Israel’s military has shown journalists documents that its soldiers found in Gaza which seem to show financial and military support provided by Iran to Palestinian Islamist militant group, Hamas, before the 7 October 2023 attacks.
The Israeli armed forces gave The Wall Street Journal a series of what it described as letters and notes from meetings of the Hamas leadership.
The papers suggest that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was negotiating with Iran over funding for a planned large-scale assault on Israel as far back as 2021.
In one of the letters, written in Arabic, Iran says it has allocated $10 million for Hamas’s armed wing. A few weeks later, Sinwar asks Iran for $500 million, divided into $20 million a month for about two years.
The Wall Street Journal hasn’t independently verified the documents which Israel said it discovered on 31 January in an underground bunker in Khan Younis.
Hamas hasn’t responded to a request for comment.
Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations said Hamas has acknowledged that its armed wing planned and executed the 7 October attacks without the knowledge of even its political officials based in Doha.
The Israeli military also shared an undated presentation found on a Hamas computer which described more ambitious plans for an attack on Israel than the ones that took place. It included attacking a set of towers in Tel Aviv near the Israeli Defense Ministry’s headquarters, symbolic of the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 9/11.
The plans also suggested the idea of using horses and chariots to move Hamas militants through Israel, and included a slideshow with an image of two horses and a chariot beside a picture of an Egyptian pharaoh riding in a chariot with a bow and arrow.
Image by Tomasz Mikołajczyk from Pixabay