Need to Know: Over half of Palestinians say Hamas’ decision to launch the October 7 attacks was correct

Welcome to Need to Know, The Hub’s twice-weekly roundup of expert insights into the biggest economic stories, political news, and policy developments readers need to be keeping their eyes on. New polling shows that Palestinian support for Hamas has grown, not shrunk, over the past two years By Luke Smith, The Hub’s deputy editor The war in Gaza is over (or at least at a relative standstill for now). How then are the people of Palestine feeling following several bloody years in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks on Israel? For many Western observers in the media and on university campuses, sharp distinctions have been drawn during the conflict between the Palestinian people and Hamas, between the suffering civilians and the terrorist regime that rules over them. But, as new polling highlights, reality has a way of confounding simplified narratives. The latest public opinion survey from PCPSR-Polling and Survey Research in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, conducted between October 22-25, 2025, finds that support for Hamas has, on net, increased compared with two years earlier, with 19 percent saying their support has increased a lot and 17 percent saying it has increased a little. Overall satisfaction with Hamas’ performance stands at 60 percent (66 percent in the West Bank and 51 percent in the Gaza Strip). Over half (53 percent) of Palestinians say that the decision by Hamas to launch the October 7 attacks, in which over 1,200 Israelis were killed and over 250 kidnapped, was correct (a decline from 71 percent in March 2024). In terms of the Trump peace plan, about 70 percent of Palestinians, including almost 80 percent in the West Bank and 55 percent in Gaza, staunchly oppose the disarmament of Hamas, even as a condition to prevent the war’s return. Other notable findings include: In terms of support for political parties, 35 percent of Palestinians support Hamas, 24 percent support Fatah (the second-largest party in the Palestinian Legislative Council), and 32 percent support neither or are unsure. If legislative elections were held today with all forces involved, 44 percent of likely voters would vote for Hamas, 30 percent would support Fatah, 10 percent would choose other, and 16 percent remain undecided. In a hypothetical presidential election between Khalid Mishal (running for Hamas) and Mahmoud Abbas (running for Fatah), Mishal draws 63 percent support to Abbas’ 27 percent among actual voters. Those intent on rebuilding Gaza and establishing lasting peace in the region will have to contend with the reality of these beliefs amongst the general Palestinian population. Two opposing conclusions on whether Alberta should ‘remain’ in Canada By Falice Chin, The Hub’s Alberta bureau chief There is something surreal about what just unfolded in Alberta on the issue of sovereignty. Two citizen-led petition drives pulling in opposite directions on the province’s future have somehow resulted in both sides declaring they’ve won. The “Forever Canadian” petition, which calls for Alberta to formally affirm that it wants to remain in Canada, delivered more than 456,000 signatures this week—far surpassing (unofficially) the already difficult threshold of 294,000 required to initiate a possible referendum. It is, by any measure, an extraordinary display of organization and civic engagement. Not least because the bar is no longer this high. In July, the province lowered the requirement for citizen-initiated referendums. Under the new rules, petitions only require about 177,000 signatures, and campaigns have more time to collect them. Critics of the UPC government characterized the legislative change as a gesture toward the Alberta Prosperity Project and others who had been pressing for a vote on independence. The move did, in fact, energize separatists. But it also triggered an opposite reaction. Sensing where the debate was headed in the lead-up, former PC deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk filed a petition in June. He did so ahead of the “leave” camp, with the question: “Do you agree Alberta should remain in Canada?” But trying to preempt the separatists’ initiative before the new law came into effect meant that his version had to meet the old criteria. This led to a frenzied, almost old-fashioned campaign with volunteers clad in red-and-white maple leaf attire criss-crossing the province, setting up tables outside farmers’ markets, festivals, and community events, asking Albertans to sign their “remain” petition. If verified, the application will go to the legislature next, where the government must choose whether to settle the issue in-house as policy or send it to a province-wide referendum. Premier Danielle Smith has previously characterized Lukaszuk’s question as a separatist referendum in disguise. “He may be trying to characterize it differently, but if you ask people if you want to remain in Alberta—yes or no—there are implications if people answer no,” she said in September. Now, some separatists are reframing Lukaszuk’s apparent victory as evidence of their own momentum, especially as their preferred rival’s petition remains tied up in judicial review. Regardless, they argue, a referendum on separation is closer than ever, even if it’s not the one they championed. The people’s historian passes away By Harrison Lowman, The Hub’s managing editor This past weekend, mere days away from Remembrance Day, Canada lost its preeminent military historian Tim Cook. He was 54. There was seldom a Canadian