Looks like another attempt to 'justify' continued attacks on Lebanon and Iran
Hamas tried to persuade Iran and Hezbollah to join October 7 attack on Israel, New York Times reports
Hamas plotted the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel for more than two years and tried to persuade Iran and Hezbollah to participate, a report in The New York Times has claimed, citing what it said were minutes of secret Hamas meetings found on a computer and seized by the Israeli military in Gaza in January.
According to the Times, whose claims have been vigorously denied by Iran and Hezbollah, Hamas had been avoiding major escalations with Israel since 2021 to lull its leaders into a false sense of security and initially planned to attack in the fall of 2022, but delayed its move as it tried to persuade Iran and Hezbollah to take part.
The Times cites the minutes as showing that a top Hamas official met senior Iranian commander Mohammed Said Izadi, who was based in Lebanon in July 2023, to request help striking sensitive Israeli sites, and Izadi is said to have responded that Iran and Hezbollah were supportive in principle, but needed more time to “prepare the environment.”
Iran’s Mission to the United Nations has denied the claims and suggested the minutes cited by the Times were fabricated.
In a statement to CNN, it said: “While Doha-stationed Hamas officials have themselves stated that they, too, had no prior knowledge of the operation and that all the planning, decision-making, and directing were solely executed by Hamas’s military wing based in Gaza, any claim attempting to link it to Iran or Hezbollah – either partially or wholly – is devoid of credence and comes from fabricated documents.”
A Hezbollah spokesperson told CNN on Saturday: “As the martyred secretary general of Hezbollah (Hassan Nasrallah) said, Hezbollah did not know about the toufan Al Aqsa operation executed by Hamas on the 7th of October.”
CNN has also reached out to Hamas and the Israeli military and Israeli prime minister’s office for comment. The Israeli military declined to comment to The New York Times, while neither Hamas nor Hezbollah responded to the newspaper’s requests for comment.
This is probably fabricated since this seems much more likely
Two and a half years later (after 2021 clashes), Sinwar authorized the start of Operation Al Aqsa Flood, the single deadliest attack inside Israel in history.
Hamas officials told me that for strategic reasons they timed the attacks to coincide with Shemini Atzeret, the final day of the Sukkot thanksgiving holiday, but more broadly to exploit mounting divisions within Israeli society and the deepening unpopularity of Netanyahu within Israel. On a tactical level, they engaged in extensive monitoring of the Israeli military facilities along what is referred to as the “Gaza envelope” and identified vulnerabilities in surveillance systems and perimeter defenses.
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/on-the-record-with-hamas/
Netanyahu didn't come back into power until December 2022, so this notion they initially planned to attack in Fall 2022 doesn't make sense.
There was no lull in 2022 either, in fact it was the deadliest year since 2014
NY Times gladly posts Israeli propaganda without fact checking (and even manufactures their own fake evidence). And CNN dutifully repeats it. Spreading disinformation to manufacture consent for the ongoing war on Lebanon and the upcoming retaliatory attack on Iran.
