Iran is Responsible for the Massacre in Israel and the War it Started
The horrific rampage by HAMAS and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in southern Israel on 7 October, which (at the present count) has slaughtered 900 Israelis and wounded 2,500, was the work of the revolutionary Islamist regime in Iran.
The Wall Street Journal reported within twenty-four hours, after speaking with “senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, [and] another Iran-backed militant group”, that Clerical Iran planned and ordered the carnage in Israel, and Tehran’s design was made possible by its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) training, funding, arming, and equipping the terrorists who carried it out.
The IRGC oversaw planning meetings in Beirut starting in August, which were “attended by … representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas” and Hizballah, according to the Journal.
The Journal notes in passing that Bashar al-Asad’s regime in Syria was aware of the attack ahead of time: “an adviser to the Syrian government” gave an account of events leading up to the massacre that matched the details given by Iran’s other terrorist assets. This is not exactly surprising since Asad surrendered his independence a long time ago, maintaining himself nominally in power by turning Syria into an Iranian colony. But it is a helpful data point to have all the same.
The planning meetings in Lebanon were “at least biweekly”, according to the Journal, which in context appears to mean twice-per-week, but this is a uselessly ambiguous word, so it could mean once-per-fortnight. The meetings were led by Ismail Qaani, the commander of the Quds Force, the wing of the IRGC charged with exporting the Islamic Revolution. (Qaani has been in office since January 2020 when the U.S. killed his predecessor, Qassem Sulaymani.) Hizballah’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, PIJ leader Ziyad al-Nakhala, and HAMAS’ military chief Saleh al-Aruri, of course, all attended the meetings.
The Journal also reports: “Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian attended at least two of the meetings”. This might seem strange, if only in “operational security” or “OPSEC” terms, but Amir-Abdollahian personally is a self-advertised adjunct of the IRGC and the inclusion of the Iranian Foreign Ministry as an institution is entirely standard practice for what is, after all, a transnational jihadist movement that happens to occupy a country; these State offices matter only in so far as they enable the global mission.
In 1994, then-Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati was present at the meeting where the final decision was made to bomb the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. That atrocity on 18 July 1994 murdered eighty-five people, almost all of them Jews, and wounded 300. The AMIA operation was run out of Iran’s Argentine Embassy and some Embassies, like the one in Syria, have become notorious—the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia and the coordination for Iran’s Shi’a jihad to rescue Asad a decade ago relied on the Syrian Embassy—but the pattern is general. The Islamic Revolution finds Iran’s diplomatic facilities useful as protected bases for its spy-terrorist activities, but its substantive views on diplomacy were made clear in 1979 when it stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took hostages as one of its first acts in power.
The Washington Post followed up, reporting via “current and former Western and Middle Eastern intelligence officials”, that the planning for the attack began “at least a year ago”, which is consistent with assessments I’ve heard from military analysts and those who focus on the IRGC Network. One thing this means is that while derailing Israeli-Saudi normalisation could be an effect of this, the attack was not triggered by the recent signals that normalisation was getting closer.
The Post said, “Iran’s precise role in Saturday’s violence remained unclear”, adding:
[T]he assault reflected Tehran’s years-long ambition to surround Israel with legions of paramilitary fighters armed with increasingly sophisticated weapons systems capable of striking deep inside the Jewish state.
Hamas … has historically maintained a degree of independence from Tehran compared with true Iranian proxy groups such as the Lebanese-based Hezbollah. But in recent years, Hamas has benefited from massive infusions of Iranian cash as well as technical help for manufacturing rockets and drones with advanced guidance systems, in addition to training in military tactics — some of which occurred in camps outside Gaza …
“The amount of training, logistics, communication, personnel, and weapons required provides a massive footprint,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA senior operations officer who served in counterterrorism roles in the Middle East. “This suggests both Iranian involvement, given the complexity of the attack, and highlights the colossal intelligence failure.” The use of paragliders — reminiscent of a spectacular 1987 attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP] in Israel that killed several soldiers — “surely required training outside of Gaza,” Polymeropoulos said.
Current and former intelligence officials confirmed that Iran had provided technical help to Hamas in manufacturing the more than 4,000 rockets and armed drones launched into Israel since Saturday. At least some Hamas militants also have undergone training in advanced military tactics, including at Lebanese camps staffed by technical advisers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah, the officials said.
