The Evidence Iran Was Behind the 7 October Pogrom in Israel

Aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre by HAMAS at the Nova music festival in Israel || Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90

In the days after the 7 October 2023 pogrom led by the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) in Israel, I wrote an article here contending that this was the work of Iran’s regime, by definition, since HAMAS is a component of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) regional network. There was already at that time some interesting data available on the specifics of how Iran had put together the HAMAS-led invasion of Israel and run it from the IRGC command post in Beirut, but my primary point was that such contestable specific intelligence was not necessary to our understanding of what had happened: the crucial details are all public and uncontested, and have been for many years.

As there continues to be debate on this point and about the nature of the 7 October massacres more generally, some of it even advanced in good faith, it seemed worthwhile taking a look at the additional evidence that has come out, and what Iran’s various IRGC units have said, over the last three-and-a-half months.

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST IRANIAN INVOLVEMENT IN 7 OCTOBER

Not even the most apologetic “analyst” has been able to claim the Iranian regime opposed the 7 October pogrom. Within days of the rampage that slaughtered 1,200 people in the most indescribably gruesome ways and kidnapped 240 others, the clerical regime had installed billboards throughout the Iranian capital lauding Tufan al-Aqsa (Al-Aqsa Flood), as HAMAS calls the war it launched against Israel that is still raging, and the Iranian Foreign Ministry said the pogrom was a “legitimate” act of “resistance”. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said in a televised address on 10 October: “We kiss the hands of those who planned the attack on the Zionist regime”. 

Some evidence has been adduced, however, to argue that the Islamic Republic did not organise and order the pogrom in Israel, and may have been unaware of what HAMAS was planning. This evidence does not hold up to the barest scrutiny.

The Foreign Ministry and Khamenei statements, while celebrating the slaughter of Jews, were careful to deny the Iranian government had any role in the carnage. A month after the attack, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the IRGC unit in Lebanon (“Hizballah”), followed Khamenei’s lead in praising the “heroic” massacre of civilians by HAMAS and simultaneously claiming the operation was “one-hundred percent Palestinian”.

The whole purpose of Iran’s revolutionary imperialist model—discussed more below—is to provide “deniability” for its operations so that it does not directly pay the price for its adventurism. Why the West continues to agree to play by Iran’s rules is a whole other issue, but suffice it to say the “official” statements from the “Axis of Resistance” were always going to lead away from Iran’s responsibility for 7 October.

Of seemingly more significance is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement at the end of October that he could not tell for “certain” that Iran was “involved in the micro-planning” of “this specific operation”. But as Netanyahu quite correctly went on to say in the same interview, the specifics of Iran’s role on 7 October are irrelevant: there would be no HAMAS capable of such an operation without Iran’s money, training, and instructions. It is also important to keep in mind that Israeli the government has to this point pursued a political messaging strategy that maintains some ambiguity about Iran’s responsibility for the 7 October slaughter in an effort to keep the war with the IRGC contained to Gaza.

What, then, to make of the Americans? President Joe Biden remarked to CBS’ “60 Minutes” show a week after 7 October that “there is no clear evidence” Iran was behind the pogrom, albeit the President conceded: “Iran constantly supports HAMAS and Hizballah. … But in terms of did they [the Iranians] have foreknowledge, did they help plan the attack, there’s no evidence of that at this point”. This was a reiteration of the line given on background by a senior administration official actually on 7 October.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN on 9 October: “In this specific instance, we have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship”. This Talmudic talking point was repeated the same day by National Security Council (NSC) spokesman John Kirby: “Make no mistake, there’s a degree of complicity here just because Iran’s been supporting Hamas now for many, many years … But in terms of the specific series of attacks we have seen in the last 24, 36 hours, we just don’t have direct evidence.” And the Pentagon would follow suit, saying, “Iran has a significant relationship with HAMAS”, so “they certainly bear some responsibility” for 7 October, but “the information that we have does not show a direct connection” between Iran and the massacres.

As with the Israeli statements, the American messaging about 7 October has a political dimension. The part of this designed to support Israel in containing the war to Gaza is more defensible than the part related to the Biden administration’s inclination to continue the Barack Obama-era policy of pursuing a détente with the clerical theocracy.

The U.S. public assessments also relied on intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), some of which has been leaked to the news media. The CIA claims to have “exquisite” intelligence showing that some “Iranian officials” were surprised by the HAMAS massacre in Israel. The intelligence comes from signals intercepts. The Iranian officials in question are unnamed, but described as “high enough that they would usually be informed about Tehran’s support for Iran’s proxies before an attack”. The problems with this are numerous.

