• Hamas was founded in 1987 during the first Palestinian intifada, a popular uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. [1][4][5]

• Hamas was established by Palestinian Islamists, including Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who believed in armed resistance against Israel as a means of restoring Palestinian support for the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which was losing ground to other Palestinian factions. [1][4]

• The creation of Hamas was facilitated by the Israeli government, which had previously helped build up the Palestinian Islamist movement as a "counterweight" to the secular and leftist Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Israeli officials admitted to providing funding and resources to the mosques and Islamic centers that laid the groundwork for Hamas. [2][3]

• This support for the Islamist movement was part of a divide-and-rule strategy by Israel, which hoped the Islamists would undermine the PLO's secular nationalist agenda. However, this backfired, as Hamas eventually emerged as a much more militant and violent adversary to Israel than the PLO. [3]

So in summary, while the immediate trigger for Hamas's founding was the first intifada, the group's origins can be traced to earlier Israeli policies that inadvertently empowered the Islamist movement as a way to weaken the secular Palestinian nationalist movement. The search results indicate that Hamas arose in part due to this history of Israeli aggression and interference in Palestinian politics. [1][2][3][4][5]

Citations: [1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1198908227 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/NPR/comments/17rgrj7/hamas_was_created_by_israeli_intelligence/ [3] https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/ [4] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-hamas [5] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/doctrine-hamas