A new study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem claimed that Hamas's October 7 massacre was part of a careful plan to destabilize Israel and spark a wider regional war against it.
The study, titled "The Strategic Origins of Hamas’s October 7 Attack" was authored by Dr. Daniel Sobelman, and is based on top-secret Hamas documents seized by Israeli forces during the war.
During the years before the attack in 2023, the study stated that Hamas's strategy shifted from defensive to offensive, with Khalil al-Hayyah, a member of Hamas’s Political Bureau, saying in 2021 that "We are not a defensive resistance but an offensive one."
Another prominent finding of the study was that Hamas discussed concrete scenarios in which the October 7 attack, combined with action from Hezbollah and unrest across Israel and the West Bank, could "quickly collapse" Israel's military and domestic front.
Internal disputes made Israel weak, Hamas leader claimed
Internal disputes and protests during the period, Hamas leader Yahya al-Sinwar reportedly said, were melting "the glue that keeps together the pillars of the [Israeli] entity," making the country "weaker than a spider's web."
Israel's failure, the study stated, was one of imagination, labeling Hamas as a "terrorist organization" and not an organized army capable of advanced and methodical strategy.
Hamas' miscalculation, on the other hand, was not correctly predicting Iran and Hezbollah's responses to the October 7 attack. The study noted that Hamas had hoped to trap its allies into a war with Israel, but that Iran and Hezbollah were "deeply surprised" by the timing and scale of the massacre.