What happened
Hamas's win surprised most outside observers, including reportedly the Bush administration, which had pushed for the election as part of a democracy-promotion agenda while expecting Fatah to win comfortably. Hamas campaigned less on its founding charter's rejectionist stance toward Israel's existence and more on a domestic platform contrasting its reputation for social service provision and relative discipline against years of documented Fatah corruption and mismanagement (see the Arafat-era entries in this file) — a genuine protest-vote dynamic that international observers, including the Carter Center and EU monitoring missions, found reflected real, competitively-contested Palestinian public opinion rather than intimidation or fraud.
The international response to the result complicates any simple 'democracy produced this outcome, so the outcome must be respected' reading: the US, EU, and Israel immediately suspended direct aid and official contact with the new Hamas-led government unless it recognised Israel, renounced violence, and accepted prior agreements — conditions Hamas refused. This produced a genuine tension the project does not resolve for the reader: Western governments that had specifically pushed for this election as a democratic exercise then declined to accept its result once it produced a government they found objectionable, while Hamas itself, once in a power-sharing arrangement with Fatah, moved within eighteen months to eliminate that arrangement by force in Gaza (documented in the following entry) rather than governing within it — meaning neither side's subsequent conduct straightforwardly vindicates a simple narrative about what this election proved.