BBC Misrepresents Islamic Scholar’s Fatwa Denouncing Hamas’ October 7 Attacks

The senior Islamic scholar in Gaza, Salman Al-Dayeh, has issued a fatwa in which he criticizes Hamas for its October 7 attack, not because of what the terrorists did to Israelis, but because of the powerful response that attack elicited from the IDF, that has caused death and destruction in Gaza. The BBC, however, reported on his fatwa as if it were meant to condemn the Hamas atrocities themselves, rather than Hamas’ indifference to what Gazans have endured as a result. More on this fatwa and its proper interpretation can be found here: “Deceptive BBC headline implies Gazan’s criticism of Hamas Oct 7 atrocities ‎,” by Itamar Marcus, Palestinian Media Watch, November 13, 2024:

Last week, the BBC published an article about an Islamic leader’s response to the Gaza war which opened with the misleading headline: “Gaza’s top Islamic scholar issues fatwa criticizing 7 October attack.” It then continued to highlight his criticism of Hamas and the religious leaders prominence in Gaza, but never mentioning that he only criticized the devastating impact that the war had on Palestinians. His fatwa did not have one word of criticism of the rape, burning alive, and massacre of Israeli civilians. This approach follows the Palestinian Authority’s policy that Palestinian Media Watch has reported on repeatedly, to defend and justify the Oct. 7 atrocities while criticizing Hamas for the destruction in Gaza.

The implication of the BBC headline, on the other hand, and opening paragraphs of the BBC article is clearly that he was criticizing what happened on Oct 7:

“The most prominent Islamic scholar in Gaza has issued a rare, powerful fatwa condemning Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the devastating war in the Palestinian territory… Dr Dayah’s fatwa, which was published in a detailed six-page document, criticises Hamas for what he calls ‘violating Islamic principles governing jihad’… Dr Dayah adds: ‘If the pillars, causes, or conditions of jihad are not met, it must be avoided in order to avoid destroying people’s lives. This is something that is easy to guess for our country’s politicians, so the attack must have been avoided.’ For Hamas, the fatwa represents an embarrassing and potentially damaging critique, particularly as the group often justifies its attacks on Israel through religious arguments to garner support from Arab and Muslim communities.”

The BBC quoted al-Dayeh that Jihad requires “to avoid destroying people’s lives,” and since the BBC wrote that he was “criticizing 7 October attack,” the implication is that he was critical of Israel’s civilian deaths. This was totally false.

The fatwa by Islamic scholar Salman al-Dayeh, has six parts, each critical of a statement made by a senior Hamas figure regarding the war in Gaza. The fatwa states that Hamas did not fulfill the conditions of jihad because it did not take into consideration the disastrous impact on civilian Palestinians.

The conditions for waging jihad, he writes, include waging the war far away from Muslim civilians and ensuring that they have enough food and water for the duration of the war:

The jihad must be “far from [the Muslim] population centers and safe shelter away from inhabited houses, populated towers, crowded schools, busy hospitals… and to store provisions that will last them longer than what opinion holders and advisors expect regarding the war.”

[Salman Daya, Facebook page]

He also insists that based on the “war people,” i.e., Israel’s past responses to Palestinian’s lesser attacks from Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas should have anticipated this counterattack and should not have attacked:

“This [the counterattack] is something that politicians and leaders in our country can easily assess if they examine the aggression of the war people [=Israelis] on the West Bank and Gaza in previous confrontations, which were much lighter than what happened on October 7th, and [Palestinians] were met with many martyrs and wounded, the explosion of houses and towers, the uprooting of people for days and months to schools and hospitals…. If the response of the war-people [Israelis, in the past] was causing severe damage for much more minor reasons than what happened on October 7th, this causes any rational person to understand that the extent of damage from their response in the case of a larger event than before would be many times greater.”

Al-Dayeh says that Hamas should have predicted the ferocious reaction of the “war people” — Israelis — given how in the past, after much smaller attacks by Hamas, the IDF so fiercely responded. It should not have embedded its combatants and weapons near population centers, but made war in places where people would not be uprooted and forced to seek shelter in schools and hospitals, or places where “houses and towers” would be blown up. In other words, Hamas should not have deliberately endangered the people of Gaza — which, of course, is central to its strategy of using human shields.

The Oct. 7 attack was a total failure because none of the jihad goals were achieved:

“None of the goals behind provoking the enemy, angering it and stirring up war with it, which the resistance [Hamas] declared at the time, were achieved.”

Moreover, Hamas’ goals were not realistic in the first place:

“When it is likely that the goals of jihad will not be achieved… it should be avoided.”…

According to Al-Dayeh, you must not conduct jihad when you know in advance you have no chance of winning. You must protect your own civilians instead of putting them in harm’s way, as Hamas does deliberately in Gaza. You should keep your own fighters away from civilian areas so as to minimize civilian casualties, but Hamas has done the exact opposite.

Anyone reading the BBC headline and the rest of its report on Al-Dayeh’s fatwa would naturally assume that he had “condemned the October 7 attacks” because they were atrocities. For this is how the BBC presents his fatwa: “The most prominent Islamic scholar in Gaza has issued a rare, powerful fatwa condemning Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel…”

But Salman Al-Dayeh utters not a word of criticism of the atrocities themselves committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Apparently he sees nothing wrong with the mass rapes, tortures, mutilations, and murders that Hamas committed that day. Hamas, in his view, is to be criticized only because it should have known what the Israeli response would be, and should not have conducted a jihad when it knew, or should have, that it had no chance of winning. He also condemns Hamas for embedding itself in civilian areas, thereby increasing the death and destruction visited upon those civilians, when it is the duty of jihadis to preserve the lives and maintain the well-being of its own civilian population.

Will the BBC own up to its carelessness, and tell its worldwide audience that Salman Al-Dayeh’s fatwa did not criticize Hamas for its atrocities, but only for its endangering the lives of its own civilians? Of course not. The BBC has its anti-Israel reputation to uphold. It has built it up over decades. Now is not the time to stop.