[Analysis Report] 2023 Israel-Hamas War: Armed Conflict, What is Hamas?

"2023 Israel-Hamas War"

 Data Collection

  Data collection was conducted as follows.

• Keywords: Hamas
• Collection Duration: October 1, 2023 ~ January 15, 2024.
• Collection Channel: Google (News, Facebook, Web Document)

source: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/what-hamas

The war began on October 7, 2023, and is still ongoing, marking over 100 days of conflict between Israel and Hamas in locations including Israel, Palestine, and southern Lebanon. After Hamas’s unprecedented surprise attack on Israel, Israel has consistently conducted bombings in Gaza. The Palestinian death toll in Israel’s assault on Gaza has surpassed 25,000.

(Figure 1) Keyword Search Volume for Hamas in Google Trends

(Figure 1) shows interest in Hamas using Google Trends. The search volume increased sharply after Hamas's attack on Israel on Oct 7 and dropped significantly within a week. This trend indicates that international interest in Hamas is not very high; it appears to be a temporary phenomenon triggered by a special event.

What are major issues on Hamas?

<Table 1> Hamas-related Word Frequency & TF-IDF

<Table 1> displays the frequency of the top 30 words and the results of TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency). TF-IDF is a measure of the importance of a word to a document in a collection or corpus, adjusted for the fact that some words appear more frequently in general. The words ‘Gaza,’ ‘war,’ ‘Israel,’ ‘Israeli,’ ‘2023,’ ‘kill,’ ‘Oct,’ ‘attack,’ ‘hostage,’ ‘Palestinian,’ ‘7,’ ‘release,’ ‘person,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘strike,’ ‘conflict,’ etc., are listed in the top 30. It illustrates what happened in the Gaza Strip, a hot spot for the Israel-Hamas war.

<Table 2 > Hamas-related Word Pairs: Bigram

<Table 2> presents the results of N-gram analysis. N-gram is a statistical language analysis model that extracts N consecutive elements from a text or sentence. TEXTOM provides a Bigram model with N=2. In <Table 2>, word pairs such as Israel-Hamas, Hamas-war, Oct-7, attack-Israel, Hamas-attack, Hamas-terrorist, Israeli-hostage, Hamas-leader, etc., appear simultaneously.

 

Depict the visualization results of an Ego network and a Word Cloud  respectively. 

In Ego Network, the word 'war' corresponds to the Ego. Word Cloud represents the word cloud related to Hamas. A word cloud visually represents text data, displaying words in varying sizes and colors based on their frequency in the source text. The more frequent a word appears, the larger and bolder it is in the cloud.

 

Lastly, shows the visualization result of CONCOR analysis.

Network Chart

An analysis technique clustering words in structural coordination by analyzing relationships between words that appear simultaneously. As a result of CONCOR analysis, Hamas-related networks were classified into four clusters. Cluster 1 (green), cluster 2 (pink), cluster 3 (yellow), and cluster 4 (blue) were named with attributes related to Israeli-Hamas war related major incident dates, hostage release issues, truce, and armed conflict, respectively.