hamas has never operated outside Palestine, there is no issue of protection within the UK. We in Britain should have a right to discuss Hamas and by banning it, the Home Secretary has taken away our freedom of speech, which is Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. So, it is the British Government who are breaking the law here.
c. Finally, there is the lack of proportionality over banning. The Quartet (Russia, the US, UN and the EU) – set their preconditions after Hamas was democratically elected in 2006. Despite the fact that the UN has allowed the use of armed force against occupation since 1982, they said they would only engage with Hamas if they gave up arms, recognise Israel and accept all PLO/Israeli agreements that had been made in the Oslo Accords of 1993. Clearly, Hamas were never going to do that.
The Quartet later appointed Tony Blair because of his ability in Northern Ireland to get peace- which was an incredible achievement. But we got peace because we negotiated. We never asked Sinn Fein to recognise Britain’s authority over Ulster. We weren’t asking the same thing that he was then asking Hamas to do. Another example, Nelson Mandela, when he headed the armed wing of the ANC, wasn’t asked to renounce the ANC before discussing peace.
Also, Hamas is the Gaza administration- so proscription criminalises all public sector workers there. Gaza City Council has 5,000 employees, just looking after the million people who lived in Gaza City. Technically, if you send money to one of those employees- you could be supporting Hamas. So its banning is simply unjust because it criminalises a vast swathe of people. It’s also pointless because they don’t have any influence over Britain.
The 1987 charter was drafted when Hamas set itself up; there were some quite harsh things in there. It’s an Islamic resistance movement after all – but that wasn’t the full thoughts of Hamas, because it wasn’t written by all of them, it was written by one man. So, in 2017 they released a clarification – their Principles and Policies. In it, they even said they would settle for a “Hudna”, a truce, along the same lines as the UN and UK demands – a return to the 1967 borders, Israel giving up the land it had taken then, giving up that occupation. Hamas also wanted the Palestinian prisoners to be released and the Palestinians who were driven out in 1948 to be given the right of return, as the UN had called for in resolution 194. But the Hamas offer of a truce was completely ignored; this proposal wasn’t covered in the West at all.
Each year Hamas calls for elections; but Fatah each year denies them. It’s true that Hamas would prefer Sharia law, but it has said it will go with the majority in a democratic Palestine. It seeks the end of Israel but would live alongside Jews who gave up Zionism. But none of this was or is talked about.
We get a very twisted view of Hamas. A brief look at its history; it all began with the advent of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 in Egypt; which was then constituted in Palestine in 1946. The Brotherhood concentrated on philanthropic acts; setting up mosques, schools, universities and so on. Back then Russia and China supported the liberation movements all over the world and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) benefitted from this. As the Soviet Union fell, political Islam rose. In 1987 much of the Brotherhood realised it could not refuse to fight any longer and so with the first intifada in 1987, Hamas emerged. Initially, Israel discreetly supported them as a counter to the secular PLO. But in 1993 matters exploded after Israeli Baruch Goldstein killed 29 worshippers at a mosque in Hebron (Goldstein is a hero nowadays to people like Ben-Gvir), he committed mass murder and injured hundreds more. As a response, Hamas declared they would retaliate, using two suicide bombs in buses against civilians in 1994. This resulted in their proscription by the EU and US.
In 1993, Israel and the PLO had signed the Oslo accords without most Palestinians knowing about it. The PLO was led by Fatah, Arafat’s party.
Hamas rejected these accords and wouldn’t get involved in the first elections but chose to give the new Palestine Authority (PA) a chance. The PA began then doing what Israel had said they should do in the agreement which was to jail people who were resisting Israel’s rule. The PA started jailing Hamas supporters, doing Israel’s dirty work. Also, it was becoming quite corrupt.
Then Arafat died in 2004 and Abbas stood for election. Hamas boycotted this, because any president of theirs would have had to negotiate with Israel, which they did not wish to do- so Fatah’s Abbas took power. But in 2006 Hamas decided they would stand for election because they fundamentally believe in democracy. They did stand, winning handsomely. But Israel and the US immediately set about undermining the Hamas Government, which Fatah had also rejected, because they didn’t want to give up power. Abbas had his own US-trained police force versus Hamas’ police force; this was just a recipe for disaster. There were many killings of Hamas, then revenge killings; eventually it became clear that Fatah was planning a coup, leading to Hamas seizing power in Gaza. Thereafter, Israel refused to negotiate over Palestinian statehood. They employed a catch 22; they said they wouldn’t negotiate with Hamas, because they were “terrorists”; and they wouldn’t negotiate with the PA because it didn’t reflect all Palestinians. There was no way to win because Israel had every excuse in the book for refusing the things that they had agreed to.
