The deceptions reach back over years to make it appear that Hamas wanted quiet with Israel.
Hamas spent more than a year planning its historic assault on Israel, following battle plans built on open-source materials and high-level intelligence, Israeli intelligence officers told a small group of journalists this week.The sophistication of the attack, and the growing evidence of long-term, strategic planning by Hamas, sheds new light on the reach of the group’s intelligence apparatus and the complacency of Israel’s vaunted security state.For years, in public statements and private diplomacy, Hamas had claimed that it was more interested in building Gaza economically than in renewing a conflict with Israel.[Head of IDF intelligence Aharon] Haliva said in September 2022 that although Hamas was involved in military activities, “we see that the processes being undertaken vis-à-vis Israel to stabilize the economy and to allow entry to laborers have potential for bringing years of quiet.”Hamas had largely refrained from firing rockets at Israel after 2021. In May, it remained on the sidelines as Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group in Gaza, engaged in a short-lived conflict with Israel.Hamas officials even provided Israel with intelligence on PIJ to reinforce the impression that they were interested in collaboration, an Israeli security official told The Post on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the news media.There were plans to discuss the issue again after Oct. 7, the holiday of Simchat Torah, according to the Kan report.Also in recent months, large demonstrations were staged at the fence in Gaza to get the IDF used to the sight of crowds at the border, and, more broadly, “to lull Israel into complacency,” said Miri Eisin, a former senior IDF intelligence officer.Eisin said that Israel’s security apparatus, and many of Israel’s allies, were more concerned with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group to the north that in 2018 declared plans to conquer the Galilee region.
The British in World War II were perhaps the masters of deception in war, creating elaborate ruses to fool Germany as to the location of invasions . Egypt in 1973 used many months of fake deployments and other deceptions to ensure that Israel wouldn't mobilize ahead of the Yom Kippur War.
But a deception that unrolled over the course of years to plan a single devastating attack? I am not aware of this ever happening before.
The level of planning and detail shows not only how much Hamas hates Jews, but also how little it cares about its own people. After all, the deception included improving Gaza's economy, securing jobs for Gazans in Israel, keeping things quiet to increase imports and exports from Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans, probably more, benefited from the improved economy. A key part of the deception was to fool Israel into thinking that Hamas actually cared about the people it rules.
Another component was not just to fool Israel but to fool the world. Hamas' new political document of 2017, where they claimed not to be antisemitic, may easily have been a part of this deception as well. And even before that, in 2011, Hamas fooled much of the world into believing that they accepted a two state solution.
Their elaborate duplicity to make themselves appear pragmatic and moderate over more than a decade set the stage for October 7.
Trickery is part of Hamas' political DNA. And it continues today, with the bogus statistics of civilians killed in Gaza and denials of atrocities on October 7, designed to give antisemites "evidence" that it is Israel that is lying, not Hamas.
Who says that we now know the extent of the deception? Once we truly understand how elaborate this deceit is, how confident can we be that it is only Hamas? Many claim Iran did not approve this specific operation on that date - but why assume that is true? Hezbollah is assumed not to want to drag Lebanon into a devastating war - but Hamas didn't care at all about its people, why do we assume Hezbollah is more sensitive to the desires of the Lebanese?
Hezbollah's limited response so far is enough to tie down a lot of IDF soldiers in the north, who may have shortened the Gaza war if they were deployed there. Is that part of the larger, still unknown plan?
Yemen's attacks appear to be test runs of Iranian weapons - could one of the goals of this war been for Iran to probe Israel's military defenses against long range ballistic missile attacks in a far larger future war of which this is only a precursor?
Exploiting wishful thinking has been a key component not only of Hamas' deceptions over the past decade, but Iran's as well, particularly with the nuclear deal.
And once Iran knows Hamas will happily sacrifice huge numbers of Palestinians to hurt Israel, why does Iran need missiles to shoot a nuclear weapon to Israel? A bomb smuggled to Gaza will do just as well and is much easier to hide.
The entire world needs to re-evaluate every single assumption we have made about Iran's "axis of resistance." All the experts have been wrong about Hamas, including nearly all of Israel's best and most cynical analysts. We have to assume that everything coming directly or indirectly from Iran and its allies is false, and to reconsider everything we accepted as true over the past decade from the region.
Finally, we need to truly understand the level of evil involved in Hamas' deceptions. Their goal, at least for October 7, was purely wicked- the murder, rape and kidnapping of a large number of Israelis and terrorizing all Jews in the world. As we should have learned with the wave of suicide bombing in the 1990s and 2000s, the motivation is utterly foreign to Western thinking, and we still try to shoehorn Western ways of thought into groups like Hamas. If Hamas is as evil as October 7 proved it is, then negotiations and ceasefires are the exact wrong approach.
Hamas' deceptions to murder Jews is not pragmatic - it is genocidal. It is irredeemable. It is Nazi-level evil. And any response that does not insist on its destruction is immoral.
