Opinion poll: The Saudi popular position shows overwhelming support for Hamas

An opinion poll showed that the Saudi popular position on the Israeli war on Gaza agreed, with an overwhelming majority stating that despite the destruction and loss of life, the war is a victory for Palestine, the Arabs and Muslims.

In the poll conducted by the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy in Saudi Arabia, 91% of respondents agreed with the statement that despite the destruction and loss of life, this war in Gaza is a victory for Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims.

As for the role of the broader Arab world, almost everyone (96%) agreed with the proposal that Arab countries must immediately cut off all diplomatic, political, economic, and any other contacts with Israel, in protest against its military action in Gaza.

Opinion polls during the war are likely to produce more volatile results as conditions change rapidly on the ground – during the current period, for example, the Israeli war on Gaza has seen several major shifts, including a temporary ceasefire from November 24 to 30, then came the expansion of Israeli incursions into the southern Gaza Strip.

However, comparisons with Saudi opinion polls conducted in August can help provide a measure of how severely this conflict has affected, at least temporarily, certain situations and how little it has affected others.

While Hamas as a movement remains unpopular among the majority of Saudis, the new trend of widespread popular support in countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt are similar.

Only 16% of Saudis believe that Hamas should stop calling for the destruction of Israel and accept a permanent two-state solution to the conflict based on the 1967 borders.

Most of them also do not believe that the Hamas attack on October 7 targeted Israeli civilians.

The vast majority of Saudis (95%) responded that Hamas didn’t actually kill civilians when asked whether they believed that Hamas’ killing of civilians was contrary to Islam.

This opinion is widely held in the eight countries surveyed, and similar results appear in a recent poll issued by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, in which the overwhelming majority reported that they hadn’t watched any videos of Hamas members committing atrocities.

The Israeli war on Gaza generated a major boost to the popularity of Hamas.

There was a thirty-point shift in positive attitudes toward Hamas, from just 10% in August to 40% in November and December.

The responses in the latest poll, along with those conducted in 2014 and 2021, show the growing popularity of Hamas among Saudis during or in the immediate aftermath of the conflict between Hamas and Israel, as well as its possible disappearance over time.

In the wake of the 2021 Hamas-Israel conflict, for example, five years of steady decline in Hamas’s popularity in Saudi Arabia was suddenly reversed, despite it reaching only a quarter of the total population (23%).