Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps helped Hamas execute the assault on Israel: Report
Reports indicate potential Iranian involvement in the planning of Hamas's recent attack on Israel. These claims stem from meetings in Beirut involving Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other militant groups.
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FollowThe Israeli Foreign Ministry on Monday shared a media report which claimed that Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel. According to media reports citing senior members of Hamas and Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, Iran gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday.
Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions -- the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War -- those people said. Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.
“An attack of such scope could only have happened after months of planning and would not have happened without coordination with Iran,” said Lina Khatib, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London, to the Wall Street Journal.
“Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, does not single-handedly make decisions to engage in war without prior explicit agreement from Iran.”
The overall plan is to eventually wage active war with Israel on all fronts to finally close in on it with the help of Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the north and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, said the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members and an Iranian official to the Journal.
US officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.
Asked about the meetings, Mahmoud Mirdawi, a senior Hamas official, said the group planned the attacks on its own. "This is a Palestinian and Hamas decision," he said.
The IRGC’s broader plan is to create a multi-front threat that can strangle Israel from all sides—Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the north and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, according to the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members and an Iranian official.
Although the Iranian delegation at the United Nations in New York did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, praised the attacks in a post on X, the app formerly known as Twitter.
Khamenei wrote, “Zionist regime will be eradicated at the hands of the Palestinian people and the Resistance forces throughout the region.”
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