By Samah Abdul Fattah | 2024-10-22

The Iranian regime was directly involved in Hamas's October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, electronic records and papers recovered from Hamas command centers reveal.

Documents recovered by the Israeli military showed advanced planning for the Hamas attacks using trains, boats and even horse-drawn chariots, the Washington Post revealed in an October 12 exclusive.

Among the trove of documents were letters from Hamas to Iran’s top leaders in 2021 requesting hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and training for 12,000 additional Hamas fighters, the newspaper said.

The letters "are additional evidence of the special organic relationship" between Hamas and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said Iranian affairs researcher Fathi al-Sayed of Al-Sharq Center for Regional and Strategic Studies.

They reveal the "unlimited support" Hamas receives from Iran, he told Al-Fassel.

Without this support, Hamas would not have been able to recruit thousands of militants to carry out the attack of October 7, 2023, he said.

"No sane person" would believe the Iranian regime was not aware of the plan that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was developing, he said, noting that its feigned ignorance "was refuted with the emergence of these documents."

"Iran will not provide money and military support without complete control over the decision of war and peace," he said.

Direct involvement

Among the documents was "a direct request" from Sinwar to his Iranian overlords for financial and military support, in exchange for promises to “completely destroy Israel within two years," said Fatah leader Saad Yassin.

It seems that the aid actually arrived, he told Al-Fassel, as at least 6,000 Hamas elements participated in the October 7 attack, while thousands more launched rockets and provided protection for different areas of the Gaza strip.

Another sign of the significant financial support Hamas has been receiving are the tunnels its fighters use, "which require great efforts and huge sums of money to build," Yassin said.

This is "in addition to weapons, equipment and surface-to-surface missiles and anti-armor missiles," he said, "which are [Iranian] technologies that neither Hamas nor others can afford."

The dozens of missiles fired towards or into Israel by the IRGC and its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, also point to the Iranian regime's direct involvement with Hamas, al-Sayed said.

"It should be noted that Iran, as usual, fights with its affiliates and outside its territory," he added.