First, it is self-evidently ridiculous. Even for those who interpret the thirty-odd-year relationship between Iran and HAMAS as some sort of loose patron-client arrangement where HAMAS has genuine independence of action, no serious person can believe HAMAS said nothing to Tehran as it worked for a year or more—with Iran’s money, weapons, and IRGC trainers—to plan the most audacious operation in its history, one with direct and potentially dire consequences for the Iranian regime. This is not how anything works.

It becomes more preposterous when one zooms in. HAMAS was not the only IRGC faction that participated in the 7 October atrocities. Among the 3,000 or so terrorists who stormed the frontier, there was Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a straight-out extension of Iran’s Islamic Revolution that is for HAMAS what HAMAS is for Iran—a “deniable” front that protects the IRGC’s key assets by absorbing the retaliation from Iran’s perennially escalation-averse enemies. And then there were the Communist remnants among the Palestinian militants, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), one of the Soviet Union’s key interlocuters with global terrorist groups, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), both of which have drawn closer to the Islamic Republic since the Soviet Empire collapsed. The alliance of the Red and the Black that brought the Islamic Revolution to power in Iran lives on. The idea all these IRGC instruments collaborated to bring about 7 October and no word of it reached Tehran is just silly.

Second, if we are to be charitable about how the CIA can possibly have come to this bewildering conclusion, an operation as “spectacular” as 7 October can be expected to be highly compartmentalised within the Iranian regime: it was certainly compartmentalised within the HAMAS unit of the IRGC; the majority of those being trained for the invasion “had no inkling of the exact purpose of the exercises”. Thus, except for Khamenei and his IRGC-Quds Force commander, General Esmail Qaani, the successor to the infamous Qassem Sulaymani, there is no guarantee anybody else in Iran would have been in the loop about the details, so unless it was the communications of either of these two men the U.S. intercepted—and the Agency’s presentation to the media suggests very strongly it was not—then the intelligence does not tell us much.

Third, as the CIA concedes, it “does not always have perfect visibility into the communications between Iran and its various proxies”. This is to say the least of it. The small circle of HAMAS leaders who planned the 7 October invasion communicated using landline telephones installed in the maze of tunnels they have constructed under Gaza: this strategy was adopted under Iran’s guidance about operational security. It would have required the U.S. or Israel physically getting into the tunnels to tap this telephone network, and they would have had to find out about the landlines first. Quite obviously that did not happen. One can choose to believe Iran played a part in creating this landline system without ever asking what it was for, if one so wishes, but what is not debateable is that this system shows U.S. visibility into how the IRGC Network communicates, let alone the contents of those communications, is distinctly incomplete.

Fourth, given that the IRGC Network can hide those parts of its communications system vital to its operations, the possibility has to be considered that the Islamic Republic is aware of those parts U.S. intelligence has access to and is using them to feed disinformation to the Americans—and by extension, Five Eyes, Israel, and the whole Western Alliance. Increasing the suspicion that something of the kind occurred, in the aftermath of 7 October it has been part of the official Iranian narrative that Tehran was taken off-guard by what HAMAS did.

Fifth, and perhaps most centrally, there is the problem contained in the word “proxies”. In the CIA’s conception, Iran is the manager of a coalition of independent actors, over which Tehran has varying degrees of influence. This analytical assumption inevitably slants the Agency’s conclusions, and it is highly problematic.

The Islamic Republic’s messaging does contain wilfully contradictory elements: Iran claims to control a unified “Axis of Resistance”, but it also sprinkles this with portrayals of itself as having relationships with a plethora of groups that have their own agendas and agency. The former message is broadly true, and the latter message—which the CIA takes seriously, as do many Western analysts, some of them honestly—is an information operation designed to ensure that retribution for the terrorism and other misbehaviour the IRGC conducts under the cover of these brand names (like “Hizballah” or “HAMAS”) does not fall on Iran itself.

As such, the word “proxy” is not only a mischaracterisation: it collaborates in Iran’s deception operation. The IRGC Network is better thought of as a unitary entity, where Hizballah, HAMAS, PIJ, and so on are “not disparate, subordinate, local revolutionary groups allied for a greater cause and supported by the IRGC, but regional names of the same movement with the same leadership and goals that shifts the same personnel and resources to various fronts of its transnational jihad under different aliases”.

It must also be said that, despite Iran always providing enough in its messaging for its Western apologists and nuance-mongering analysts (overlapping breeds) to find “distance” between the clerical regime and its “proxies” if they really want to, Tehran does not actually hide the fact that HAMAS and the others are external units of the IRGC. Just to give two examples.

When Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force, gave a press conference in January 2020 explaining that Iran’s missile attack on the American Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq a day earlier was revenge for the killing of Qassem Sulaymani, he chose to surround himself (see the picture below) with nine flags representing, from left to right, the Islamic Republic, the IRGC, the IRGC Aerospace Force, and six overseas brigades of the IRGC: Hizballah (Lebanon), Ansarallah or “the Houthis” (Yemen), al-Hashd al-Shabi (Iraq), HAMAS (Palestine), Liwa Fatemiyun (Afghanistan), and Liwa Zaynabiyun (Pakistan).

Hajizadeh’s decision to include Ansarallah’s flag was especially notable, since there has been—and continues to be—a particularly energetic messaging campaign disguised as analysis to portray Ansarallah as a “Yemeni” actor with some extraneous support from Iran, rather than what it is and always has been: an organic component of the IRGC. It is somewhat absurd that this is still going on. Iran’s regime itself ceased all pretence about its ownership of Ansarallah during the May 2021 Israel-HAMAS war, and has re-emphasised the point many times since then. But this cycle of denying the IRGC Network’s expansion is a persistent one: before Ansarallah, there was much controversy over the nature of the Hashd.

In September 2021, Major-General Gholam Ali Rashid, the head of Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, the combatant command for Artesh (the regular Iranian army), made a speech in which he reported that he had spoken to Sulaymani three months before Sulaymani’s “martyrdom” (i.e., October 2019), and Sulaymani said his Quds Force had—with the assistance of the broader IRGC, Artesh, and the Defence Ministry—“organised six armies for you outside Iran’s territory” and this had created a thousand-kilometre defensive perimeter to deter the regime’s foes: “any enemy who wants to fight the Islamic Revolution and the sacred system of the Islamic Republic of Iran must get through these six armies”. Rashid named these six external “armies” as: Hizballah, HAMAS, PIJ, the Hashd, Ansarallah, and “an army in Syria”.

While the IRGC’s Syrian army is not further specified, Rashid is referring essentially to the whole spectrum of forces that constitute what passes for the Syrian “State”, all of which have been under Iranian control since 2012-13 at the latest. The process by which Iran took over Syria is an excellent case study of how the IRGC functions, as one organisation that shifts resources to various jihadist fronts as needed.

In late 2012, Bashar al-Asad’s Syrian regime was crumbling in the face of an escalating nationwide rebellion. Iran responded by orchestrating a full-scale international Shi’a jihad, moving thousands of IRGC operatives from other theatres—especially Lebanon and Iraq—into Syria to save Asad. Once in place, the Islamic Revolution then began cloning itself to embed organically in the societal fabric, taking Syria through the same evolution as Iran has been through since 1979, with the formation of parallel structures that overshadow State counterparts, as the IRGC did with Artesh, and penetrating the State. In this way, the IRGC secures so many points of leverage it has de facto physical control of the country, while at the same time retaining the outward forms of the old State, providing both “nationalist” political cover to advance the Islamic Revolution and a scapegoat for when things go wrong, which is usually followed by claims that if only the local IRGC unit had more control everything would be better.

In Syria, this took the form of the IRGC-created and -modelled “National Defence Forces” (NDF), which gathered together the Asad regime’s “popular committees” and other Shabiha-type sectarian militias into a more regularised force that quickly outnumbered and outgunned the battered Syrian army. The NDF, paid directly from Iran and led by IRGC officers, is what Rashid called a “religious and popular” army: it is nominally staffed by volunteers, who are not “officially” part of the Syrian military, even as it has done the bulk of the fighting that has kept Asad in power.

Alongside the NDF, the IRGC has created a “Syrian Hizballah” or more precisely Hizballahs. Simultaneous with the importation of Iran-loyal Shi’i settlers to alter Syria’s demographics, the IRGC/Hizballah has worked at the local level to indoctrinate Syrians with the clerical regime’s absolute wilayat al-faqih ideology. This has focused on Syria’s small Twelver Shi’a community and the Shi’a-derived Ismailis and Alawis, the population that is the basis of the Asad regime, but the IRGC has had success—beginning before the war—in converting tribesmen and other Sunnis. The central effect of the Iranian regime’s version of Shi’ism has been restructuring Syrians’ identity and loyalty away from their nation and towards the cause of transnational Islamic Revolution embodied in Iran’s Supreme Leader, “the Shadow of God on Earth”. These Syrian recruits were then given military training and organised into Hizballah-style militias that are integral elements within “Lebanese” Hizballah.

What we have from the CIA, then, is an over-reliance on signals intelligence, without human sources to resolve ambiguities; counter-intelligence issues; and shaping analysis around dubious a priori theories: these are all familiar problems.

