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| Hezbollah leader Nasrallah and Hamas leader Haniyeh meeting in Lebanon in April |
DUBAI—Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War—those people said.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 Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said....Leading the effort to wrangle Iran’s foreign proxies under a unified command has been Ismail Qaani, the leader of the IRGC’s international military arm, the Quds Force.Qaani launched coordination among several militias surrounding Israel in April during a meeting in Lebanon, The Wall Street Journal has reported, where Hamas began working more closely with other groups such as Hezbollah for the first time.Around that time, Palestinian groups staged a rare set of limited strikes on Israel from Lebanon and Gaza, under the direction of Iran, said the Iranian official. “It was a roaring success,” the official said.Iran has long backed Hamas but, as a Sunni Muslim group, it had been an outsider among Tehran’s Shia proxies until recent months, when cooperation among the groups accelerated.Representatives of these groups have met with Quds Force leaders at least biweekly in Lebanon since August to discuss this weekend’s attack on Israel and what happens next, they said. Qaani has attended some of those meetings along with Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, Islamic Jihad leader al-Nakhalah, and Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s military chief, the militant-group members said.Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian attended at least two of the meetings, they 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 Hezbollah in Lebanon, does not single-handedly make decisions to engage in war without prior explicit agreement from Iran.”The Palestinian and Lebanese militias’ ability to coordinate with Iran will be tested in the coming days as Israel’s response comes into focus.Egypt, which is trying to mediate in the conflict, has warned Israeli officials that a ground invasion into Gaza would trigger a military response from Hezbollah, opening up a second battlefront, people familiar with the matter said. Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire briefly on Sunday.
Of course Iran was behind this coordinated attack, the worst attack on Israeli civilians since Nazi Germany.
The attack required excellent intelligence, new weapons and methods like drones and paragliders, and an exceptional ability to keep the planning - which in the end involved thousands of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members - hidden from Israeli intelligence. There is no way Gaza groups could have done this on their own.
It is also obvious this has been planned for months. The recent riots at the Gaza border are seen now as being likely test runs to see how quickly the IDF responds to breaches in the fence, and from there it can be calculated how many simultaneous breaches would overwhelm its defenses.
The Gaza workers who have been allowed to work in Israel for the past several months were also likely employed as intelligence agents, taking note of the defenses (or lack thereof) in the kibbutzim and villages surrounding the Gaza Strip.
Combine this with the history of Iran attacking Israel by proxy, both from Lebanon and from Gaza, while staying above the fray with plausible deniability. But in the end, Iran is ready to sacrifice every last Palestinian (and Lebanese) to weaken Israel.
The only way to break the cycle of endless Gaza campaigns is not only to eliminate major Gaza terror leaders but to - clandestinely - go after Iranian IRGC and other leaders who have been hatching these plans, as well as the Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders who live outside Gaza.
We have seen how terror leaders are afraid for their own lives while they wax poetic on the beauty of martyrdom - for those who are under them. Only a realistic threat against the leaders will dampen their enthusiasm for continuously starting these terror campaigns.
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