More Evidence Iran Was Behind the 7 October 2023 Massacre in Israel
A few days after the pogrom in Israel on 7 October 2023, I wrote that Iran was behind it. We had some specifics even at that early stage about exactly how Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) had devised the massacre, but my main point was that none of this was necessary. The nature of HAMAS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the other terrorist elements that invaded Israel—integrated components of the IRGC Network one and all—meant that responsibility lay in Tehran.
Still, as the extent of Iran’s responsibility continued to be debated, not always in bad faith, three months later I wrote a longer article bringing together what was by then a vast tranche of evidence giving us quite a detailed picture of how the IRGC had orchestrated the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. As I summarised in the conclusion:
The formation of the Joint Operations Chamber (JOC) [in the] summer [of 2023], 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.
Fourteen months on, even more evidence has come to light about the Iranian responsibility for 7 October from internal HAMAS documents captured in Gaza.
YAHYA SINWAR AND IRAN
The road to the Simchat Torah Pogrom began almost exactly twelve years earlier, in October 2011, when Israel released Yahya Sinwar in the exchange for Gilad Shalit. Sinwar, who had been in prison since 1988 and had his life saved by Israel removing a brain tumour in 2004, became the effective leader of HAMAS in the Gaza Strip soon after this.
Sinwar was imprisoned for orchestrating the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers, and murdering four Palestinian civilians he accused of being “collaborators”, three of them with his bare hands, choking and suffocating them. Among the Israeli hostages taken on 7 October were the Bibas family: nine-month-old Kfir, four-year-old Ariel, their mother Shiri, and father Yarden. HAMAS’s decision shortly afterwards to strangle the two babies to death and slaughter Shiri is less surprising once one knows Sinwar’s background.
The second Gaza war in November 2012 made clear that HAMAS in the Strip, already dominated by Sinwar, operated within the IRGC Network, and all ambiguity was removed shortly afterwards when the “Political Bureau” set aside its gambit over Syria. HAMAS’s leadership was thoroughly purged, all the key military commanders around Sinwar were known for their closeness to the IRGC, and Sinwar was formally proclaimed Leader in early 2017. Sinwar was not secretive about his ideological allegiance to Iran, nor HAMAS’s wholesale material dependence on the IRGC. By the time of the fourth Gaza war in May 2021, HAMAS fought virtually undisguised as a front in the IRGC’s jihad against Israel.
In the aftermath of the 2021 round, Sinwar and his deputies became convinced a final solution was possible and began to speak of an apocalyptic showdown to would destroy Israel, what they called “the Last Promise” (al-Wa’d al-Akhir)—interestingly, a name used years earlier by a jihadi-Salafist publication in Gaza. Conferences were held where HAMAS went into demented detail about the zones of command and distribution of properties in Israel after the State was conquered. This strategic concept became the October 2023 HAMAS invasion of Israel.
WHAT’S NEW
Captured documents show Sinwar and five other HAMAS officials signed letters in June 2021, right after the war with Israel, to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and IRGC Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani, as well as one a month later to Mohammad Said Izadi, the head of the IRGC’s “Palestinian Office” that manages HAMAS and the IRGC’s other Palestinian assets. Sinwar et al. informed Iran’s leaders that HAMAS had a plan to destroy Israel within two years, and asked for additional funding, plus training for 12,000 HAMAS fighters, to accomplish this. The letter promised “not waste a minute or a penny unless it takes us toward achieving this sacred goal”.
Whether the IRGC went as high as the $500 million HAMAS asked for (to be paid in instalments), we do not know—Tehran’s replies are not in the cache—but there is little reason to think the Iranians refused totally. And if Iran did send extra cash, it cannot have been in any doubt what it was being used for: the IRGC has exercised increasingly tight control over HAMAS’s spending in Gaza since Sinwar took over.
Another set of captured documents discloses in considerable detail HAMAS’s internal deliberations leading up to 7 October 2023. The common theme is HAMAS keeping Iran abreast of developments for its “big project” and making changes to the plan according to IRGC advice. Sinwar laid the groundwork for the pogrom with a January 2022 order to avoid clashes with Israel to “keep the enemy convinced that HAMAS in Gaza wants calm”. Sinwar pitched for initiating the attack in the autumn of 2022, but Tehran put the brakes on. In July 2023, Sinwar’s deputy, Khalil al-Hayya, went to Lebanon to present the plan and new proposed date—25 September 2023, during Yom Kippur—to Izadi, who approved the plan, while again delaying its execution “to prepare the environment”.
As has previously been reported, the IRGC ultimately settled on 7 October for a combination of reasons, religious and diplomatic, then spent the months beforehand, inter alia, training specialised HAMAS and PIJ teams within Iran, and setting up the JOC to coordinate the roles the various IRGC units, particularly Hizballah in Lebanon and Ansarallah in Yemen, would play after the massacre began.
The documents contain confirmation that there was no split between HAMAS’s “military wing” in Gaza and its “political wing” in Qatar over “Al-Aqsa Flood”. Ismail Haniyeh, the HAMAS “political chief” and a supposed “moderate”, was not only fully briefed with the most sensitive details at every stage in the run-up to the pogrom in Israel. Haniyeh was involved in the coordination from no later than July 2022, when Izadi arranged for Haniyeh to meet Hizballah’s late leader Hassan Nasrallah, and Haniyeh reported back to Sinwar. Haniyeh met Ayatollah Khamenei directly in June 2023, and during the trip IRGC chief Hossein Salami expressed his optimism about the “signs” HAMAS had formulated a way “of removing Israel from the map”.
A final note: the documents do not sustain the idea that Iran “hung HAMAS out to dry”. In all the IRGC/HAMAS tactical discussions, there is no expectation the Iranians would intervene directly. On the contrary, from mid-2022, when HAMAS leaders spoke of the “Resistance Axis” joining their assault on Israel, it was specified “excluding Iran”. Deniability is, after all, the whole point of the structure of the IRGC Network: the façade of independent “proxies” lets the Islamic Revolution carry out terrorism without incurring the consequences in Iran. The Resistance Axis answered HAMAS’s call. Ansarallah’s attacks on Israel and piratical campaign are ongoing, and Hizballah joined the war on 8 October 2023, inflicting terrible costs, until Israel’s devastating response—the cascade effects of which reined-in the IRGC’s Iraqi militias and brought down Bashar al-Asad in Syria. The IRGC Network has not done more in Gaza because it cannot, not because it was unwilling. The lesson in all this is that the Iranian Revolution can be thwarted when there is the will to do so.