The Wall Street Journal ran a report late yesterday with the headline “Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks,” citing unnamed senior members of Hezbollah and Hamas saying that Iranian security officials helped Hamas plan the surprise attack it unleashed on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, Oct. 2. Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions, they said. 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.
“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” an unnamed U.S. official told the Journal when asked about the meetings. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press earlier the same Sunday, said that the U.S. has no information that Iran “was directly involved in this attack, in planning it or in carrying it out,” though “that’s something we’re looking at very carefully.” A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the Journal 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. A spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations said the Islamic Republic stood in support of Gaza’s actions but didn’t direct them. “The decisions made by the Palestinian resistance are fiercely autonomous and unwaveringly aligned with the legitimate interests of the Palestinian people,” the spokesman said. “We are not involved in Palestine’s response, as it is taken solely by Palestine itself.”
The question now is, according to an analysis published in the Jerusalem Post, is “Will Israel Hold Iran Responsible for Hamas’ Surprise Assault, Massacre?”
“An argument can be made: first, let’s regain complete control of our own territory, and then talk about taking the war to the enemy. But Israel will regain control of the South, will wipe out the terrorists there, and then will begin an offensive in Gaza,” writes Jerusalem Post’s military analyst Herb Keinon. “But will that be the end of it? Or should Jerusalem decide that the time has come to somehow take the terrorist battle with organizations funded and supported by Iran to Iran, to somehow make the Ayatollahs pay for their support of organizations bent on murdering Jews and Israelis?”
Keinon goes on to say that over the last few months, both Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have issued threats against Iran but have not acted on them. “The question in light of Saturday’s massive attack is whether the sheer magnitude of this attack will compel the IDF to send a military message to Iran,” he writes.
