This is a historical analysis of the subject, as such, it deserves its own topic. I'm using several sources. By using different sources of good to high quality, my aim is to create a historical explanation based on convergence of evidence—the idea that difference sources supporting the argument makes for a much more robust case.

I quote the passages I deem most relevant. Also, in order to boost credibility, I give a Media Bias/Fact Check profile about factuality of the each main source.

The Japan Times — Israel's historical role in the rise of Hamas

MB/FC Profile — Factual Reporting: High

The international focus on the war in Gaza has helped obscure the fact that Israel in the 1980s aided the rise of the Islamist Hamas as a rival to the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel’s policy was clearly influenced by the U.S. training and arming of mujahideen (or Islamic holy warriors) in Pakistan from multiple countries to wage jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

(...)

Hamas, for its part, is alleged to have emerged out of the Israeli-financed Islamist movement in Gaza, with Israel’s then-military governor in that territory, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, disclosing in 1981 that he had been given a budget for funding Palestinian Islamists to counter the rising power of Palestinian secularists. Hamas, a spin-off of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, was formally established with Israel’s support soon after the first Intifada flared in 1987 as an uprising against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

Israel’s objective was twofold: to split the nationalist Palestinian movement led by Arafat and, more fundamentally, to thwart the implementation of the two-state solution for resolving the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By aiding the rise of an Islamist group whose charter rejected recognizing the Israeli state, Israel sought to undermine the idea of a two-state solution, including curbing Western support for an independent Palestinian homeland.

Israel’s spy agency Mossad played a role in this divide-and-rule game in the occupied territories. In a 1994 book, “The Other Side of Deception,” Mossad whistleblower Victor Ostrovsky contended that aiding Hamas meshed with “Mossad’s general plan” for an Arab world “run by fundamentalists” that would reject “any negotiations with the West,” thereby leaving Israel as “the only democratic, rational country in the region.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official involved in Gaza for over two decades, told a newspaper interviewer in 2009 that, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

(...)

Israel, by contrast, persisted with its covert nexus with Hamas. With the consent of Israel, Qatar, a longtime sponsor of jihadi groups, funneled $1.8 billion to Hamas just between 2012 and 2021, according to the Haaretz newspaper.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power for much of the past decade and a half, told a meeting of his Likud Party’s Knesset members in 2019 that, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” adding, “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

The Intercept — Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It

MB/FC Profile — Factual Reporting: Mostly Factual

But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.

They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.

(...)

“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.”

The Times of Israel — For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces

MB/FC Profile — Factual Reporting: High

For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.

(...)

Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.

According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

While Netanyahu does not make these kind of statements publicly or officially, his words are in line with the policy that he implemented.

The same messaging was repeated by right-wing commentators, who may have received briefings on the matter or talked to Likud higher-ups and understood the message.

Reuters — EU's Borrell says Israel financed creation of Gaza rulers Hamas

MB/FC Profile — Factual Reporting: Very High

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Friday that Israel had financed the creation of Palestinian militant group Hamas, publicly contradicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has denied such allegations.

Opponents of the Israeli government and some global media have accused Natanyahu governments of boosting Gaza rulers Hamas for years, including by allowing Qatari financing of Gaza.

"Yes, Hamas was financed by the government of Israel in an attempt to weaken the Palestinian Authority led by Fatah," Borrell said in a speech in the University of Valladolid in Spain without elaborating.

TW for obvious reasons

As the title says. Mass shooting in a mall/concert hall, at least 40 people dead, over 100 injured. (UPD a day later: the count is now up to 133+ dead, 145+ injured)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Crocus_City_Hall_attack

Luckily I live on the opposite side of Moscow from where it happened, but both my girlfriend and my best friend (and a bunch of their friends as well) live near that area. Nothing happened to them, but it's still very scary and everyone's afraid that more shootings can happen soon.

Some of their friends said they heard gunshots directly under their windows. My gf had a very strong panic attack and still can't go to bed.

I'm not as scared myself because as I mentioned, I live far away from that area, but I'm still very worried for all of the people I know who live there.

That's it, I just felt like I wanted to share this with someone.

His wife is murdered in the Bataclan terror attack in 2015. Shortly after, Johannes Baus meets Floriane Bernaudat,
who's fiancé was also killed there. They become a couple, and have to learn what it means to love another.

Written by Katharina Render, last updated Nov. 18th, 2023. Published in the "Christ & World" section of DIE ZEIT.

Translated by @Grzmot

When the breaking news from Israel on October 7th pop up on Johannes Baus' phone, he instantly remembers the moment when he was lying on the floor of the Paris music club Bataclan. Islamist attackers shot into the crowd of people, killing 90 attendees, his wife among them. He felt "incredibly cynical morderous energy" in the room, on the 13th of November, 2015, he tells today.

He can feel this murderous lust today, through his smartphone, when the algorithm puts the Hamas hunt for people into his timeline. Videos of young women and men, who like him then, just wanted to dance, murdered, raped, or kidnapped. Johannes Baus defends himself against this hate. The hate of the terrorists now, and even his own. Under no circumstance must he give in to the hate. Get up and live instead! But how are you supposed to do that, when one of the in total 130 victims in the Paris terror attacks in the Bataclane, the Stade de France, bars and restaurants, was the one for him?

In the past four years as a reporter I've talked multiple times with Johannes Baus and visited him in Paris. When we last video-chatted, I asked the lawyer, who's found his home in the french capital; how does one believe in the good of people, when you were forced to live through the most vile thing that people can do to another? When a stranger, because of his upside-down view of religion extinguishes the love of your life? When he makes jokes with his accomplices during the murdering? When you have to bury your wife in her wedding dress, which she wore five months earlier? I wanted to understand: How does hope work?

Two months after the terror of Paris, in January of 2016, hope stands in front of Johannes Baus. She is wearing the same hat like his late wife Maud, and knows like no other, what he has been through. She has lived through the same thing. Floriane Bernaudat, then 27, lost her fiancé Renaud in Bataclan. He was 29. The first bullet hit him in the back, the second entered his groin and exited at his jaw. It was five AM when he died, alone in the hospital, while Floriane Bernaudat was driven to the police with other survivors and a relative of hers called every hospital in the area. When
the relative was finally told, that there is a patient who fits the description, he was already dead. Twelve years they were together. Almost half their lives. Two weeks before the attacks, she had chosen her wedding dress.

And suddenly, there is this stranger, who in a Facebook group for mourners, comments on her post about Renaud: "Your message has touched me deeply, I lost my wife in Bataclan. If you want to meet..."

The so-called Islamic State quickly admitted responsibility publicly, and celebrated the killing of innocents as a "holy raid" against the "crusading France". Almost 700 people were wounded by the terrorists. Floriane Bernaudat and Johannes Baus did not suffer any bodily injuries. But the wounds, that the barbaric murder of their loved ones cut into their souls were so deep, that neither of them imagined, the lawyer nor the headmistress of a private university, they would ever heal. How could they keep on living? The day they first meet, they talk about these thoughts. Till the owner of the restaurant closes for the night, that's how they both describe it.

From a surface perspective, a romance begins to blossom here, how only Hollywood could tell it. It would maybe even be too cliché for the authors of TV soap opera scripts. Too much does this story rely on the "all ends well" trope. It's because it's not true. Not quite. Their love does not grow quick and strong, they are not made for one another. The backdrop of their tale is no idyllic Cornwall, but a Paris, where violence and murders still happen.

Guilt, jealousy, trauma

It's no innocent love between the two, like you could see it on the pictures of the two with their earlier partners. Of photoshoots in tranquil forests and colourful sunglasses on vacations. Floriane Bernaudat and Johannes Baus didn't make their love easy. There was guilt. Jealousy. Secret dreams of their dead partners. Lingering trauma. The fear of being the second choice. At some point they looked at each other and honestly asked: What keeps us together? Are we two sinking survivors who just want to drown together, or do we want something more?

The something more is now five and two years old and doesn't know or understand, what brought their parents together. The first daughter the two survivors called Bérénice. A name of ancient Greek origin, which means: The one who brings victory. The second they called Madeline, "The Illustrious".

When the terorrists storm into the concert of the Eagles of Death Metal, Baus and his wife Maud are standing close to the entry. The tickets were a surprise for them. The 37 year old Maud honestly wasn't in the mood, didn't know the band and was tired from work. In the subway still, she was unsure if she wanted to attend. But when she's there, she really likes it, is how Baus tells me. A happy grooving together. Until they hear the bangs. Like fireworks.

Screaming people run into their direction. He searches for her hand and doesn't find it. He jumps behind the bar and in a break of the shooting, runs out through the backdoor into the open air. Later the police tells him, where they found Maud, who was shot in the heart by the terrorists: Supposedly, she was next to him behind the bar. When you ask Baus to go through it by the minute, he remembers many details, for example a fan which he found and "armed" himself with, until he realised just how stupid that is against an assault rifle. To this day the idea of Maud being right next to him does not fit into his head. His memory of her blanks the moment they run and his hand doesn't reach hers. He believes that
his brain is protecting him from the thought that he could have left his wife behind.

That Madeline and Bérénice "the victory-bringer" were born, is a victory over the doubts. The choice to give in to hope, despite everything. Hope for a world, where the girls will live well. A second yes to life, and the opposite of what drove the terrorists of Paris, who sought their salvation in the next life and some of which blew themselves up.

