Secret documents reported by NY Times indicate that Iran, Hezbollah knew of Oct. 7 Hamas attack plan

Hamas had been trying for months to get Iran to join with it in its October 7, 2023 attack against Israel, according to a New York Times report on Saturday based on documents seized by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza last January. 

“Minutes of Hamas’s secret meetings, seized by the Israeli military and obtained by The New York Times, provide a detailed record of the planning for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, as well as Mr. Sinwar’s determination to persuade Hamas’s allies, Iran and Hezbollah, to join the assault or at least commit to a broader fight with Israel if Hamas staged a surprise cross-border raid,” reported The Times. 

For more than two years, Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, had been plotting with his top commanders. They planned for this attack to be "the most devastating and destabilizing attack on Israel in the militant group’s four-decade history," according to The Times. 

The report says that the deputy head of Hamas’s political bureau, Khalil al-Hayya, had informed senior Iranian commander Mohammed Said Izadi of the terrorist plot in Lebanon in July 2023, according to the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS). 

While the Iranians have continued to deny any involvement in the attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel, wounded thousands more, and resulted in 251 people being taken hostage into the tunnels of Gaza, transcripts of the Hamas leadership meetings show that al-Hayya asked Izadi to strike sensitive sites in Israel in “the first hour” of the attack.

The recordings indicate that Izadi said that Iran and Hezbollah went along with the attack in principle, but they wanted more time “to prepare the environment.”

But Hamas decided to act on its own, according to the report, over concern for Israel’s laser defense system, “Israel’s election of a right-wing government with growing Israeli presence on the Temple Mount, which ‘can’t make us be patient,’” growing divisions in Israel over issues such as the judicial reform push, and finally the desire to stop any normalization discussions between Saudi Arabia and Israel, according to JNS. 

The Times reports that the recordings were discovered on a computer found by Israeli troops in a Hamas command center built underground in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza.