H
ere’s a hard and fast rule: sensitive documents never just “leak” out by themselves; someone with an interest in the documents becoming public leaks them.That common sense rule needs to be applied in evaluating reports that appeared simultaneously in The New York Times and The Washington Post on Saturday, based on Hamas’s internal minutes and documents culled by the IDF from the terrorist organization’s control bunker in Khan Yunis in January.
Why?
The documents show that Iran knew of a general plan by Hamas to carry out a massive attack on Israel that it hoped would bring Iran and its proxy Hezbollah into the fray and lead to the collapse of the Jewish State.
Not, mind you, an evacuation of settlements, a retreat to the 1967 lines, or the establishment of a Palestinian state and a two-state solution, but rather, as the Post’s article said, the destruction of Israel.
The Times reported on the minutes of an August 2023 meeting where Khalil al-Hayya, a deputy of Hamas head Yahya Sinwar, discussed the plan a month earlier with Mohammed Said Izadi, an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps commander based in Lebanon, who helped oversee Tehran’s relations with Palestinian terror organizations.
Izadi, this report read, said that Hezbollah and Iran welcomed the plan in principle but that they needed time “to prepare the environment.”
That Iran knew of the plan and was asked by Hamas to send money to help realize the plan, and that when urged to join in, it said that while it supports the idea, the time is not opportune, gives even more justification for Israel to attack the Islamic Republic – as if Iran’s recent attack was not justification enough.
Israel has tarried in its response to Iran, and the reasons for this may become clearer when the expected attack does take place. But the length of time that has already elapsed between attack and response means that when the response does come, much of the international community will have forgotten the cause.
Along come these documents, and now not only is there justification for the response because of the Iranian missiles, but also because of Iran’s involvement in Hamas’s atrocity.
If George W. Bush was justified, as most Americans at the time felt he was, to go to war against Iraq after 9/11 because the country was seen as aiding and abetting al-Qaeda, then certainly Israel is no less justified in lashing out at Iran, which has aided and abetted Hamas even more.
Beyond implicating Iran in an overall project to launch a dramatic attack on Israel that would lead to its destruction, the leaked documents do something else: they challenge certain assumptions that have taken strong root since October 7.
The first assumption is that the attack was done to stymie a Saudi Arabia-Israel agreement that would pave the way to greater Israeli integration into the Middle East.
According to this assumption, Iran and its proxies feared that such a move would cement a strong US-Israel-Sunni Arab alliance in the region that would be a powerful counterforce to Iran’s hegemonic designs in the region and that it would further push the Palestinian issue off the international agenda.
Indeed, in the weeks just prior to October 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the UN of Israel and Saudi Arabia being “at the cusp” of a historic breakthrough, fundamentally altering the Middle East. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman echoed this sentiment in a Fox News interview, saying “every day we get closer” to an Israel-Saudi agreement.
Furthermore, in that same month – September 2023 – US President Joe Biden proposed an economic corridor of rail, shipping lines, pipes, and cables that would link India to Europe through the Middle East.
While such an agreement would certainly disrupt Iran’s designs for Middle East hegemony, the leaked documents indicate this wasn’t 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 before the original date, and well before there was serious momentum on the Saudi-Israeli track.
The Times article claimed that Hamas tried to sell their project to Hezbollah as a way of keeping this normalization of ties from taking place, but that was after the die was cast for an attack and they had decided to go forward. This was a rationalization for Hezbollah to get on board, not the reason for the plan; that reason was, as the reports made clear, an extremist ideology and fanatical hatred of Israel.
The second assumption that these documents disproved is that the October 7 attack was a result of last year’s judicial overhaul upheaval and the deep internal rift inside Israel.
If Hamas originally wanted to attack in fall 2022, then that was when Yair Lapid was prime minister and several months before the new Netanyahu government set off full force on the judicial reform plan in January.
Granted, the fall of 2022 was not a shining example of Israeli unity, with the country heading towards its fifth election in 3 ½ years, yet it disproves the notion that tumultuous scenes on the Israeli streets and threats of reserve pilots and soldiers not showing up for service were what was behind the attack. These divisions proved an opportune time to strike, but, again, the plan was not hatched because of the divisions but long before.
Here too, Hamas – in arguments trying to get Hezbollah on board – cited the “internal situation” as a reason they felt compelled to move to the plan now, but it was not the prime mover behind the plan.
Finally, what is striking about these documents is that a terrorist organization hellbent on the Jewish state’s destruction was putting together a project – the “big project” – to implement their fanatical ideology and enlist fellow travelers in the project. All the while, Israel – just 78 years after the Holocaust – was asleep at the wheel.
