Reports: Hamas delayed Oct. 7 attack to enlist Iran, Hezbollah; plotted 9/11-style bombing
The devastating terror onslaught carried out by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, had originally been planned for the previous year, but was delayed amid efforts by the Palestinian terror group to enlist the help of Iran and Hezbollah, according to a series of documents obtained by international media outlets on Saturday.
The reports cited minutes from a series of meetings held by Hamas’s military and political leaders over the course of two years, in which they planned the logistics of the attack, as well as various correspondences between Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Iranian officials.
An initial report published by The New York Times on Saturday detailed the minutes of 10 meetings spanning from January 2022 until August 2023, which the outlet said had been discovered back in January on a computer in a Hamas control center in Khan Younis. The Times said that it had verified the authenticity of the documents and had separately obtained an internal report by the Israel Defense Forces that did the same.
The contents of additional meetings and messages, mostly focused on Iran’s involvement in planning and funding the attack, were then shared by the IDF with The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, both of which said that they could not independently verify the authenticity of the information they received.
While it was not always clear which officials had attended which meetings, The Times found that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was present at each one, while now-dead top officials Muhammed Deif and Marwan Issa attended at least several of them, as did Muhammad Sinwar, Yahya’s brother.
The plan for a cross-border attack on Israel’s military infrastructure and civilian communities was first mentioned in a meeting in January 2022, The Times reported, when the Hamas officials in attendance discussed the need to avoid escalating conflict with Israel and to instead focus on “the big project.”
However, the ball may have started rolling even earlier than that, as The Post said it had obtained letters written by Sinwar to Iranian officials in which he requested financial and military assistance for a large-scale assault on Israel.
“We promise you that we will not waste a minute or a penny unless it takes us toward achieving this sacred goal,” Sinwar was said to write in a letter dated June 2021.
His request appeared to have been granted, as The Wall Street Journal said it had obtained a letter in which an Iranian official confirmed the allocation of $10 million for Hamas’s armed wing. Sinwar later asked for an additional $500 million, which he said could be delivered over the course of two years, with $20 million being transferred per month.
Following the meeting in January 2022, the “big project” was discussed at length in later meetings of Hamas’s Gaza leadership in April and June of that year.
It was during that period that the attack began to take shape. Last November, a 36-page document was uncovered in northern Gaza, The Washington Post reported, in which various scenarios for attacking Israel were outlined and reviewed.
Among the targets discussed were shopping malls and military command centers, The Post reported, as well as the Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv, which house offices, a large shopping mall and a train station. In this scenario, the terror group reportedly envisioned carrying out an attack similar to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
However, the report said, this plan was discarded after the terror group concluded that it lacked the ability to bring down the towers.
Among the other plans said to have been discarded by the terror group was one that involved the use of horse-drawn carriages, which the terror group said would serve as a “fast and light mechanism” to transport fighters without drawing the attention that modern vehicles do.
By the time Rosh Hashanah came around nine months later, in September 2022, Hamas appeared ready to attack, having settled on a plan to first attack military bases before later moving on to civilian residences, The Times said. But it would be another 13 months before it carried out its brutal invasion and slaughter in southern Israel.
The reason for the delay was never explicitly mentioned in the minutes obtained by The Times, but there were indications that it was related to the terror group’s efforts to enlist the help of Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah terror group.
Citing the minutes of a meeting held in August 2023, the report found that Sinwar’s deputy, Khalil Al-Hayya, had traveled to Lebanon a month earlier and discussed the details of the planned attack with a senior member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mohammed Said Izadi.
During their meeting, al-Hayya told Izadi that Hamas would require help striking Israeli targets during “the first hour” of the assault, coined the “Al-Aqsa Flood” by the terror group.
According to the report, Izadi told al-Hayya that both Iran and Hezbollah welcomed the plan but stressed that they needed time “to prepare the environment.” The report didn’t say what was Iran’s eventual response.
While al-Hayya also intended to discuss the plan with now-dead Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, their meeting was postponed and it was unclear whether it ever took place.
Despite their apparent willingness to participate, Hamas ultimately proceeded without the direct assistance of Iran or Hezbollah — although the Lebanese terror group joined the fray with missile fire of its own just one day later, spiraling into the current war on that front.
Several reasons for Hamas’s willingness to launch the attack without its allies were offered by The Times, including that the terror group had been concerned that a new and much-touted Israeli air defense system was almost ready for deployment, and because Jerusalem and Riyadh had appeared to be moving closer to normalizing relations.
The terror group also told Hezbollah that it was “compelled to move toward a strategic battle” by Israel’s “internal situation” — apparently a reference to the domestic political unrest last year over the government’s judicial overhaul push.
From the time it started planning the attack until the date of its execution, Hamas focused on lulling Israel into a false sense of security by leading it to believe that it was focused on governing Gaza instead of seeking further conflict, a ploy widely deemed successful, as Israel was caught unaware and unprepared.
In a Hamas meeting in April 2022, there was relief among participants that the Muslim holy month of Ramadan had passed without incident, allowing the terror group to “camouflage the big idea.” Similar sentiments were expressed in later meetings, including in June 2022 after the annual Jerusalem Day Flag March snaked through the capital’s Old City, and again at the end of Ramadan the following year.
Not willing to take any chances, the Hamas officials decided that only those who needed to know would know about their intentions. As such, The Times stated, the terror group’s leadership in Qatar was kept mostly in the dark, and only its since-assassinated political leader Ismail Haniyeh was informed of the covert meetings with Iranian and Hezbollah officials.
Inside Gaza, a similar decision was made regarding the terror group’s lower-ranking operatives. The minutes from the June 2022 meeting revealed that Sinwar had decided they would only learn of the full extent of the planned attack in the hours preceding it.
By the fall of 2023, having misled Israel for close to two years, Hamas once again appeared ready to attack. Only one major point of contention remained: whether to attack on Yom Kippur, which fell on September 25, or to wait until Simhat Torah, on October 7.
Eventually, on the morning of October 7, the terror group launched its deadly assault. Some 1,200 people were slaughtered across dozens of communities in southern Israel that day, and 251 were seized as hostages. Of that number, 97 captives are believed to still be in Gaza.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says that more than 42,000 people have been killed or are presumed dead in the subsequent war in the Strip. It does not differentiate between civilians and fighters, and its figures cannot be verified. Israel says it has killed some 17,000 combatants in battle as of August and another 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on and after October 7.
Source » timesofisrael.com
