Following searches by the Israeli army in Gaza, new evidence has come to light. The IDF discovered documents containing information on the financial and military support provided to Hamas by Iran prior to the October 7th attacks.
Specifically, the IDF provided The Wall Street Journal with a series of notes and letters from meetings of the Hamas leadership. This comes as Israel weighs a retaliatory strike against Iran after Tehran launched a barrage of rockets at Israel this month.
Hamas leader Sinwar’s secret negotiations
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has been negotiating with Iran to fund a large-scale, planned attack on Israel as early as 2021, according to documents obtained by the newspaper.
In one of the letters, written in Arabic, Iran says it has allocated $10 million to Hamas’ armed wing. A few weeks later, Sinwar asked Iran for $500 million in installments of $20 million a month for about two years.
Map of Israel’s vulnerabilities found
According to the documents found on the Hamas computer and given to the The Wall Street Journal, Hamas’ plans were more ambitious than what occurred on October 7th.
The original plan, accompanied by 3,100 aerial photographs covering 90 percent of Israeli territory, was to assess the country’s vulnerabilities with ambitions for attacks on airports and other critical infrastructure, as well as a takeover of the Israeli Knesset.
What was included in the plans between Hamas and Iran?
Other targets included a series of towers in Tel Aviv near the Israeli Defense Ministry headquarters, emulating the kind of symbolism that came with destroying the World Trade Center on 9/11, the plan said.
The plans also suggested the use of horses and chariots to transport Hamas fighters within Israel. There was a slide presentation with an image of two horses and a chariot next to an image of an Egyptian pharaoh riding in a chariot with a bow and arrow.
During the October 7th attack, Hamas militants swept across Israel on motorcycles, trucks, and hang gliders. Hamas killed 1,200 people, including women and children. About 250 others were abducted.
Meetings between Hamas and Iran started in 2019
Some of the records released by the Israeli military from 2019 describe a Hamas delegation’s trip to Iran for meetings with leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Qasem Soleimani, then the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ overseas operations unit, the Quds Force.
Soleimani, who was killed a year later in a US air strike in Iraq, told the Hamas delegation that they had few military allies in the region. Turkey, which hosted some Hamas officials, was sympathetic, he said, but could not provide “a single bullet.”
“The reality is that there is no one but Iran,” Soleimani said.