THE EVIDENCE OF IRAN’S ROLE IN THE 7 OCTOBER POGROM

NSC spokesman Kirby was asked on 11 October what he would consider a “direct link” between Iran and the 7 October massacres, given his own statement a few minutes earlier that “HAMAS wouldn’t have been able to function at all had it not been for … the Iranian regime”. Kirby replied:

We obviously recognize that there’s broad complicity here by the Iranians … But we haven’t seen anything that tells us [the Iranians] knew, specifically, date, time, method … [or otherwise] that they were witting to this. We haven’t seen anything that tells us they specifically cut checks to support this set of attacks or that they were involved in the training and, obviously, this required quite a bit of training … or that they were involved in any directing of the operation.

Let us take this as a guidepost to test the distinction between “broad complicity” and direct responsibility when assessing Iran’s role in 7 October.

The day after the 7 October pogrom, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing “senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah”, that the IRGC had worked with intensively with HAMAS in the final two months before the invasion of Israel to refine the plan, and gave the final “green light” for the assault at a meeting in Beirut on 2 October.

The Journal documented that the Quds Force, frequently represented by Esmail Qaani personally, had gathered the leaders of four IRGC units—the HAMAS military chief Saleh al-Aruri (to whom Israel dealt justice three weeks ago), Hizballah’s Nasrallah, PIJ’s Ziyad al-Nakhala, and officials from the PFLP—for “biweekly” meetings in Lebanon, starting in August 2023, to discuss their roles in the 7 October atrocity, and how they would deal with the aftermath. (As the word “biweekly” is uselessly equivocal, we do not know for sure if this means twice-per-week or once every fortnight.) These meetings built on Qaani’s push since April 2023 to thicken the IRGC’s intra-network cooperation against Israel, which had yielded results.

There were a couple of other noteworthy details in the Journal’s reporting. It appears senior officials in the Asad regime were aware of the 7 October planning meetings. This makes sense, since, as outlined above, Syria has been occupied by the IRGC for more than a decade, and it was conceivable that the Israeli response would affect Syria. Perhaps most interestingly, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who appeared very publicly with HAMAS and PIJ leaders a month before the pogrom to offer support for their “resistance”, attended at least two of the secret planning meetings, which might seem surprising to some, but, for reasons I explained in October, should not.

The best a “senior Biden administration official” could do in response to this reporting was to say that HAMAS and Hizballah “have an interest in getting Iran involved, so you can’t necessarily take what they’re saying at face value”! It is preferable to think that the administration knows better and resorted to this crude dishonesty in a moment of unpreparedness, because the implications of the U.S. government really believing HAMAS and Hizballah can manipulate Iran are too awful to contemplate.

The reality, that Iran is to the “Resistance Axis” what the Soviet Union was to the “fraternal” Communist Parties around the world—i.e., the directing node in a completely centrally-controlled network—could be seen in the report from Amwaj. In the “early summer” of 2023, Amwaj related, before the end-game meetings for the 7 October pogrom began in Beirut in August, “leaders and representatives” of the various IRGC units—including those based in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and (of course) former Mandate Palestine—“gathered in Tehran for what has become an annual occasion. The meetings stretched out over several days.”

Framed as part of Qaani’s effort to “enhance communication” within the “Resistance Axis”, the actual focus of the summer 2023 meetings was not so nebulous: a regional Joint Operations Chamber (JOC) was established “to counter challenges from both Israel and the United States”, Amwaj notes. The discussions about the structure of the JOC, which is an expansion of the war room the IRGC established in 2021 to fully unify the command structure for HAMAS and Hizballah, “went into specifics”:

The participants debated the responsibilities that would fall on the shoulders of each actor, and how confrontations and cooperation within the ‘Axis of Resistance’ ought to be managed. … Iran hosted the Arab guests amid talk of the possible eruption of a major war in the region. In a sign of how preparation for a comprehensive confrontation was viewed as imperative, the Iranians offered engagement at the highest level—with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei …

Khamenei held the scheduled plenary session which gathered all Arab visitors affiliated with the ‘Axis of Resistance’. … [T]hose in attendance—including Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Houthi representatives—were reminded of the overarching purpose of the regional bloc and indeed the session itself: to restore Palestinian [Arab] control over Jerusalem. 

Everything that has happened since 7 October—the Hizballah attacks that have displaced 30,000-plus people in northern Israel, the attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, and the escalated naval jihad by Ansarallah against international shipping—has been according to the design Khamenei set down, coordinated through the JOC.

The Journal discovered from its sources within the IRGC Network that throughout September 2023 about five-hundred HAMAS and PIJ terrorists went to Iran for “specialized combat training” in Quds Force camps to prepare them for the invasion and massacre in Israel. Once again, Qaani was personally present in these camps, as were “senior Palestinian officials”—presumably meaning “political” figures—from the IRGC’s Palestinian units.