In the West Bank, as expected, the PA became responsible for arresting Hamas supporters, making them very unpopular. Note that Hamas made repeated attempts over the years at peaceful protest, culminating in the 2018 Great March of Return. It was just so shocking; people were getting murdered by snipers just because they wanted to go home, back through the fence. Many became aware of the true nature of the Israeli regime at this time. Also note that over the 20 years from 2021, 44 Israelis were killed by rockets fired from Gaza; over the same period, Israel killed many, many thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
But Israel continued to allow Qatar to fund Hamas; suitcases full of dollar bills went into Gaza because Israel wanted to keep Hamas going, as then they would then conflict with Fatah (the PA), who were being funded by the EU and the US. The more they became polarised, the more the Israelis benefitted.
This carried on until Donald Trump set up the 2020 Abraham Accords in an attempt to “normalise” relations between the Arab states and Israel, seeking the former’s recognition and trade with Israel. Bahrain, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates all signed and in 2023 it looked like Saudi Arabia was going to be next, even though up until then the Saudis had said they wouldn’t normalise unless Palestine attained statehood. But the more the Israelis promised the Saudis- their own nuclear power stations for example- the more the Saudis were tempted, which gave the strong impression that Palestine was being negotiated away. Hamas felt it had to put Palestine back in the public eye. Also, there was a lot of anger about Israeli actions at Al Aqsa mosque in 2023, where IDF soldiers attacked people at worship during Ramadan.
Hamas launched their strike pre-emptively as they became aware that Israel was about to attack again and take the Hamas leaders. In this strike, their stated aim was to capture soldiers- as the going rate for one Israeli soldier was about one thousand Palestinians, as evidenced by the various previous prisoner exchanges that had taken place.
The plan therefore was to take captives. On 7th Oct Hamas launched an attack with the IDF falling back quickly, which Hamas didn’t expect. They then moved to settlements seeking more captives. Israel now employed the Hannibal directive. Clearly, the damage to cars at the scene could not have been done by guys on motorbikes with Kalashnikovs and were likely done by Hellfire missiles from IDF Apache helicopters. These cars were completely and utterly burned out. The cars had been taking Israelis back to Gaza as captives, but the IDF bombed them. Damage from IDF tank fire of kibbutz homes was also apparent. Whether there was a Palestinian in there and some Israelis, the IDF didn’t care, they just bombed the whole building because they knew that they could blame Hamas. It’s believed as many as 800 Israelis were killed by the IDF. As more and more evidence has come to light following the attack, the claims of mass rape have by now been largely dismissed, despite the media frenzy. There were 19 breaches of the border fence, through which lots of people flooded out of Gaza, not just Hamas. The psychological state of these Gazans can be guessed at, after being starved and bombed for twenty years. They attacked the Nova festival that Hamas says they didn’t know was taking place.
The US and UK accepted Israel’s narrative. And now Israel uses the terrorist label to justify a genocide. And most Israelis have gone along with this because, they think “Oh no, they’re going to kill us all”. It’s got to that level of terror amongst your average Israeli – that they think “we can’t do anything but kill Palestinians, because otherwise we’re dead”. Which is exactly what Netanyahu and the Zionists want.
Even in this country, they brew up terror amongst Jewish people, because they know that just keeps the whole ridiculous ball rolling – and nothing sells newspapers like antisemitism.
As long as Hamas represents the majority view in Palestine, any negotiations would need to include Hamas, for any resulting deal to have any legitimacy within Palestine. Various UK Lords- Lord Peter Hain, Lord Rickets, have declared that wiping out Hamas is impossible. Even Tony Blair said it was a mistake to ban Hamas. Yet, these issues are shoved under the carpet and what we have is a very silent acceptance of proscription. But 80% of countries in the world do not label Hamas as terrorists. The UN does not define Hamas as terrorists. It’s actually the UK, the EU and the US that do so, which gives Israel all the cover it needs to continue killing Palestinians.
Pro-Palestine demonstrations are all very good but are not really getting at the root of what’s going on; Palestinians are fighting for their lives and land, and we should not ignore the fact that Hamas are fighting for them.
We must keep calling for de-proscription. If you agree, please sign the petition at www.tiny.cc/hamas and then we can start getting people to write to their MPs and MSPs. If enough people bug their politicians, it may succeed, not tomorrow perhaps, but if we persist for as long as it takes, it may lead to the establishment of a new democratic state for the most persecuted and oppressed people on this planet.