historical anniversary, be it our charging up Juno Beach on D-Day, or the mowing down of our boys at Beaumont-Hamel, where Tim was not dutifully making the media rounds, informing Canadians today about the Canadians of yesteryear who died so this country could survive. Tim was a prolific author. But with a whopping 19 books to his name, his writing did not take the form of the usual dense academic military prose. It was free of page-long descriptions of the exhaustion system of the Sherman tank. No, instead, his bestsellers were crafted for the layman: on-the-ground colourful eyewitness accounts plucked from diary entries and letters. “I realized that people wanted their history but we, as academics, weren’t giving it to them. We were publishing in obscure journals or it was too theoretical for them,” Tim once admitted. What made Tim even more impressive was that as he wrote about wars, he was, for more than a decade, fighting a war of his own with cancer. An email he sent me from 2023 reads, “It was a tough year as I had another battle with cancer. It was grim tidings for a while but I beat it.” Another read, “I’ll see you on the other side of this illness.” After all the stem cell transplants, surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy, the Canadian War Museum’s chief historian was never deterred. He even used insights from his illness to better understand the men in uniform who also had to stare down death. What made this week even more depressing was the realization that there is no one waiting in the wings to take on the mantle of telling Canadians their military history. For the last 25 years, Tim had been holding up the study on his shoulders, like Atlas. In America, a country obsessed with telling you about its military history, there is an army of Tim Cooks. In Canada, there was just one. Some solutions for teachers and conservative governments alike By Kelden Formosa, a teacher in Calgary It’s always been strange to me that teachers are considered a core progressive constituency in provincial politics. My day-to-day life as a teacher includes dozens of conservative-coded habits: reminding students to stand up straight, speak politely, and tuck in their uniform shirts. It also involves insisting on high academic standards, including the idea that there’s sometimes one right answer while also considering different points of view, including those out of fashion in our own time. Even the implicit curriculum in my classroom feels somewhat conservative, at least in the non-political sense: one adult passing on the wisdom of the ages to a new generation. In my experience, most classrooms share that same small-c conservative ethos. And yet teachers, and especially their unions, remain suspicious at best of most provincial conservative parties. The recent labour dispute—and three weeks of lost school due to a strike—between the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) and the province’s United Conservative government highlights this division. I sympathize with both sides. Teachers’ wages haven’t kept up with inflation, so we’ve had a real pay cut over the last several years. But we are still relatively well-paid compared to the average Albertan and earn the second-highest salaries of teachers in any province.1Teacher pay in Alberta is higher than in neighbouring NDP-governed British Columbia, where the cost of living is higher, and yet the teachers’ union is much less hostile to the provincial government. They also have a point on class sizes, which have increased in many areas, in large part due to an immigration surge—concentrated in suburban areas where young families can still buy homes but new schools have yet to be built—that has filled classrooms, including with many students still learning English, which makes teaching those larger classes even more complex. While most teachers gladly welcome these new students, integrating them has posed real logistical challenges. Add the lingering effects of pandemic learning loss and growing mental health struggles amid family instability and technology overload, and teaching in 2025 is not what it was 20 years ago. None of this is helped by keeping Alberta kids out of school for almost a month. I hated school closures during the pandemic, and I hate them even more now, when there is no public health concern. Kids shouldn’t lose out on schooling or key social interactions core to a good childhood because we can’t agree on a contract. I think the government is right to send teachers back to work, even if that means invoking Section 33 of the Charter. School ought to be treated as an essential service, and teachers as essential workers, with labour rights, pay, and working conditions that reflect that status. So, a proposal for our Alberta’s conservative government: recognize that teachers could be natural allies, as long as they’re treated well. Ensure that becoming a teacher guarantees a good middle-class wage by granting the planned raise and then linking pay to inflation through a legislated formula rather than collective bargaining. Commit to measuring and maintaining class size and complexity limits, again through legislation. Those measures would prevent real pay cuts, unmanageable classrooms, and high-stakes negotiations around school closures. If you lower those stakes, the unions will have less relevance, so teachers could finally have their free-association rights recognized in law and be made free to teach without having to join or contribute to a very political union like the ATA. Union leadership would hate it, but many ordinary teachers would vote for such a deal.