Hamas v Israel: The Iranian Connection
Did Iran Help Plan Hamas' October Surprise Against Israel?
Shoutout to reader
for framing this latest discussion on the unfolding horror show in the Middle East.“Iran’s involvement is hardly confirmed”
Not that I trust the news, but it’s been all over that Iran is taking credit for this and Hama has been profusely thanking Iran for their help.
She’s not wrong. As I noted in yesterday’s article, no less a corporate media mainstay than the Wall Street Journal carried the story of Iran’s purported direct involvement.
Elements of the Wall Street Journal story have also been picked up by other news sites and rebroadcast, amplifying the original story’s gravitas.
Did Tehran have a hand in Hamas’ horrific attack on Israel? Ultimately, the answer to this question is almost certainly “yes”, although exactly what that role was and is as yet remains a matter of some conjecture. Exactly what that role is will have significant impact on whether this conflict escalates beyond Gaza, and so the question bears some further scrutiny.
Perhaps the most damning evidence against Iran regarding the Hamas attack on Israel is that Iran’s political and religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, took to X/Twitter immediately following the attack with effusive praise for Hamas in launching the assault.
With praise coming from the most powerful man in Iran, it is not hard to fathom that Iran helped Hamas plan and coordinate the attack.
However, in the midst of this effusive praise for Hamas, Khamenei also tweeted out a denial of Iran’s direct involvement in planning the attack.
Khamenei’s full video statement, downloaded from Twitter (which does not support hotlinking from Substack) is included here.
Despite praising Hamas, Khamenei seems reluctant to put Iran on the same path to war that Hamas chose.
Does that mean that Iran is merely a cheerleader, with no role either in maintaining the Hamas organization or in carrying out these attacks? Not exactly.
According to statements of more than one US official to the corporate media, Iran’s sponsorship and support for Hamas goes back almost to the group’s inception.
Hamas grew out of the the first intifada, or Palestinian uprising, which was marked by widespread protests against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1987. Its name is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement and an acknowledgment of its early ties to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. Sworn to Israel’s destruction, it has launched numerous suicide bombings and other attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers, leading Israel and other nations including the U.S. to describe it as a terrorist organization.
Although Sunni, it has grown increasingly close to the Mideast’s Shiite powerhouse, Iran. For Tehran, Hamas fits into a pattern it has followed since its 1979 Islamic Revolution of backing regional proxies as a hedge against the superior firepower of archenemy Israel and its main backer, the U.S.
Indeed, Hamas leaders have at times boasted of the levels of funding Tehran has provided the organization.
In a memorial tribute to Qassem Soleimani, a senior Hamas official boasted that the assassinated military leader had provided Hamas with $22 million in cash in 2006. Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC-QF), was assassinated on Jan. 3, 2020, in an American drone strike.
Mahmoud al-Zahar, a founder and senior leader of Hamas, disclosed this to several television channels, including Al-Alam, an Iranian propaganda station targeting Arab audiences. His revelation provoked a wave of angry reactions on Iran’s social networks, and the hashtag #Dollar_Bagage (#چمدان_دلار) trended, with thousands of mentions in Persian.
Such claims are especially noteworthy now, as they help confirm not only that Iran has helped finance Hamas, but that Iran’s support for the organization has been restored after years of relative estrangement.
Relations between Syria and the Palestinian movement were strong for many years, with Damascus being a safe haven for Hamas’s leadership since the early 2000s. Syria was also home to at least 500,000 Palestinians, according to United Nations estimates.
But the start of the 2011 Syrian revolt proved to be a breaking point in their ties, as relations quickly soured between Hamas and its longtime ally.
Hamas leaders rejected pressure from al-Assad to rally in his support in Damascus, and instead endorsed the opposition. They were then swiftly forced to shutter their offices in the Syrian capital city, before moving to Qatar in 2012
That ties between Hamas and Tehran are currently strong is also established by comments made by Iranian officials last fall praising Hamas’ improving relations with Iranian client state Syria.
In separate speeches last week, both Tehran and its regional ally, Hezbollah, praised Hamas’s decision, with Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, saying that Syria and its leadership would remain “the true support of the Palestinian people”.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Minister Nasser Kanani said in a news conference on September 19 that the move was in the interests of the Palestinian people, as it helped strengthen their position against Israel.
“Iran encourages and supports this trend and believes convergence between resistance factions can help strengthen peace, stability and security in the region,” said Kanani.
