Opinion What Hamas hoped would happen after Oct. 7
By: David Ignatius (The Washington Post)
Wasn't Yahya Sinwar expecting a cautious response from Israel? After all, the United States, having trapped itself in a Ukrainian quagmire, would return to the two state solution as appeasement to avoid a wider war in the Middle East. It was all too plain that US returning to Obama foreign policy priorities would force the United States to hate Russia much more than it would hate Iran. Sinwar expected the United States to be a sympathetic adversary who would constrain Israel with the framework for a two state solution.
That is the conventional wisdom we're hearing from the academic left and the unbiased liberal press, isn't it? Defeating Russia to maintain the liberal world order is the existential imperative. Free trade and free movement of people must be defended at all cost. Otherwise the liberals in charge of the liberal world order would lose their ability to exploit producers, consumers, and governments. And a defeated Russia would be wide open for unbridled exploitation.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
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.
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.
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The academic left and unbiased liberal press cannot believe Benjamin Netanyahu's declaration that Israel will fight alone if it must. After all Israel had been diplomatically restrained and controlled with a framework for a two state solution. The liberal world order wanted to exploit the conflict between the Sunni and Shia to control the Middle East which required pushing Israel into the closet. And the exploitation by liberals was successful from Turkey to Pakistan; the Middle East has been in simmering turmoil since the fall of Reza Shah Pahlavi in the 1970s. Muslim terrorism has been very good for the liberal world order.
Can the United States handle a wider war in Europe, as Volodymyr Zelensky wants? Can the United States handle a wider war in the Middle East, as Yahya Sinwar wants? Have the exploitive liberal thinkers creating foreign policy for the United States been duped and exploited by unwashed barbarians? It certainly looks like there will be a wider war somewhere that the United States cannot stop, control, or exploit.
We see how that worked out. Gaza is, rightfully, a pile of rubble, Lebanon is scrambling for cover and Iran doesn't know what to do with itself right now.
Official Hamas instruction documents were also found that indicated Hamas' plan to wage a psychological propaganda war, one that would incentivize the rest of the world to come down hard on Israel, to emasculate it. It has succeeded with that method to win, and it has already won that war. How would they do it? With the aid of UNRWA (already PROVEN to have been complicit) the Hamas militants hid themselves, in and under their control centres and their weapons in and under hospitals, schools, mosques, refugee centres and UNRWA facilities, using human shields whom they knew would become casualties of war. They announced exaggerated numbers of casualties, accentuating how many women and ESPECIALLY how many children were killed, but not how many militants were killed. If you have actually realized that the north Gaza Hospital bombing that supposedly killed 500 innocent Gazans was NOT an Israeli bomb as Hamas announced, but a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket, you might actually understand the game they are playing for their propaganda war, and how they fool the bleeding hearts of the world. You hear every organization and government, from the UN itself to the majority of its members, the ICJ, presidents and prime ministers declare a genocide is taking place, that the Israelis are starving the Gazans when the aid trucks are being hijacked by Hamas and what they don't need for themselves sell to the civilians at exorbitant prices. But Israel is blamed. Marches, protests and demonstrations are held around the world supporting the terrorists. Governments are announcing that they will impose arms embargoes on Israel (including Biden recently). Let the truth be known, that Hamas has relied on the gullibility and antisemitism of the rest of the world, AND THEY HAVE ALREADY WON THEIR PROPAGANDA WAR.
Has ANYONE demanded that Hamas surrender? Has anyone said that it is the tactics of Hamas that are the war crimes? If they do surrender, because their defeat is inevitable, the bloodshed will immediately stop, the Gazans will be inundated with food and medical aid, the reconstruction can be planned and commenced, but the problem is that Hamas will NEVER surrender, and this war will not end until the last Hamas militant has been killed, They will NEVER surrender because if they are not killed doing what the Quran commands them to do, i.e. to fight and kill the Jews, the Day of Judgment will not come and they will not get to live forever in The Garden of Allah while deflowering their 72 virgins.
I think that by this time it is probably well known on this site that I am NOT a bleeding heart.
Am Yisrael Chai The people of Israel live