As Israel moves ever closer to all-out war with Iran, newly released Hamas documents suggest that this broad regional conflict is precisely what the group’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, had dreamed about when he planned the savage Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Hamas’s cunning — and its desire to involve Iran and Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, in its war to destroy Israel — is captured in internal documents published last weekend by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Post. They provide a stunning account of the deception that hid Sinwar’s wildly ambitious plans.
Deception in war is older than the Trojan horse, but the Hamas documents make clear that this was one for the intelligence history books.
The documents appear to have been leaked by the Israeli military, which perhaps hoped to show Iran’s complicity on the eve of likely reprisal attacks from Israel. Biden administration officials tell me they expect Israel to strike only military targets in Iran. But warfare is full of unintended consequences, and these documents make me worry that Israel, in moving to the brink of full-scale war, is falling into the trap laid by Hamas.
Pleading for aid from Iran in 2021, Sinwar and other Hamas leaders promised Tehran, “We are confident that we and you, by the end of these two years … will uproot this monstrous entity,” meaning Israel, according to a letter quoted by The Post. “We will not waste a minute or a penny unless it takes us toward achieving this sacred goal.”
The Times cites minutes of an August 2023 meeting where officials reported that a top Hamas leader had discussed the attack plans with Mohammed Said Izadi, a senior commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. According to the Times, the Hamas official also intended to inform Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, who was assassinated by Israel last month in Beirut.
Iran has denied it played any role in the Oct. 7 attack, and U.S. officials have said intelligence indicates that Iran was surprised when Hamas burst across the Gaza fence and rampaged through Israeli border towns and military bases. But the newly released Hamas documents suggest that at least some Iranian and Hezbollah operatives knew something big was coming.
Sinwar wanted to create a catastrophe so overwhelming for Israel that it would cascade into a war involving Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Yemen and Iraq. To hide what Hamas officials called “our big project,” they crafted an elaborate, years-long campaign of trickery.
Deception in war is older than the Trojan horse, but the Hamas documents make clear that this was one for the intelligence history books.
Hamas achieved strategic surprise through a campaign to “keep the enemy convinced that Hamas in Gaza wants calm,” according to an internal memo quoted by the Times. Another memo quoted by the Times said Sinwar’s aim was to convince Israel that “Gaza wants life and economic growth.”
Hamas lulled Israel’s vaunted intelligence services into such a deep fog that even when its fighters were engaged in unusual activities early on the morning of Oct. 7, Israeli intelligence analysts blandly commented in a memo quoted by the Times: “It is estimated that Hamas is not interested in escalation and entering into a confrontation at the present time.” Soon after, 1,200 Israelis were dead.
Sinwar’s biggest worry seemed to be that small skirmishes would put the Israelis on alert and obstruct the big campaign it was planning. The Times reports that during an April 2022 meeting, Hamas leaders expressed relief that Ramadan had passed without major violence, so that Hamas could “hide our intentions” and “camouflage the big idea.” After Ramadan passed in 2023 without a flare-up, Sinwar and his commanders again were pleased.
Sinwar wanted to feed a narrative that Hamas was using money from Qatar to bolster its popularity by improving the lives of Palestinians in Gaza. That masked the group’s plans for an attack that would stun Israel. The Post quotes a 36-page slide presentation Hamas prepared in late 2022 that promised al-Qaeda-style attacks to topple a 70-story Israeli skyscraper, detonate fuel tankers on Israel’s railway system and send high-speed suicide boats into Israeli ports.
“We present to you this vision, which talks about the appropriate strategy for liberation in the near future,” says a preamble to the slide presentation quoted by The Post. The account doesn’t say who viewed the slideshow.
As Sinwar prepared his sneak attack, he knew that Israel would mount a retaliatory campaign that might devastate Gaza. The Times reports that in a June 2022 meeting, Sinwar “briefly discussed with his colleagues how a major attack on Israel would most likely require sacrifices, seemingly from ordinary Gazans.”
Sinwar’s victory strategy evidently lay in a vision of a war that would spread to engulf Iran and the entire Middle East. As Israel calculates its next steps, it should consider the possibility that a major escalation and regionwide conflagration is Sinwar’s last hope.
