Previously unpublished Hamas documents released by Army Radio on Sunday shed new light on the terror group’s coordination with Hezbollah in the years leading up to the October 7 massacre, including appeals for the Lebanese terror group to join the attack and details of joint planning with Iran.
The documents’ release follows a mid-June report from The Jerusalem Post on secret Hamas internal documents showing the progression of the terror group’s plans from 2022 to 2023 to systematically deceive Israel into complacency so as to surprise the IDF during the massacre.
Additionally shown in the documents is Hezbollah’s false promise to join Hamas in its attack on October 7 due to its fear of Israel’s retaliation, as the Post has previously reported.
In 2019, Hamas had already begun to seriously accelerate “the plan to defeat the Gaza Division.”
According to the published documents, Ismail Haniyeh, the former top leader of Hamas’s political bureau, had written to former Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah, saying that his “brothers and family in Palestine are confident that you will not disappoint them in their campaign against their enemy and that you will always be a help and support for them until victory is achieved.”
Nasrallah was killed by the IDF on September 27, 2024.
A similar letter was also sent to Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The newly published documents also reveal that during Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, a joint intelligence war room was opened in Beirut for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
Additionally, the documents claim that Hezbollah “thwarted” Israel’s operation on Hamas’s widespread “Metro” system in the Gaza Strip and had pre-warned the terror group of the IDF’s activity in the area.
Hezbollah reportedly also helped prevent the IDF from killing Hamas’s former Northern Brigade commander Ahmad al-Ghandour in 2021.
Ghandour was killed by the IDF in November 2023, alongside Hamas’s Rocket Division commander, Ayman Siam.
Orchestrating October 7 massacre
A year earlier, in May 2022, senior Hamas officials, Nasrallah, and the IRGC’s former Palestine Corps commander Saeed Izadi, who helped orchestrate the October 7 massacre, met in Beirut to discuss the expansion of the “confrontation with Israel.”
According to the papers, after Nasrallah’s documented reservations about attacking Israel, former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a letter to the Hezbollah leader raising possible options for an attack on Israel – including counting on an invasion from both Jordan and Syria.
Sinwar was later killed by the IDF on October 16, 2024.
While Sinwar was committed to committing the massacre, a document written by Hamas’s military intelligence wing revealed that several members of the terror group and Hezbollah carried hesitations.