 "Revealed: Why Hamas actually launched Oct 7 raids on Israel in 2023, the real target was a peace pact")
Documents found in tunnels in the Gaza Strip have revealed the reason why Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
In an unprecedented act of terror, Hamas led a coalition of terrorist groups that invaded Israel by land, air, and sea on Oct. 7, 2023, and went on a killing spree across large swathes of the country. It took Israeli security forces days to neutralise or expel all of the terrorists. The terrorists killed around 1,200 and injured thousands of people, and abducted around 250 people and took them to Gaza as hostages.
Documents found by Israeli forces in Gaza’s tunnels have now revealed that the objective behind Oct. 7 attack was to derail the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, according to Wall Street Journal.
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For years, the United States had been leading a bipartisan effort for the normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab world. Abraham Accords under the first Donald Trump administration in 2020 led to the normalisation of relations between Israel and United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Morocco. The Joe Biden administration took over the efforts and was working on a normalisation deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia when Oct. 7 attack derailed talks.
Hamas saw Israel-Saudi normalisation as existential crisis
Documents found by Israeli forces, which comprised minutes of meetings from Oct. 2, 2023, reveal that Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, considered the Israel-Saudi normalisation an existential threat, according to The Journal.
Sinwar, who was the Hamas’ chief of Gaza at the time, was the principal architect of the Oct. 7 attack along with Mohammed Deif, the military chief of Hamas at the time. After Ismail Haniyeh, the overall chief of Hamas, was assassinated in Iran’s capital Tehran, Sinwar became the overall chief of Hamas. Both Sinwar and Deif have been killed in the ongoing war — Sinwar was shot dead by ground troops and Deif was killed in an airstrike.
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The meeting noted that an “extraordinary act” was required to derail the normalisation in the making.
The minutes from the meeting of Hamas’ political bureau in Gaza quote Sinwar as saying: “There is no doubt that the Saudi-Zionist normalisation agreement is progressing significantly.”
Sinwar warned that an Israel-Saudi deal would “open the door for the majority of Arab and Islamic countries to follow the same path”.
The minutes quoted Sinwar as saying that the attack had been two years in the making.
The goal of the attack was “to bring about a major move or a strategic shift in the paths and balances of the region with regard to the Palestinian cause”, according to the minutes of the meeting.
Israeli forces found two more documents in the tunnels that shed light on how important the Israel-Saudi normalisation was for Hamas, according to The Journal.
An internal report from Sept. 2023 recommended that escalation of the conflict in the West Bank and Jerusalem would make the normalisation harder.
The report expressed mistrust about Saudi pledges regarding Palestinian interests and called them “weak and limited steps to neutralise” Hamas and stop it from challenging the normalisation.
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Another internal briefing from August 2022, which was stamped ‘secret’, concluded: “It has become the duty of the movement to reposition itself to … preserve the survival of the Palestinian cause in the face of the broad wave of normalisation by Arab countries, which aims primarily to liquidate the Palestinian cause.”
Israel-Saudi normalisation off the table — for now
If derailing the Israel-Saudi normalisation was indeed Hamas’ purpose for Oct. 7 attack —as these documents say— then the terrorist group has surely succeeded as the normalisation is certainly off the table for the foreseeable future.
The derailment has also come at huge cost — perhaps at the cost of the Palestinian statehood.
The war, which is cruising towards its second anniversary, has devastated Gaza and killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. Entire neighbourhoods have been flattened in Israeli bombardment and intentional razing of buildings through excavators in the name of building corridors and creating buffer zones.
As US President Donald Trump has announced the plan to annex Gaza and Israel has essentially occupied it nearly entirely, the two-state solution is essentially dead. Trump has said that all Palestinians would be expelled from Gaza and the enclave would be developed from scratch the ‘Riviera of the East’.
Saudi Arabia has stated that there would not be any normalisation with Israel until the war in Gaza ends and there is a permanent pathway towards Palestinian statehood . As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has firmly rejected both of these demands, the normalisation is off the table.
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