On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters from Gaza launched one of the most brutal assaults on Israeli soil since the country’s founding—killing civilians, seizing hostages, and briefly occupying territory. The attack was quickly labeled a “terror attack,” and Hamas, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, was cast once again in the role of a group of religious extremists operating outside of the system of sovereign states. This framing, though familiar, is flawed. It creates misperceptions about the scale, nature, and legal classification of the conflict Israel now faces. And it misleads both policymakers and the public about the rules that govern this conflict, the expectations of response, and the real meaning of proportionality.

It is time to stop calling Hamas just a “terrorist organization.” This argument is, of course, heard most often from those who would claim that Hamas consists of “freedom fighters” and that the term terrorist is unfairly biased or even a sign of racial prejudice. The case we make here is very different, and not moralistic, but legal and strategic. Undoubtedly, Hamas is a terrorist organization that has committed countless acts that fit any standard definition of the term. But in addition it is a political-military entity with governing authority, territorial control, and a functioning bureaucracy. It maintains a trained army, organizes military campaigns, and conducts operations that resemble traditional armed conflict far more than they resemble isolated acts of terrorism. Labeling Hamas a terrorist group undermines the legal clarity and strategic understanding necessary to fight and win a war. It also distorts public perception of what Israel is actually doing—and what it is allowed to do under the law of armed conflict.

The term “terrorism” has political, legal, and operational meaning. Under U.S. law, a terrorist act is politically motivated violence by non-state actors targeting civilians. These acts of violence traditionally involve bombings of civilian buses or buildings, hijackings, and similar tactics; the appropriate response to such violence, accordingly, is counterterrorism, which refers to limited, targeted actions—drone strikes, special operations, law-enforcement responses—aimed at disrupting such threats. This framework does not fit the events of October 7, the lead-up to that attack, or its aftermath.

These misapprehensions are not limited to Western commentators and diplomats. In the IDF’s recent nineteen-page report on the intelligence failures leading up to October 7, its “perception probe” highlighted the flawed assumptions about Hamas, noting a failure to recognize Hamas’s shift from a standard-issue terrorist group to one actively planning a large-scale offensive, aimed at occupying Israeli territory and destroying Israel. This perception gap led to a lack of preparedness as well as failures to respond appropriately on the day of the attack. And the same misunderstanding continues to persist across the international community.

The attack of October 7 was not an isolated act of terror; it was a cross-border, combined-arms military operation, that is, an invasion. This invasion involved thousands of trained fighters who breached Israel’s air, land, and sea defenses; killed civilians and soldiers alike; and seized territory, while operatives in the rear simultaneously fired rockets deep into Israeli territory. Hamas attempted to coordinate its assault with Hizballah to open a northern front. They filmed and broadcast their battlefield activities as psychological warfare, and it took days for the IDF to uproot them from ground they held in several Israeli kibbutzim and border towns. Like any conventional military invasion, the attack posed an immediate, existential risk to the state of Israel, and the IDF has since admitted that its Gaza Division was initially overrun and defeated by the enemy. This was an act of war—a traditional one, albeit one that involved countless war crimes, executed by a force that defies easy classification under norms that have governed warfare and diplomacy in the West for the past several centuries.

Framing the October 7 massacre as simply a “terrorist attack” misleads legally, militarily, and psychologically. It suggests that Israel should respond with law-enforcement measures or limited, counterterrorism operations rather than a full-spectrum military campaign aimed at dismantling a hostile regime. But under international law, once the nature and intensity of violence waged between a state and an organized armed group is above a certain threshold, an armed conflict exists, and the applicable framework is not law enforcement but the laws of armed conflict. Hamas’s actions on and after October 7 easily meet that threshold.

In short: war changes the rules. It must change the rhetoric, too.

It is true that Hamas has used and uses terrorism: during the second intifada, for example, it carried out suicide bombings in buses, cafés, and nightclubs. Similar attacks were attempted in February 2025. Those attacks fit the classic mold of terrorism: deliberate violence against civilians to incite fear and exert political pressure. But Hamas’s current structure and operations mean it is not merely a terrorist group. It is a terrorist regime.

Hamas governs Gaza, a territory with clearly defined borders. In 2006, Hamas won internationally monitored elections, after which it consolidated power by force, outmaneuvering its rival, Fatah, and taking over the security apparatus of Gaza. It has since ruled the Strip as a political-military entity with governing authority, territorial control, and a functioning civilian bureaucracy. It taxes, administers social services, runs a media wing, and commands an army with battalions of fighters organized in a hierarchical chain of command.

No other U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization has accomplished this level of territorial and governmental control. Al-Qaeda never held cities. Islamic State briefly held territory, but it never won an election or gained semi-recognition as a governing authority. In this sense, Hamas is more akin to the Nazi party—elected, militarized, and expansionist.

If the 2023 attack was a military operation, an invasion by a terrorist army, then the attackers were “militants” or “fighters,” and their leadership is a belligerent regime, not just a group of terrorists in the narrow sense. And the battle now unfolding against this hostile army is not counterterrorism. It is war.

The difference is not merely semantic; it has operational consequences as well. The U.S. Department of Defense doctrine recognizes that different kinds of operations apply, respectively, to terrorism, insurgency, and war. Calling Hamas fighters “militants” more accurately reflects the reality of their battlefield role, which is governed by the laws of armed conflict—including the Geneva Conventions and customary international law.

Language also frames legitimacy. If Israel is perceived to be responding to terrorism with full-scale war, it can be accused of overreach. But if Israel is understood to be engaged in a defensive, existential fight against a hostile regime that invaded its territory, killed and kidnapped its citizens, and declares its intent to repeat the attack, then war—along with all the obligations and rules it entails—is the appropriate response, and absolute victory is a justified objective.

Unfortunately, the label “terrorist” has become a rhetorical weapon. It invites simplistic comparisons between Israel’s airstrikes and Hamas’s atrocities. It enables critics to say, “Israel is killing more people than Hamas, therefore it must be the aggressor.” But wars are not judged by symmetry in body counts. They are judged by adherence to principles: military necessity, distinction between civilians and combatants, proportionality, and humanity. Those principles only function if the conflict is properly defined.

None of this is to excuse Hamas’s conduct. Hamas has repeatedly violated the laws of war by targeting civilians and holding them hostage, using human shields, and placing military assets in protected civilian sites. But the nature and scope of how Israel carries out its right to defend itself under international law—and the perception of how it does so in the eyes of the public—depends in part on the type of conflict it is fighting. If the public continues to see the war through the lens of counterterrorism, it will not appreciate the scale or scope of Israel’s objectives or the existential risks associated with failure.

Precision in language supports precision in strategy, and aligns legal frameworks with battlefield realities. And it gives the international community a coherent basis for judging conduct—not by emotion or media framing, but by the standards of just war. It also means that, to win, the IDF must pursue the sort of conventional strategy it would apply at wartime, rather than resorting to the playbook it used effectively during the second intifada, and with less clear results during the numerous brief outbreaks of fighting with Hamas since 2007. Hamas may use terrorist tactics, but it is an armed force fighting in a war.

The semantics matter. They always have. But in war, they can mean the difference between legitimacy and condemnation, between clarity and chaos, between victory and defeat.