The Hamas militants who received training were likely elite officers who passed along skills to other fighters inside Gaza itself, said Michael Knights, an expert on Iranian-backed militia groups … “It’s a ‘train the trainer’ approach,” Knights said. “You don’t have to do a lot to train someone to be capable of operating a drone system, which is not complicated stuff anymore.” On the other hand, he said, the combined-arms breaching capability exhibited during Saturday’s assault “clearly was practiced and carefully planned somewhere. A whole bunch of fortified positions fell to sophisticated combined arms-breaching attacks. And you don’t just wing that.” …
Some of the rockets produced by Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas have Farsi terms in the blueprints … [a]nd a drone used by Hamas, called the Shahab, is based on the Iranian Ababil-2, a loitering munition which … is almost identical to a model being used in Yemen by the Houthis, another Iranian proxy.
It is not to denigrate the Journal’s reporters or reporting to note here that the Post gives non-specialist readers a better sense of reality precisely by not looking at the details of this specific operation in Israel and instead providing the big picture context that no serious analyst disagrees with: HAMAS could not have done this without Iran providing it the capacity and giving it permission. The nuance-mongering after that among specialists—about precise degrees and mechanisms of control, and so on—is irrelevant to policymakers, never mind the general public. Moreover, arguments over such details—on this topic specifically—are often used for mischief by bad-faith actors determined to exculpate Tehran by confusing, rather than clarifying.
In terms of correctly conceptualising Iran’s imperial structure in the region, the IRGC Network should be seen as an unitary structure, under a single ideology and command structure, where its troops and resources move from front to front as needed, and the various names—like “Hizballah” and “HAMAS”—are useful at most as shorthand to describe theatres where Iran’s forces are operating.
I recently wrote about the true origins of Hizballah, often wrongly referred to as a “proxy” of Iran’s, when it is in fact an organic component of the IRGC, forged in the half-decade or so before the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The Shi’a militias in Iraq and Syria, and Ansar Allah in Yemen, conform to this model. The case of HAMAS is slightly more complicated, because the group originates outside Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution, as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, but just as the Soviets used to co-opt ostensibly independent “national liberation movements” during the Cold War, so it is that HAMAS was brought wholly under the IRGC command structure some time ago.
During the last round in Gaza in 2021, AIJAC’s Oved Lobel gave a thorough run-down of how the IRGC absorbed HAMAS and PIJ, concluding:
[E]very time there is a major clash between Israel and the Gaza factions, Western media outlets almost universally link it to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, amplifying Hamas’ propaganda and legitimising its actions. … For anyone genuinely interested in analyzing and discussing the conflict, the starting point must be the recognition of two parallel phenomena: the pan-Islamic “resistance” jihad to destroy Israel, which has no relation to Israeli policies; and the fight for civil and political rights for Palestinians and the aspirational pursuit of a two-state solution. To muddle the two is to justify the genocidal aims of the former and thoroughly discredit the latter.
Understanding this key point might have avoided some of the obfuscatory arguments that have been put forward over the last few days about “the occupation” and “decolonisation”, albeit these talking-points would still have come up since many of the people parroting them were engaged in a wilful, obscene effort to justify the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Acknowledging that this is a war orchestrated by Iran does not mean denying Palestinians their agency. The obvious delight many Palestinians, and the “pro-Palestinian” movement abroad, took in seeing Jews raped and butchered will surely further degrade the political and psychological environment, pushing any chance of a durable settlement in former Mandate Palestine further out of reach. But this is an issue for the medium-term.
As Israel prepares a ground invasion of Gaza to deal with Iran’s enclave there, Jerusalem publicly insists Iran was not directly behind the atrocities in the south. The U.S. government keeps saying this and Iranians—amongst a lot of deliberately mixed messaging—said the same thing through Supreme Leader Ali Khamene’i this morning. Empirically false as we have seen this is, the messaging has the strategic intent of keeping the war contained to Gaza. The long-running effort to compartmentalise Iran’s war on Israel, which is part of the reason the Israelis now face such grim options, might not yet be recognised as futile in Israel, but events might demonstrate it is so.
If Israel’s operation in Gaza seeks to eliminate HAMAS, and that is the indication, it seems unlikely, for ideological-strategic reasons, Iran will not utilise its assets in southern Lebanon, something that has already begun. Bad as a two-front war would be for Israel at this stage, delaying also has costs. Should a two-front war become reality, the military logic of dealing with the nerve centre in Tehran comes into play for Israel, and at that point the direct line from Saturday’s attack to Iran will surely become manifest in official Israeli statements; until then, denial buys the Israelis time to prepare options. It is to try to prevent such a cascade that the U.S. is involving itself to deter Iran on the Lebanon front.
Amid the uncertainties about what comes next in the Middle East, there is one point of clarity: the responsibility lies with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The scale and nature of what Iran’s terrorists did to Israel over the weekend is what has taken the region into unchartered territory, where the old rulebook for controlled conflict no longer applies.
The IDF EW advantage will be key to establishing aerial supremacy at the quad-copter level.