Israel says documents found in Gaza show Hamas attack planning and ties to Iran

Papers submitted to the Journal indicate that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was already negotiating with Iran in 2021 to finance a planned major attack on Israel.

In one of the letters, written in Arabic, Iran said it had provided $10 million to Hamas’ armed wing. A few weeks later, Sinwar asks Iran for $500 million, divided into $20 million a month for about two years.

Other documents were leaked to various media outlets. The officials who provided the documents declined to say why they were releasing them now.

The Wall Street Journal has not independently reviewed the documents. The Israeli military said it discovered most of them on January 31 in an underground bunker in the city of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip, Sinwar’s hometown.

Hamas did not respond to a request for comment.

Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations said in a statement that Hamas acknowledged that its armed wing planned and carried out the Oct. 7 attacks without even its Doha-based political officials knowing.

Any claim that attempts to link the attacks “in part or entirely to Iran or Hezbollah” lacks credibility and comes from forged documents, the mission said.

The Israeli military also shared an undated presentation it said it found on a Hamas computer near Gaza City on November 10, which described Hamas’s plans for an attack on Israel that was more ambitious than what ultimately happened.

It detailed the collection of 3,100 aerial images covering 90% of Israel to assess the country’s vulnerability, with plans for simultaneous attacks on airports and other critical infrastructure, as well as a takeover of Israel’s legislature in Jerusalem.

Other targets would be a series of towers in Tel Aviv near the Israeli Defense Ministry headquarters, aimed at the kind of symbolism that accompanied the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, the plan says.

The plans also included the idea of ​​moving Hamas fighters around Israel using horses and chariots, and included a slideshow with an image of two horses and a chariot, as well as an image of an Egyptian pharaoh riding in a chariot with a bow and arrow.

In the actual attack on October 7, Hamas fighters advanced into Israel on motorcycles, pickup trucks and paragliders. Hamas and other militants killed 1,200 people, including women and children, and kidnapped around 250 others.

The attack led to the current conflict in Gaza, where nearly 42,000 people have been killed, most of them civilians, according to Palestinian health authorities. The numbers do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.

Other undated letters from Hamas to Iran, provided by the Israeli military, suggest that both sides are deepening their cooperation and organizing joint military, intelligence and logistical plans for future conflicts with Israel.

The letters suggest working together to develop better drone, air defense and communications systems.

Together, “we will uproot this monstrous entity and together change the face of the region,” Sinwar wrote in a letter to the head of the Quds Force, an arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In recent weeks, Israel has shifted its focus to its northern border, where Hezbollah, a key ally of Iran, began firing rockets into Israel a day after Hamas led attacks on October 7.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced a painful reaction.

Some 2019 files provided by the Israeli military describe how a Hamas delegation traveled to Iran to meet leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Qassem Soleimani, then head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations unit, the Quds Force.

“The reality,” Soleimani said, “is that there is no one but Iran.”