Did Iran help plan Hamas attack? U.S. intel not saying

FPI / October 15, 2023

Geostrategy-Direct

Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had since August worked with the Hamas terror organization to devise the Oct. 7 air, land, and sea incursions into Israel, the most significant breach of the Jewish State’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, senior members of Hamas and Hizbullah said, according to an Oct. 8 report by the Wall Street Journal.

“Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hizbullah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon,” the report said.

Geostrategy-Direct.com reported on August 1, 2023: "Security officials from Iran and its terror proxy Hamas held a closed-door meeting to strategize on optimal responses to deepening social upheaval in Israel as leftists in the Jewish State protest the conservative Netanyahu government’s overhaul of the judicial system."

Despite these reports and the widespread consensus on Iran's involvement by regional analysts, U.S. intelligence agencies responded that they have not seen "evidence" of a coordinated operation.

“We know that there were meetings in Syria and in Lebanon with other leaders of the terror armies that surround Israel so obviously it’s easy to understand that they tried to coordinate. The proxies of Iran in our region, they tried to be coordinated as much as possible with Iran,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, said on Oct. 8.

Human Events editor Jack Posobiec, a former Naval intelligence officer, said on social media: “We had no intel that Hamas was about to attack but we have intel Iran was definitely behind the attack? Make it make sense.”

The Biden Administration, which has been long negotiating for a new Iran nuclear deal and having just approved the unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian assets, has not indicated Iran was involved.

In an interview with CNN that aired on Oct. 8, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”

Related: Iran, proxies strategize on how best to exploit internal upheaval by Left in Israel, August 1, 2023

Iran's mission to the United Nations said on Oct. 8 that Teheran was not involved in one of the bloodiest attacks in Israel's history when Islamist group Hamas killed more than 1,000 Israelis and abducted over 150 more.

"The resolute measures taken by Palestine constitute a wholly legitimate defense against seven decades of oppressive occupation and heinous crimes committed by the illegitimate Zionist regime," Iran's UN mission said in statement.

Mahmoud Mirdawi, a senior Hamas official, claimed the Gaza Strip group planned the attacks on its own. “This is a Palestinian and Hamas decision,” he said.

“An attack of such scope could only have happened after months of planning and would not have happened without coordination with Iran,” said Lina Khatib, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London. “Hamas, like Hizbullah in Lebanon, does not single-handedly make decisions to engage in war without prior explicit agreement from Iran.”

A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hizbullah members, according to the Journal’s report.

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