One of the main culprits of the attacks was later caught in Belgium: Salah Abdeslam, 34, convincted to life in prison. Baus and Bernaudat didn't really follow the court case. They didn't want to give the individual any more attention. It's important that the judiciary is doing its job, they say, but at the same time they understand that the case isn't going to give them any satisfaction. A warmer idea to them is the thought that "our story inspires someone or gives them hope, especially to someone who is afraid of terrorism or the general tragedy of life. That would be wounderful. But it would be even better, if a potential suicide-attacker, who is in danger of seeing a nihilistic act of self-destruction as the best alternative to life, became inspired to see the positives of life and take small steps in a good direction."

This point of view is the result of a long process of therapy and intense work with the human condition. It's an attempt to escape the role of a victim which society attributes them with. Johannes Baus doesn't want to be damned to mourn forever. His thoughts are shared by the journalist Antoine Leiris, who put a similar impulse to paper after the attacks. His wife also died in the Bataclan club. The journalist wrote, addressed to the perpetrators: "I will not give you the gift of hating you. Even when it is what you want. To answer your hate with rage would mean to give in to the same ignorance that made you who you are."

"Make it stop"

Floriane Bernaudat likes this perspective, she tells today. If she liked it back then, when she was hiding in the little space between ceilings, which she climbed to from the wardrobe? The biting glass wool which was supposed to isolate the space, but didn't protect her from hearing the execution shots below her in the hall? When she was one of the last survivors to leave the building, and the policemen told her to look up into the air and not down at the corpses? At Renaud's funeral, when she hated the musical arangement, which her late husband would not have liked?

Both find it difficult to give general advice, for example to the survivors in the middle east. Part of the fact is, they explain, they wouldn't know where they would be without each other. At the same time they agree that love by itself is not the answer. But their example shows, that even close to the wounds on their soul, new moments of happiness can grow. Though they point out, it would be a lie to say that it is easy to remain humane after having witnessed so much inhumanity. Just recently a Algerian colleague of Bernaudat's told her that it's beautiful, that she is able to treat him as a Muslim exactly the same how she treats everyone else. There are many people in France, and not just there, who after the terror of 2015 cannot tell the difference between members of a religious group and islamist fanatics.

They want to teach their daughters that. Of course they should also know, that the "first loves of their parents" existed. But now it's too early. For everyone. That's how Baus and Bernaudat think of it. That's why there are no pictures of Maud or Renaud in the little house in the Paris suburbs, into which the family moved four years ago. But what remains still, is the close connection of the parents to their dead partners. The children have four grandmothers and four grandfathers. Sometimes, Floriane says, she feels like Maud and Renaud guided her and Johannes together from
the afterlife. "They are in our hearts, and our hearts told us, what is right".

In October 2017, almost two years after the attacks, Johannes Baus and Floriane Bernaudat marry. At the wedding, they announce that they are expecting their first child Bérénice. Bernaudat wears a dress which is very different to her first wedding dress. The best man of the wedding, Mehdi, was Baus' best man at his first wedding too. "Maud gave me a part of her gentle soul", believes Johannes Baus. Floriane got a little tattoo of a fox on her arm. In French, "renard" means fox, which almost sounds like Renaud, who is now forever under her skin.

She still sees that last image of him in front of her eyes. How he's dancing happily on the Bataclan stage and waves at her, wanting her to come closer. Floriane is standing a little bit away. She's tired and needs a short break, and it's hot on stage. Then the attacks happen, and pure chaos bhreaks out. Shots, screams, blood everywhere. A man, hit, falls on top of Floriane and begs for help. When Floriane sees the shooters reload, she crawls out from under the injured man and runs to an exit. With approximately fifteen others, one of them a mother with a young son, she ends up in the wardrobe for the musicians. A man takes her hand, "I don't want to die!" Someone manages to punch a hole into the ceiling. Bernaudat climbs into it, crawls over electric cable and fibreglass wool, until she can't anymore. She hears phones ring and shortly after shots ringing. She doesn't dare calling Renaud, but writes a message, "I'm in the ceiling, where are you?"

Johannes Baus sits next to Floriane Bernaudat on the couch. The kids are colouring in princesses. He caresses her arm, the arm with the fox tattoo on it. They talk about the Hamas attacks once more. And to the question, what gives hope in the pitch black. During therapy, the myth of the phoenix rising from the ashes played a big role repeatedly. To gain strength even when facing complete destruction. Maybe that's what it's about, says Bernaudat.

Johannes Baus finds his words in songs, which he composes. Music has always given him much. The bass of his songs plays Matt McJunkins, 40, the ex-bass player of the American band Eagles of Death Metal, who were standing on stage on the 13th of November 2015. McJunkins hid with others, in part injured ones, in the room behind the stage and survived there. Baus asked him some time ago, if he wanted to teach him. Now they make music together.

In the song Chaos Rebuild Baus writes in English how it feels when the world falls apart. When all security is lost and you are thrown into chaos. What do you do then? Then, the song goes on, it's your duty to build a new world. In the chorus of the song, Baus gives us a picture of his new world:

Make it good

Make it just

Make it clean

Make it gentle

Make it stop