The New York Times followed up by reporting—from three IRGC officers, a senior Iranian official, and a Syrian affiliated with Hizballah—that:

[A] tight circle of leaders from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas helped plan the [7 October] attack starting over a year ago, trained militants, and had advanced knowledge of it. …

Hezbollah’s top commandos … trained Hamas members in Syria and Lebanon, according to two Iranians. Paragliders trained in Lebanon, they said, while in Syria, the Hamas members were trained to raid Israeli communities and take civilians hostage. …

Over the past six months, Hezbollah created provocations meant to mislead and distract Israel along its northern border with Lebanon and in Syria so it would think the real threat was coming from those areas, according to two Iranians briefed after the attack.

Note the thoroughness of Iran’s role: planning how it would take place, misdirecting Israel down to the last, and training for the minute details on the day itself, including how to take a hostage and in particular the training Iran supplied to the paragliders, which became a symbol for the crowds that turned out on Western streets to celebrate the massacre of Jews last October.

No less a source than the Iranian media puts Qaani in Syria in late September: it can be assumed that the Quds Force leader looked in on the final preparations at the terrorist training camps before he slipped over the border to give the execution orders for “Al-Aqsa Flood” and its aftermath to the JOC in Beirut on 2 October.

Captured HAMAS terrorists disclosed in interrogations that the HAMAS leadership had proposed to carry out the massacres during Passover, in April 2023, which would have also been around the time of the annual “Quds Day”, but Iran had vetoed this and forced a delay, probably to allow the completion of a deal then being negotiated that ultimately saw the Biden administration pay the Islamic Republic $6 billion to release five American hostages. That deal was completed in mid-September 2023, three weeks before the pogrom in Israel.

Assuming the planning for “Al-Aqsa Flood” was already completed by this stage, it is notable that it did not take place in late September, during Yom Kippur, one of the most important Jewish festivals. The Jewish calendar, therefore, cannot have been the only factor in the timing. The Iranian regime’s decision to stage the pogrom on 7 October appears to have rested on a combination of factors: it was a Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah; it roughly coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 Arab war against Israel; and it was a Saturday, just as with the first day of the 1973 war, meaning many Israelis were observing Shabbos and to that extent less prepared.

Reinforcing this information, it subsequently became clear that Qaani had, as well as being in Beirut multiple times in the run-up to 7 October, been in the Lebanese capital directing the JOC continuously from 8 October until the end of the month. (Note: the day after the pogrom, HAMAS and the other IRGC factions still occupied areas of southern Israel.) Qaani left only for a few days, between 16 and 20 October, to consult with Khamenei in Tehran. This practice of in-person communication on the most sensitive matters emphasises how difficult it is to infiltrate IRGC Network communications and gain access to information about its intentions without human spies: Israel has had some success on this front; there is no evidence the CIA has.

In terms of the weaponry used by HAMAS and the other factions on 7 October, from start to finish the various systems were supplied by Iran, and their tactical use betrays methods passed on by the clerical regime. The barrage of missiles fired into Israel—under the cover of which HAMAS-led terrorists stormed the border by land, air, and sea—were supplied by Iran. As has been true for many years, and the captured documents this time around showed again, HAMAS’ entire rocket arsenal is either smuggled into the Gaza Strip by Iran or produced locally using Iranian-provided instructions and technology. The same is true of the artillery and demolition charges used to break through the defences of Israeli homes and bomb shelters, enabling the murder so many civilians that day. Even HAMAS’ small arms were obviously Iranian in origin.

The elaborate intelligence preparation HAMAS engaged in, allowing them to swiftly locate and neutralise the Israel Defence Force (IDF) positions, clearly derives from the IRGC, which is among many other things a sophisticated intelligence agency. The “home-rigged” drones dropping grenades and other low-cost methods used to destroy the defensive infrastructure along the border derive from lessons Iran has learned by participating in Russia’s war to eliminate Ukraine. The propaganda videos HAMAS disseminated after the pogrom, some of them showing scenes of slaughter filmed from drones over the concert at the Nova festival, are undisguised IRGC products and Iranian channels have worked to buttress HAMAS’ messaging across the board.

Iran as much as admitted that it designed the 7 October operation by releasing a video on 13 January 2024 showing Ansarallah, the most complete outpost of the Islamic Revolution except for Hizballah, conducting a replica assault against a mock village in Yemen, where pictures of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were shot and men dressed as Orthodox Jews were taken hostage in a manner consistent with the written instructions found on HAMAS terrorists killed during the invasion of Israel.

