Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest roadblock to reaching a peace arrangement with Hamas is his insistence that Israel maintain control of what he calls the Philadelphi Corridor, along the border between Gaza and Egypt. He says that Hamas has plans to evacuate its top leadership and the remaining hostages to Egypt, and therefore Israel must maintain its military control.
But Israeli intelligence is challenging the basis of two articles in European press—one in the U.K.-based Jewish Chronicle and the other in the German publication Bild—which reported on what they claimed to be official and important Hamas documents indicating plans to evacuate the hostages by tunnels to Egypt and thence to Iran.
A supposed handwritten note from Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, cited by Prime Minister Netanyahu, has also been called into question by Israeli intelligence.
The Jewish Chronicle article reports that “Sinwar’s plan was to smuggle himself and the remaining Hamas leaders along with Israeli hostages through the Philadelphi Corridor to Sinai and from there to Iran,” and refers to its sourcing this way: “This was reportedly revealed during the interrogation of a captured senior Hamas official, as well as by information obtained from documents seized on Thursday, August 29, the day the six bodies of the murdered hostages were retrieved.”
But a Hebrew-language post on the site of leading Israeli news site Ynet reveals that intelligence sources challenge the authenticity or even the existence of these documents. The JC publication “was defined by four intelligence and media sources with whom [Ynet] spoke as a ‘wild invention.’ The four of them join IDF sources who insist that neither the document—nor the narrative attributed to Sinwar who suddenly decided to escape—is known to anyone in Israel,” reports Ynet (via machine translation).