OIC's Diplomatic Shield of Jihad

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has become one of the main diplomatic shields for the strategy Hamas relies on. Its protection does not come through open approval of every tactic, but through a broader political framework: Palestinian violence is cast as “resistance,” “self-defense,” and “liberation,” while Israel’s response is framed as aggression, criminality, or collective punishment.

This framing is not coincidence. Hamas’s strategy depends not only on firing rockets at civilians, operating in tunnels under civilian areas, taking hostages, fighting in civilian disguise, and the exploitation of hospitals, schools, ambulances, and humanitarian systems. It also depends on an international ecosystem that turns the consequences of those tactics into accusations against Israel. The OIC helps maintain that ecosystem.

Hamas’s war strategy is based on asymmetry. It commits illegal acts of war, embeds itself inside civilian life, attacks Israeli civilians, hides behind Palestinian civilians, and then depends on international pressure to restrain Israel’s response. The military tactic and the diplomatic tactic are inseparable. Hamas creates the battlefield; international institutions convert the consequences into accusations against Israel.

The OIC’s role is not necessarily to endorse every Hamas tactic explicitly. Its role is to protect the ideological and diplomatic framework that allows those tactics to function.

The “armed struggle” exception

The first structural problem is found in the OIC’s own legal-political language. The 1999 OIC Convention on Combating International Terrorism includes a broad carve-out for “peoples’ struggle, including armed struggle against foreign occupation, aggression, colonialism, and hegemony, aimed at liberation and self-determination.” Human Rights Watch warned that this language risks excluding violence committed under the banner of “resistance” from the category of terrorism, and urged the OIC to make clear that deliberate attacks on civilians are never permitted.

This is not a technical detail. Hamas presents its war against Israel exactly through this vocabulary: resistance, occupation, liberation, self-determination. When the OIC preserves a legal and diplomatic category in which “armed struggle” is treated as legitimate without clearly excluding attacks on civilians, hostage-taking, or other war crimes, it creates a protective framework for jihadi movements that operate under the banner of liberation.

After October 7: legitimacy for “resistance,” silence about Hamas’s methods

After the October 7 massacre, the OIC did not produce a serious condemnation of Hamas’s core war crimes. It did not focus on the murder of civilians, the abduction of hostages, the use of rockets against civilian communities, or the wider strategy of embedding military activity inside civilian areas.

Instead, the OIC Executive Committee reaffirmed the Palestinian people’s “legitimate right to self-defense” and framed the war primarily as Israeli aggression. It placed responsibility for Gaza’s civilian suffering on Israel, while avoiding a direct confrontation with Hamas’s role in creating the battlefield.

This is the diplomatic shield in action.

The OIC does not need to say, “We support hostage-taking.” It only needs to preserve the category of “legitimate resistance” while refusing to name the illegal methods by which that resistance is conducted. It does not need to say, “We support the use of hospitals and schools for military purposes.” It only needs to accuse Israel of attacking civilian infrastructure while avoiding the prior question of why Hamas is operating from within civilian infrastructure in the first place.

Denying Israel the right to respond

At the joint Arab-Islamic summit in Riyadh in November 2023, Islamic countries called for an immediate end to Israel’s military operations and rejected Israel’s justification of self-defense. The summit urged international legal action against Israel, including through the International Criminal Court.

This position fits perfectly with Hamas’s strategic logic.

Hamas attacks Israel, hides among civilians, turns Gaza into a battlefield, and then relies on international actors to deny Israel the ability to dismantle the military system Hamas built. The OIC’s position does not merely express sympathy for Palestinian civilians. It converts Hamas’s human-shield strategy into political pressure against Israel.

In effect, the OIC treats the consequences of Hamas’s illegal warfighting as proof of Israeli criminality, while refusing to treat Hamas’s methods as the central cause of those consequences.

The “disinformation” campaign

The OIC has also adopted an information-war posture against Israel. In 2024, OIC information ministers advanced a campaign against what they described as Israeli disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda. The emphasis was not on investigating violations by all parties. It was on exposing and countering Israeli narratives.

This matters because many of the most important claims about Hamas’s illegal tactics — use of hospitals, schools, mosques, ambulances, civilian clothing, tunnels, aid theft, and human shields — are often first documented or publicized by Israeli sources. By framing Israeli claims as part of a disinformation campaign, the OIC helps discredit the very evidence that exposes Hamas’s method of war.

Again, this is not an explicit endorsement of Hamas tactics. It is something more useful to Hamas: a diplomatic and media environment in which accusations against Hamas are treated as suspect, while accusations against Israel are amplified.

Praise for Hamas inside the OIC arena

There is also direct political support for Hamas from some OIC member-state leaders. At the November 2023 Riyadh summit, Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi openly praised Hamas, reportedly saying, “We kiss the hands of Hamas for its resistance against Israel.”

This does not mean every OIC member state shares Iran’s exact position. Some OIC states are more cautious, and there are disagreements among them. But the relevant point is that open praise for Hamas’s “resistance” exists inside the Arab-Islamic diplomatic arena, while the collective pressure remains overwhelmingly directed at Israel.

The result is a division of labor: some actors openly praise Hamas; others avoid naming Hamas while attacking Israel; the OIC as an institution preserves the broader “resistance” framework.

The shield, not the confession

The OIC provides a diplomatic shield for jihadi asymmetry. It frames Palestinian violence as legitimate struggle, rejects Israel’s self-defense rationale and mobilizes legal and media pressure against Israel while avoiding specific condemnation of Hamas’s illegal methods. It is also a well known fact that the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) announces their kinetic strikes in advance so that the civilian population gets enough time to move to a safe area. This is done by spreading fliers, phone calls, messages, and many other means. On the other hand, Hamas uses the civilian population, including women and children, as disposable human shields. Then, if there are any civilian causalities, Hamas blames Israel for using an inhuman warfare strategy. This is the highest level of deception which is often reproduced even by non-Islamic media.

This is how modern jihadi warfare functions. The armed movement creates civilian suffering by design, and the diplomatic network turns that suffering into a weapon against the state fighting back.

The OIC’s role is therefore not merely rhetorical. It is strategic. It protects the narrative architecture that Hamas needs in order for its illegal tactics to succeed.

Hamas fights from behind civilians. The OIC fights from behind diplomacy. Together, they create a system in which jihadi violence is called resistance, Israeli defense is called aggression, and the laws of war are used not to protect civilians, but to paralyze the side that does not hide behind them.

Contact for Israel

Eyal Lior
CSPII 🇮🇱 Country Director
[email protected]