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Leaked documents reveal Hamas-Iran plot to destroy Israel

Leaked documents reveal Hamas-Iran plot to destroy Israel

A fixed rule applies here: Sensitive documents never simply “leak out” to the outside world; Someone with an interest in seeing the documents published leaks them.

This rule of common sense must be applied when evaluating reports that appeared simultaneously in the New York Times and the Washington Post on Saturday and are based on internal Hamas logs and documents that the IDF obtained in January from the terrorist organization’s control bunker in Khan Yunis had collected.

This means that Israeli intelligence had these documents for about ten months, but the contents – or some of them – have only now been leaked.

Why?

One likely reason is that Israel has primed international public opinion for what is widely expected and widely touted as retaliation for the Jewish state’s shelling of 180 ballistic missiles against Iran. Oddly, but rather typically, the media is already assessing the likely Iranian response to an Israeli attack that hasn’t even happened yet.

How do these documents relate to Iran?

The documents indicate that Iran knew of a general plan by Hamas to carry out a massive attack on Israel, which it hoped would draw Iran and its proxy Hezbollah into the fight and lead to the collapse of the Jewish state.

Palestinians take control of an Israeli tank after crossing the border fence with Israel from Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, October 7, 2023. (Credit: ABED RAHIM KHATIB/FLASH90)

Not, mind you, about clearing settlements, retreating to the 1967 lines, or establishing a Palestinian state and a two-state solution, but rather, as the Post article put it, the destruction of Israel.

The Times reported minutes of an August 2023 meeting in which Khalil al-Hayya, a deputy to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, discussed the plan a month earlier with Mohammed Said Izadi, a Lebanon-based commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. who helped with surveillance, discussed Tehran’s relations with Palestinian terrorist organizations.

Izadi, that report said, said that Hezbollah and Iran welcomed the plan in principle but that they needed time “to prepare the environment.”

That Iran knew about the plan and was asked by Hamas to send money to help implement the plan, and that when Hamas was asked to join in, it said that while it supported the idea, the timing was but is not favorable for this, gives Israel even more justification for attacking the Islamic Republic – as if Iran’s recent attack were not justification enough.

Israel has delayed its response to Iran, and the reasons for this may become clearer if the expected attack actually takes place. But the long time that has already passed between attack and response means that much of the international community will have forgotten the cause by the time the response comes.

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Then these documents come, and now the reaction is justified not only because of the Iranian missiles, but also because of Iran’s involvement in the Hamas atrocity.

If George W. Bush was justified in going to war against Iraq after 9/11, as most Americans believed at the time, because the country was seen as a supporter of al-Qaeda, then Israel certainly has no less Right to lash out against Iran, which has even more aided and abetted Hamas.

Aside from implicating Iran in an overall project that envisions a dramatic attack on Israel that would lead to its destruction, the leaked documents do something else: They challenge certain assumptions that have been building strongly since October 7 have established.

The first assumption is that the attack was carried out to prevent an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel that would pave the way for greater Israeli integration in the Middle East.

According to this assumption, Iran and its allies feared that such a move would cement a strong alliance between the US, Israel and the Sunni Arabs in the region, which would represent a strong counterforce to Iran’s hegemonic plans in the region and further advance the Palestinian issue disappear from the international agenda.

Indeed, in the weeks leading up to October 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the United Nations of Israel and Saudi Arabia being “on the threshold” of a historic breakthrough that would fundamentally transform the Middle East. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman echoed those sentiments in an interview with Fox News, saying: “Every day we get closer to an Israeli-Saudi agreement.”

Furthermore, in the same month – September 2023 – US President Joe Biden proposed an economic corridor of rails, shipping lines, pipes and cables that would connect India to Europe via the Middle East.

While such an agreement would certainly thwart Iran’s plans for Middle East hegemony, the leaked documents suggest that this was not the reason for the October 7 attack. According to the leaked documents, Hamas had originally planned to carry out this attack in the fall of 2022, a year ahead of the original date and long before there was any serious momentum in Saudi-Israeli cooperation.

The Times article claimed that Hamas tried to sell its project to Hezbollah to prevent this normalization of relations, but that was after the die was cast for an attack and they decided to move forward. This was a rationale for Hezbollah’s entry, not the reason for the plan; That reason, as the reports made clear, was extremist ideology and fanatical hatred of Israel.

The second assumption that these documents refuted is that the October 7 attack was a result of last year’s upheavals in judicial reform and deep internal divisions within Israel.

If Hamas originally planned to attack in the fall of 2022, that would be when Yair Lapid was prime minister and several months before the new Netanyahu government launched its judicial reform plan in full force in January.

Admittedly, the fall of 2022 was not a shining example of Israel’s unity as the country headed toward its fifth election in three and a half years, but it belies the idea that there were turbulent scenes on Israeli streets and threats of no-shows by reserve pilots and soldiers came because the service was behind the attack. These divisions proved to be an opportune time to attack, but again the plan was hatched long beforehand, not because of the divisions.

Again, Hamas – in its arguments to bring Hezbollah on board – cited the “internal situation” as the reason why they felt compelled to move on to the plan now, but it was not the driving factor behind the plan.

Ultimately, what is striking about these documents is that a terrorist organization hell-bent on destroying the Jewish state put together a project—the “Great Project”—to implement its fanatical ideology and recruit fellow travelers to the project. Meanwhile, just 78 years after the Holocaust, Israel was asleep at the wheel.