Hamas documents reveal real reason for Oct. 7 attack

The Hamas terror organization launched its deadly invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in order to foil a possible peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, May 17, citing internal Hamas documents recovered by the Israeli military.

According to Saturday’s report, the IDF discovered records from a high-level meeting of Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip on Oct. 2, 2023, during which Yahya Sinwar, the late chief of Hamas forces in Gaza, warned that Riyadh and Jerusalem were nearing a normalization agreement.

“There is no doubt that the Saudi-Zionist normalization agreement is progressing significantly,” the Journal quoted Sinwar as saying, citing the Hamas records that the Journal said it has reviewed.

Saudi Arabia’s inclusion in the Abraham Accords, Sinwar warned other Hamas officials, would “open the door for the majority of Arab and Islamic countries to follow the same path.”

Hamas had already been planning a large-scale invasion of southwestern Israel for two years at the time of the meeting.

Sinwar, according to the records cited in Saturday’s report, successively lobbied to carry out the invasion just five days later in order to “to bring about a major move or a strategic shift in the paths and balances of the region with regard to the Palestinian cause.”

The Hamas leader, who was killed by Israeli forces while hiding in a partially demolished building in southern Gaza last year, predicted that other Iranian proxy groups would join in the war against Israel once Hamas invaded.

The terror group declined to confirm or deny the document’s authenticity.

A second internal Hamas document reviewed by the Journal, this one dating back to September 2023, a month before the invasion, also highlights the terror group’s concerns over a possible deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, leading Hamas’ leadership to back plans to carry out additional terror attacks against Israeli targets in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria in the hopes of derailing normalization talks.

A year earlier, in August 2022, a memo from a meeting of Hamas leaders in Gaza hinted at the terror group’s increasing willingness to engage in attacks of unprecedented scale to torpedo a possible Israel-Saudi deal.

“It has become the duty of the movement to reposition itself to … preserve the survival of the Palestinian cause in the face of the broad wave of normalization by Arab countries, which aims primarily to liquidate the Palestinian cause,” the memo read.

The Journal also reported that, according to senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials, Iran explicitly approved the October 7th invasion.

A second meeting, held on the same day as the October 2nd gathering of Hamas leaders in Gaza, took place in Beirut, bringing together Hamas and Hezbollah representatives alongside Iranian officials.

According to some Hamas and Hezbollah officials cited in the report, Iranian officials present at the Beirut event gave a green light to Hamas’ attack.

However, other terrorist officials denied the claim, stating that Hamas was tight-lipped about the attack, limiting information regarding the planned invasion to a small cadre of the Islamist group’s top leadership.

Intelligence officials from multiple countries have said, according to the report, that Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah have been in talks since the summer of 2021 to organize a massive, multi-front attack on Israel.

However, officials from Israeli intelligence agencies, as well as from Iranian-aligned terror groups, claimed that both Iran and Hezbollah sought to avoid a direct military confrontation with the Jewish state, arguing that it was Hamas alone that planned the invasion.