What is striking is how closely Iran was involved at every stage and in every component of the pogrom in Israel. Even under Kirby’s rather stringent terms, this is well beyond “broad complicity”. 7 October was an IRGC operation as much as the Marine barracks bombing or any of the other atrocities the Islamic Revolution has carried out around the world since it captured Iran in 1979.

HEARING FROM THE “AXIS OF RESISTANCE” SINCE 7 OCTOBER

Nearly a week after the pogrom, on 13 October, the late Saleh al-Aruri, the then-head of HAMAS’ “military wing” and deputy of its “political wing”—showing how meaningless these distinctions are—gave a statement to Al-Jazeera claiming that none of the Izzuddin al-Qassam Brigades operatives who stormed across the Gaza-Israel border on 7 October had targeted Jewish civilians, neither for murder nor kidnapping. According to Al-Aruri, there were some Israeli civilian casualties because the IDF had implemented its “Hannibal Directive”—this conspiracy theory that the Israelis killed themselves on 7 October has spread well-beyond Islamist militant circles—and some were caught up in the crossfire, but the bulk were killed by Gazan civilians who moved across the border after the unexpectedly “rapid collapse” of Israel’s defences. Al-Aruri adamantly repeated that it was armed Palestinian civilians who killed and abducted Israelis: this was “not at the hands of Al-Qassam fighters”.

HAMAS’ cynicism towards the Gazan population is the central feature of this war: its entire military-political strategy to save itself is constructed around maximising Palestinian civilian casualties to generate international pressure on Israel to halt its campaign. But for those who hold the absurd belief that Israel intends “genocide” in Gaza and is therefore looking for any “pretext” to engage in mass-killing, HAMAS cynically deflecting blame for the 7 October atrocities onto Gaza’s civilians must be a cause of special outrage, though they are hiding it well so far.

Regardless, for our purposes, Al-Aruri’s statement is a useful demonstration that “Resistance Axis” propaganda cannot be consumed uncritically. The IRGC units obviously lie and obfuscate in pursuit of their jihad, and it is precisely by bearing this in mind that we can glean information from these factions’ propaganda about Iran’s role in the 7 October pogrom. The official narrative is that the invasion of Israel was an exclusively Palestinian affair, which gives admissions to the contrary an evidence-against-interest weight.

Ghazi Hamad, a HAMAS spokesman, told the BBC within hours of the pogrom beginning that HAMAS “had direct backing for the attack from Iran, which pledged to ‘stand by the Palestinian fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem’.”

Hamad was the source, a few weeks later, of perhaps HAMAS’ most infamous statement since 7 October. During an interview with LBC TV in Lebanon on 24 October, Hamad did not follow Al-Aruri in denying there had been anti-civilian massacres in Israel. On the contrary, Hamad said the massacres were justified and HAMAS intends to repeat them until the Jews in Israel are destroyed:

We must remove [Israel] … We are not ashamed to say this … We will do this again and again. Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time … [W]e are proud to sacrifice martyrs … We are the victims of occupation [because of Israel’s existence]. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000—everything we do is justified.

The blatant threat to repeat 7 October was so popular that HAMAS has made it into a theme of its propaganda, in more generic format on its Telegram channels and so forth, and directly from its spokesmen, specifically Osama Hamdan, the psychopathic antisemite who “officially” represents HAMAS in Lebanon. Hamdan said in one of his statements at the end of November 2023 he had no regrets about the pogrom, adding, “I can promise a war of liberation is coming, not just another October 7”. Earlier that month, it was a Hamdan statement that put into circulation the laughable idea that HAMAS does not know where the civilian hostages are—that they are being held by “other elements”. In the early November statement, Hamdan acknowledged Iran’s support, albeit indirectly and after-the-fact, praising Hizballah’s terrorism on Israel’s northern border as “real support” for the Palestinians.

The former overall leader of HAMAS (r. 1996-2017), Khaled Meshal, who is based in Doha, found himself in an unusually combative interview with Rasha Nabil on Saudi Arabia’s Al-Arabiya channel on 19 October. Ms. Nabil challenged Meshal from, so to speak, the “pro-Arab” perspective, asking why HAMAS had acted so bestially on 7 October, since this created sympathy for Israel—or so she thought: she actually need not have worried about that, neither in the region nor in Europe—and Nabil asked how HAMAS could justify dragging Gazans into this war without consulting them.

Meshal’s interview was still in the early phase when Al-Aruri’s line was being followed, so he simply rejected the premise that HAMAS had murdered Israeli civilians, mendaciously claiming, “HAMAS does not kill civilians on purpose”, and defended HAMAS’ unilateralism by arguing that while operational details of “Al-Aqsa Flood” had to be kept secret to maintain the element of surprise, it was not a new phase of activity and took place “in the context of legitimate resistance”, so there was no need to consult other Palestinian factions or the captive civilian population in Gaza about the specifics.