It is this lengthy history of support for Hamas that is the apparent foundation of US assertions that Iran is “complicit” in the October 7 attacks.
President Biden's national security adviser said that Iran is "complicit" in Hamas's onslaught in Israel on Saturday. "They have provided the lion's share of the funding for the military wing of Hamas. They provide training, they have provided capabilities, they have provided support, and they have had engagement in contact with Hamas over the years and years," Jake Sullivan told reporters on Tuesday in the White House briefing room. "All of that has played a role in contributing to what we have seen now."
Despite the longstanding ties, as of this writing no conclusive evidence of Iran’s direct involvement in the attacks has been reported by either US or Israeli intelligence services.
As of now, no government worldwide has offered direct evidence — whether images, electronic surveillance or satellite imagery — supporting that Iran orchestrated the attack. However, many have pointed to Iran’s long sponsorship of the group through extensive training, funding and smuggled rockets.
At the same time, some of the tactics Hamas has used are being reported as similar to tactics used by Iran’s Quds Force.
Sunday’s attack showed a level of sophistication and scale so far unseen in previous Hamas attacks on Israel. Airborne militants flew into southern Israel on paragliders. Bomb-carrying drones dropped ordinance precisely on Israeli robotic gun positions. Within hours, militants detonated bombs to tear open Israel’s separation fence, body cam footage showed.
Some of these militant techniques have been used by Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, whose Quds, or Jerusalem, force serves as an expeditionary unit that long has liaised with proxy militia groups across the Middle East.
Additionally, the magnitude of the Hamas attack would appear to indicate some level of outside assistance. Given Iran’s history of support for Hamas, there is a certain “common sense” element to considering Iran to be the source of that assistance.
"Iran would be suspect No. 1 in a lineup” of suspects who could give Hamas the ability to launch the stunning terrorist attacks against Israel by air, land and sea and take it by surprise, said Andrew Borene, a senior U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism official until four months ago.
“That doesn't mean that they're guilty,” Borene told USA TODAY in an interview. “It means there's a reason that they're being investigated" for a possible role in the attacks.
Iran "has historically been the largest state sponsor of terrorism," said Borene, whose last job was as a senior executive in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "And they are the most active state sponsor of terrorism. So it's not without cause that people are investigating that thread."
Further complicating the picture have been attacks by Hezbollah—another organization receiving Iranian support—against northern Israel, which some say indicates a measure of coordination between Hamas and Hezbollah.
The fighting around the northern Israeli border is at a much smaller scale than in southern Israel near Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave to Israel's southwest. But the double-pronged attacks at both poles of Israel left many fearing a more widespread, regional escalation of violence.
"Hezbollah's response from southern Lebanon is not opportunistic," said Lina Khatib, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London.
She said Hezbollah, which is a Shia Muslim organization, and Hamas, a Sunni group, have coordinated for years.
Several analysts said both groups receive financial, military and rhetorical support from Iran.
On Sunday, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, said that Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has met with Hamas leaders.
"We know that there were meetings in Syria and in Lebanon, if I remember correctly, with the other leaders of the terror armies that surround Israel," he said. Spokespeople for Hamas did not return requests for comment.
At a minimum, Iran has been supporting Hamas in general, even if it turns out they were not in the loop in the planning and preparation for this particular attack.
As of this writing, there is no “smoking gun” evidence linking Iran to the October 7 attacks aside from the initial (and as of yet uncorroborated) claims reported in the Wall Street Journal by Hamas members that IRGC personnel helped with planning them. There is a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Iran may have had a role in these attacks:
That Iran approves of the attacks and is hoping Hamas and Hezbollah will do more is documented by statements directly attributable to Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
That Iran has been supporting Hamas is established through statements made by Iran’s own foreign minister and by Hamas officials.
Did Iran help Hamas carry out the worst terrorist attack ever on Israeli soil? As of this writing, we cannot say with absolute certainty that they did. We cannot say Iran helped plan the attack nor can we say Iran green-lit the attack.
We can say that, without Iran’s overall support, it is highly unlikely Hamas would be in any position to even contemplate such a strike, let alone marshall the resources necessary to undertake such a strike.
Was Iran involved in the October 7 attack? Indirectly at least, yes, they were. The official reporting and the official narratives are not wrong in making that claim.
Whether their involvement was such as to warrant retaliation against Iran by Israel is a far less certain and far more murky question, with no satisfactory answers in either direction.