For more than two years, Yahya Sinwar huddled with his top Hamas commanders and plotted what they hoped would be the most devastating and destabilizing attack on Israel in the militant group’s four-decade history.
Minutes of Hamas’ secret meetings, seized by the Israeli military and obtained by The New York Times, provide a detailed record of the planning for the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack, as well as Sinwar’s determination to persuade Hamas’ allies, Iran and Hezbollah, to join the assault or at least commit to a broader fight with Israel.
The documents consist of minutes from 10 secret planning meetings of a small group of Hamas political and military leaders in the run-up to the Oct. 7 attack. The minutes include 30 pages of previously undisclosed details about the way Hamas’ leadership works and the preparations that went into its attack.
The documents, which were verified by the Times, lay out the main strategies and assessments of the leadership group:
Hamas initially planned to carry out the attack, which it code-named “the big project,” in the fall of 2022. But the group delayed executing the plan as it tried to persuade Iran and Hezbollah to participate.
As they prepared arguments aimed at Hezbollah, the Hamas leaders said that Israel’s “internal situation” — an apparent reference to turmoil over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s contentious plans to overhaul the judiciary — was among the reasons they were “compelled to move toward a strategic battle.”
In July 2023, Hamas dispatched a top official to Lebanon, where he met with a senior Iranian commander and requested help with striking sensitive sites at the start of the assault.
The senior Iranian commander told Hamas that Iran and Hezbollah were supportive in principle but needed more time to prepare; the minutes do not say how detailed a plan was presented by Hamas to its allies.
The documents also say that Hamas planned to discuss the attack in more detail at a subsequent meeting with Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader at the time, but do not clarify whether the discussion happened.
Hamas felt assured of its allies’ general support but concluded it might need to go ahead without their full involvement, in part to stop Israel from deploying an advanced new air-defense system before the assault took place.
The decision to attack was also influenced by Hamas’ desire to disrupt efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia; the entrenchment of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank; and Israeli efforts to exert greater control over the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, sacred in both Islam and Judaism and known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
Hamas deliberately avoided major confrontations with Israel for two years from 2021, in order to maximize the surprise of the 2023 attack.
Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip said they briefed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ Qatar-based political leader, on “the big project.” It was not previously known whether Haniyeh, who was assassinated by Israel in July, had been briefed on the attack before it happened.
The documents provide greater context to one of the most pivotal moments in modern Middle Eastern history, showing it was both the culmination of a yearslong plan as well as a move partly shaped by specific events after Netanyahu returned to power in Israel in late 2022.
The attack on Israel killed roughly 1,200 people and prompted Israel to bombard and invade Gaza, killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and militants. It ultimately expanded into a broader war between Israel and Hamas’ regional allies.
The extent to which Iran and Hezbollah knew about Hamas’ initial plans has been one of the persistent mysteries of Oct. 7. The question took on new resonance in recent weeks, after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and Iran’s strikes on Israel.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has publicly denied that Iran had any role in the attack. And U.S. officials have described intelligence showing key Iranian leaders were caught by surprise. But Hamas leaders have spoken broadly about the support they have received from regional allies and there have been scattered and sometimes conflicting reports that Iranian and Hezbollah officials helped plan the attack and train fighters.
The minutes were discovered on a computer found in late January by Israeli soldiers as they searched an underground Hamas command center in Khan Younis, from which the group’s leaders had recently escaped.
The Times assessed the documents’ authenticity by sharing some of their contents with members of and experts close to Hamas. The Israeli military, in a separate internal report obtained by the Times, concluded the documents were real.
The Israeli military declined to comment. Hamas and Hezbollah did not respond to requests for comment. Iran’s Mission to the United Nations denied the claims made in the minutes.
The documents first hint at the operation in January 2022, when the minutes show that Hamas leaders discussed the need to avoid getting dragged into minor skirmishes to focus on “the big project.”
By June 2022, preparations for the attack were roughly a month from completion, according to the minutes from that month. The plans included striking positions staffed by the Israeli military division that guards the border, then targeting an air base and intelligence hub in southern Israel, as well as cities and villages. The leaders said it would be easier to target those residential areas if the military bases were overrun first — a prediction that proved to be correct on Oct. 7, 2023.
Gathering in September 2022, the Hamas leadership council seemed ready to begin the attack within a month. (The documents do not explain why the attack was postponed.) In December 2022, a new far-right government took office in Israel, returning Netanyahu to power.
At a meeting in May 2023, Sinwar and his colleagues seemed ready to finalize plans for the attack. According to the minutes, the leaders debated whether to launch it Sept. 25, 2023, when most Israelis would be observing Yom Kippur, the most hallowed day in the Jewish calendar, or Oct. 7, 2023, which coincided that year with the Jewish holy day of Simchat Torah.
In the same meeting, the leadership council said they wanted to carry out the attack by the end of 2023 because Israel had announced it was developing a new laser that could destroy Hamas rockets more efficiently than its current air-defense system.
Hamas planned to present the attack to Hezbollah, according to the documents, as a way of derailing efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a move that would have further integrated Israel within the Middle East without fully resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to the minutes from an August 2023 meeting, Sinwar’s deputy, Khalil al-Hayya, discussed the plan the previous month with Mohammed Said Izadi of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, who was based in Lebanon. Those minutes also said al-Hayya intended to raise it with Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader.
The meeting with Nasrallah was postponed and the minutes of later meetings do not clarify whether the Hamas deputy was able to eventually present that argument to him in person. The minutes also show that the leaders shared sensitive information with Haniyeh and briefed him on “the big project.”
The August minutes reported that al-Hayya had told Izadi that Hamas would need help with striking sensitive sites during “the first hour” of the attack. According to the document, Izadi said Hezbollah and Iran welcomed the plan in principle but needed time “to prepare the environment.” As a result, Hamas’ leaders seemed hopeful that their allies would not leave them “exposed,” but they accepted that they might need to carry out the attack alone.
In the end, Iran did not directly strike Israel until months after Hamas’ attack and Hezbollah came to Hamas’ aid only on Oct. 8, 2023, after Israel had begun to restore control over its borders. Hezbollah continued to distract the Israeli military from Gaza by firing rockets into Israel. The confrontation led to an all-out war in which Israel assassinated Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders and invaded the group’s strongholds in southern Lebanon.
Source » japantimes