More important was a later moment in the interview. Meshal demanded that Arab States do more to help HAMAS, and Nabil again challenged this presumption that others should involve themselves in a war HAMAS started without consulting them. Meshal’s response was that he was not calling for Egypt or the other Arab governments to physically engage in the war: there was no need for this, Meshal explained, because “Hizballah and Iran provided us with weapons, expertise, and technology”. What Meshal wanted was a stronger anti-Israel political position. Elsewhere in the interview, Meshal said he was “grateful” to Hizballah for “support[ing] our cause” by launching attacks into Israel from southern Lebanon that stretch IDF resources and alleviate pressure on HAMAS.

Ezzatollah Zarghami, a “former” IRGC officer and the current Iranian Minister of Tourism and Cultural Heritage, who was among the “students” who took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979, told IRIB Ofogh on 20 November about his role in providing weapons and training to HAMAS in the run-up to 7 October. HAMAS’ missiles (Fajr-3) were “our products”, said Zarghami, and it was with the “utmost pride” that Zarghami admitted that his “first mission” was a “production manager” taking these missiles to HAMAS and Hizballah. Zarghami emphasises that HAMAS is Sunni and Hizballah is Shi’a, but Iran is not restricted by sectarianism in supporting terrorists—or “the oppressed” (mostazafeen), in the nomenclature of the clerical regime. “I was inside the very same tunnels that [HAMAS] are fighting from now”, Zarghami went on. “In the tunnels, I provided training about the usage and specification of the rockets. These training courses were highly successful.”

Given the messaging imperatives in the wake of 7 October, public statements such as those from Meshal and Zarghami about the material support Iran provides HAMAS have been comparatively rare. The viral video that circulated the day after the pogrom, apparently showing Izzuddin al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Ubayda telling a crowd, “We thank the Islamic Republic of Iran who provided us with weapons, money, and other equipment. It gave us missiles to destroy Zionist fortresses, and helped us with standard anti-tank missiles”, turned out to be from December 2014. Likewise, a lot of the other statements where HAMAS officials thank Iran for “every weapon” HAMAS has and the billions of dollars Tehran has given the group transpired to be from before 7 October, though most were very recent.

An important exception was the interview given by Hassan Hoballah, the Hizballah official in charge of liaising with HAMAS and PIJ, to Egypt’s Al-Masir in the first week of January 2024. “Hizballah aids the Palestinian resistance [i.e., HAMAS and PIJ] with everything it has, with weapons and training, because we have an alliance with the Palestinian resistance on every level”, said Hoballah. Asked why “Iran and Hizballah” had not entered the fray directly in Gaza, Hoballah replied that it was a political decision: if this was visibly made into a regional war, it would “end with a regional agreement … and then the Palestinian right will be lost”.

Hoballah explained—somewhat obliquely—that what he meant is that overt Iranian intervention would obliterate the current framing of this as a war between Israel and “the Palestinian resistance”, so it was best to leave HAMAS “in the lead”, as the face of the war, because this was more likely to bring “victory”. Hoballah is not naïve about HAMAS’ capabilities: it cannot take territory, and if it does take territory it cannot hold it for long “because the enemy has immense firepower”, but “the victory of the resistance is thwarting the enemy’s plan, as happened in the 2006 Lebanon war”, which is to say HAMAS’ survival is victory. As Hoballah is constrained from spelling out, the path to such victory is international pressure stopping Israel’s military operations in Gaza.

Still, Hoballah is insistent that Hizballah has intervened: “the number of martyrs in Gaza could have been far greater were it not for Hizballah’s action. In the absence of a second front [in the north], the Israelis would … perhaps … have killed 4,000 to 5,000 [Palestinians] every day instead of 400 to 500”. And Hoballah insists that if “a complete defeat for HAMAS” becomes likely, Hizballah will make a “decisive intervention”.

Hoballah tries to have it both ways about the HAMAS and PIJ attacks on Israel from southern Lebanon, saying Hizballah stays out of it and is not responsible for these groups, while adding: “we are in control of the front”. Hoballah was clearer about the military training IRGC/Hizballah has given to HAMAS and PIJ: “Of course, they received training in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. It is no secret that Iran trained them in [the use of] all the weapons they employ. This [fact] is now known to all.”

