(Times Of Israel) The devastating terror onslaught carried out by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, had originally been planned for the previous year, but was delayed amid efforts by the Palestinian terror group to enlist the help of Iran and Hezbollah, according to a series of documents obtained by international media outlets on Saturday.
The reports cited minutes from a series of meetings held by Hamas’s military and political leaders over the course of two years, in which they planned the logistics of the attack, as well as various correspondences between Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Iranian officials.
An initial report published by The New York Times on Saturday detailed the minutes of 10 meetings spanning from January 2022 until August 2023, which the outlet said had been discovered back in January on a computer in a Hamas control center in Khan Younis. The Times said that it had verified the authenticity of the documents and had separately obtained an internal report by the Israel Defense Forces that did the same.
The contents of additional meetings and messages, mostly focused on Iran’s involvement in planning and funding the attack, were then shared by the IDF with The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, both of which said that they could not independently verify the authenticity of the information they received.
While it was not always clear which officials had attended which meetings, The Times found that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was present at each one, while now-dead top officials Muhammed Deif and Marwan Issa attended at least several of them, as did Muhammad Sinwar, Yahya’s brother.
The plan for a cross-border attack on Israel’s military infrastructure and civilian communities was first mentioned in a meeting in January 2022, The Times reported, when the Hamas officials in attendance discussed the need to avoid escalating conflict with Israel and to instead focus on “the big project.”
However, the ball may have started rolling even earlier than that, as The Post said it had obtained letters written by Sinwar to Iranian officials in which he requested financial and military assistance for a large-scale assault on Israel.
“We promise you that we will not waste a minute or a penny unless it takes us toward achieving this sacred goal,” Sinwar was said to write in a letter dated June 2021.
His request appeared to have been granted, as The Wall Street Journal said it had obtained a letter in which an Iranian official confirmed the allocation of $10 million for Hamas’s armed wing. Sinwar later asked for an additional $500 million, which he said could be delivered over the course of two years, with $20 million being transferred per month.
Following the meeting in January 2022, the “big project” was discussed at length in later meetings of Hamas’s Gaza leadership in April and June of that year.
It was during that period that the attack began to take shape. Last November, a 36-page document was uncovered in northern Gaza, The Washington Post reported, in which various scenarios for attacking Israel were outlined and reviewed.
Among the targets discussed were shopping malls and military command centers, The Post reported, as well as the Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv, which house offices, a large shopping mall and a train station. In this scenario, the terror group reportedly envisioned carrying out an attack similar to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
However, the report said, this plan was discarded after the terror group concluded that it lacked the ability to bring down the towers.
Among the other plans said to have been discarded by the terror group was one that involved the use of horse-drawn carriages, which the terror group said would serve as a “fast and light mechanism” to transport fighters without drawing the attention that modern vehicles do.
