Iranian security officials helped the Palestinina terror group Hamas plan its Saturday sneak attack on Israel — and gave the final go-ahead at a meeting last Monday in Beirut, an explosive new report says.
Officers from Iran’s infamous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been working with the Gaza Strip-based terrorist organization since August to plan the Oct. 7 attack, which sent thousands of rockets and groups of armed gunmen over the fortified Israeli border, killing more than 700, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
The attack was the most serious breach of the Jewish state since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Iranian officers — as well as reps from Iran-backed militant groups including Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — refined tactical and strategic plans for the assault during several meetings in Beirut, according to the Journal, which cited senior members of both terrorist groups.
It’s a no-brainer that Iran helped plan the bloody mayhem, some experts 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, to the outlet.
“Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, does not single-handedly make decisions to engage in war without prior explicit agreement from Iran.”
The overall plan is to eventually wage active war with Israel on all fronts to finally close in on it with the help of Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the north and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, said the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members and an Iranian official to the Journal.
US officials have not confirmed the report.
“We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday on CNN.
Another US official buttressed Blinken’s statement when they said that the US doesn’t “have any information at this time to corroborate this account.”
If Iran’s direct involvement is proven, it could rachet tensions even higher in the already explosive region.
Although the Iranian delegation at the United Nations in New York did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, praised the attacks in a post on X, the app formerly known as Twitter.
Khamenei wrote, “Zionist regime will be eradicated at the hands of the Palestinian people and the Resistance forces throughout the region.”
A senior Hamas official said the group planned the attack all by itself.
“This is a Palestinian and Hamas decision,” he said.
The attacks — which began in earnest Saturday morning at about 6:30 a.m. — have already killed more than 1,100 people on both sides and wounded thousands more.
Israel’s cabinet swiftly invoked Article 40 Aleph, marking the nation’s first formally declared war since 1973.
On Sunday, Minister Benjamin Netanyahu braced the Jewish state for a “long and difficult war” while his administration retaliated for the surprise attack.1427
“The war was forced upon us by a murderous attack by Hamas. The first phase ends in these hours by destroying most of the enemy forces that have penetrated our territory,” Netanyahu declared.
“We will restore security to the citizens of Israel, and we will win.”