What is interesting—and, as will be seen below, important—is that after the Hoballah interview was published, the Hizballah media department flatly denied that Hoballah had spoken to Al-Masir at all, despite the photograph of Hoballah with the outlet’s editors. Hoballah is too senior an official to have spoken to Al-Masir without getting clearance from the IRGC/Hizballah hierarchy, and the IRGC cannot have seriously expected people to believe Al-Masir fabricated the interview. More to the point, it is unlikely the IRGC wanted people to believe the interview was fabricated. The most likely explanation for this slightly strange coda is that the IRGC wanted public recognition for what it had done to bring about 7 October and its role underwriting the Islamist militants fighting Israel in Gaza since then, but wanted “official” distance from the consequences of this.

Alongside the information about Iran’s role in 7 October provided in public statements from the “Resistance Axis”, there is the testimony of its operatives in captivity. For example, Basel Mahadi, a PIJ platoon commander, was arrested in Gaza by the IDF in mid-December and on 16 January excerpts from his interrogation video were released. Mahadi went from Gaza to Egypt, then to Syria and from there to Lebanon for two weeks, we can assume being sheltered and trained by IRGC/Hizballah, before moving back into Syria and being flown to Iran to join the hundreds of other terrorists training in the Quds Force camps in the period immediately preceding the pogrom. Mahadi’s PIJ comrades were Lebanese and Syrian, as well as Gazan. Along with fitness training, Mahadi was given instruction on “different types of weapons”, including sniper techniques. The instructors were “Iranian soldiers, they were wearing uniforms”, Mahadi notes.

In Qatar on 9 January, at a conference of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, founded in 2004 by the late Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, HAMAS’ overall leader Ismail Haniyeh gave a speech that did not specifically mention Iran, but made clear his and HAMAS’ ideological vision was in line with the clerical regime’s transnational Islamism, not Palestinian nationalism:

This is the battle for Jerusalem and the Aqsa Mosque, and not the battle of the Palestinian people, or Gaza, or the people in Gaza. … What was October 7 if not a front line trench for an offensive by our umma [Islamic community]? We must not let this moment slip away. … Our umma and our Islamic scholars have very few historic moments like this. … We should hold on to the victory that took place on October 7 and build upon it.

Haniyeh went on to encourage Muslims to at least get involved in “financial jihad”. Haniyeh conceded that the “humanitarian issue” was of “immense importance”, given what HAMAS had dragged Gaza into, and people might be tempted to send money to Palestinian civilians, but he felt civilian needs were secondary to “waging jihad with one’s life and one’s money”.

In a 28 October interview on the “Hello, Good Morning” (Salam, Sobh Bekheir) show on Iran’s Channel 3 TV, Mohsen Rafighdoost, a “former” IRGC officer and previous Minister of Revolutionary Guards (a post abolished in 1989), made a curious statement. “The military option of all the superpowers against Iran will not work”, said Rafighdoost. “Mostly, this is because we have weapons that even America does not, but that is not all. In our region, we are holding hostages from the powers that might attack us—and we can destroy those hostages within half-an-hour or an hour. God willing, the time will come and we will get the chance to do this” [italics added].

This caused a stir, since it looked like a slip acknowledging that the hostages taken on 7 October were held by the IRGC. Rafighdoost did not quite go as far as Hoballah in denying he had said anything—he was on camera, so it was more difficult—but Rafighdoost did issue an ostensible clarification: “What I mean by the hostages we have in the region is, firstly, the Zionist regime itself, which will be destroyed if our country is attacked, and, secondly, the American military bases” in Iraq and Syria. Maybe.

After the IRGC spokesman, Ramazan Sharif, said on 27 December that the 7 October pogrom was part of Iran’s “revenge” for the killing of Qassem Sulaymani, something more like the Hoballah model was adopted. A public statement was quickly put out under HAMAS’ name to deny Sharif’s remarks. It is possible Sharif made a mistake in his admission. More likely, this was a standard two-track message: Iran wanted to gloat about what it had done, and to “officially” retain “deniability”.

CONCLUSION

The nature of HAMAS, PIJ, DFLP, and PFLP as components of the IRGC Network should have made it obvious, without a single piece of specific information about how the 7 October massacres in Israel occurred, that Iran was responsible. As it happens, however, there is a wealth of information uncovered in the last three months pointing the same way. The formation of the Joint Operations Chamber (JOC) last summer, the planning meetings headed by the IRGC for the pogrom beginning in August 2023, the specialised combat training in Iran itself for hundreds of Palestinian terrorists in the weeks before 7 October, the selection of the timing, the provision of weapons, the intelligence training to deceive Israel, the relentless flow of money, the IRGC Quds Force chief giving the final orders to the JOC in Beirut on 2 October, then returning on 8 October to personally oversee the regionwide response from Lebanon to Yemen, and the statements—some in public, some from “Resistance Axis” captives—touching on the various elements of this: all of it shows the direct, intricate control Iran had over every aspect at every stage of the preparation and execution of the atrocities on that awful Saturday morning.