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Israeli documents undermine claim Iran and Hezbollah helped plan 7 October attack

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This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Hamas’ armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades hold a Palestinian flag as they destroy a tank of Israeli forces in Gaza City, Gaza on October 07, 2023. [Hani Alshaer – Anadolu Agency]

Secret Hamas documents summarised by the Israeli site OSINT613 appear to undermine one of Israel’s central narratives about 7 October: that the attack was a closely coordinated operation planned with Iran and Hezbollah.

The documents, first revealed by Israel Army Radio correspondent Doron Kadosh and analysed by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, were presented by Israeli sources as evidence of years of contact between Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. However, the same material indicates that neither Hezbollah nor Iran was informed in advance of the timing or operational launch of the 7 October attack. 

According to the Israeli site OSINT613, Hamas had spent years seeking a broader multi-front confrontation with Israel and repeatedly tried to persuade Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah to join a simultaneous attack from Lebanon. Hamas also sought support from Iran, while internal documents described intelligence sharing and strategic discussions involving Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards during earlier rounds of fighting. 

Yet the documents point to a major gap between Hamas’s expectations and the reality on 7 October. OSINT613 reported that, immediately after the attack began at 6:29am, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent an urgent message to Nasrallah apologising for not informing him in advance and asking Hezbollah to intervene through rocket fire and a major ground offensive. Sinwar’s apology for the lack of prior notice is seen as a strong indication that Hezbollah was not operationally informed before the attack was launched. 

The requested ground offensive never came. Hezbollah later opened a northern front with rockets, missiles and drones, but it did not send its Radwan Force into the Galilee as Hamas had expected. According to the Israeli account, this failure to launch a simultaneous northern assault fundamentally changed the scale of the conflict and prevented a wider coordinated attack on northern Israel. 

The Israeli report also indicate that Hamas did not expect Iran to enter the war directly. Instead, it envisaged Hezbollah and other Iran-aligned groups opening additional fronts while Tehran remained in the background. This detail complicates Israeli claims that Iran directly managed or jointly executed the 7 October operation. 

READ: Israel’s 7 October narrative under fresh scrutiny after army accused of deleting footage

The documents do show that Hamas had sought a wider regional war. In 2019, Ismail Haniyeh reportedly wrote to Nasrallah seeking closer military coordination, while a similar message was sent to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. During Israel’s 2021 assault on Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards reportedly established a joint intelligence operations room in Beirut, with Hezbollah providing intelligence on Israeli troop movements, air operations and surveillance. 

However, the most important revelations undermines the Israeli claims that 7 October attack was a tightly coordinated regional operation. Hamas appears to have believed that Hezbollah would join a future “great strategic battle”, but internal Hamas assessments also warned that Hezbollah remained hesitant about entering a full-scale war with Israel. OSINT613 reported that Hamas intelligence documents described Hezbollah as facing a “psychological barrier”, an apparent reference to its hesitancy after the 2006 Lebanon war. 

Nasrallah’s own reported response to Hamas’s proposal also suggests hesitation. According to the documents, he questioned what Hamas’s strategic objective would be and asked whether the goal was to force Israel’s collapse or merely prevent incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque. Hamas reportedly acknowledged that it had not fully defined its objectives. 

Analysts have argued that Israel’s insistence on linking Iran directly to the 7 October attack served a wider political purpose: to internationalise the assault on Gaza, frame the war as part of a broader confrontation with Tehran and push Washington towards a more aggressive regional posture. Israeli officials repeatedly invoked Iran and its allies even when the connection was out of context, reflecting a long-standing Israeli effort to draw the US into direct confrontation with the Islamic Republic. 

The Israeli-sourced documents now appear to undercut that propaganda line. While they show that Hamas maintained contacts with Iran and Hezbollah, they also suggest that neither Tehran nor Hezbollah had prior operational knowledge of the 7 October attack.

READ: Why Israel has kept peddling the false narrative of Iran involvement in the October attack

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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