One of the questions that the most astute observers asked themselves after the tragic attack of 7 October, and throughout the period of Israel's response in this devastating war, was and is: "how is it possible that the secret services of Tel Aviv did not know about Hamas’ attack?". Is it conceivable that Mossad and Shin Bet, which are seen as the most efficient secret services in the world, capable of organising targeted assassinations of the military and political leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, remained completely in the dark about the whole thing? How can we explain that these secret services even managed to kill the head of Hamas in Tehran with a surgical strike, knowing in advance where, when and how it would be possible to carry out an undertaking that seemed almost impossible? Not to mention the meticulous efficiency with which they managed to tamper with the supply chain of pagers which Hezbollah purchased in an attempt to avoid the identification of its militants through their mobile phones. In particular, Mossad has always monitored, day and night, the military and political movements of its enemies in the Gaza Strip as well as in the West Bank, ready to intervene at the slightest suspicion of a suicide attack, let alone an attack of that magnitude which, presumably, had months, if not at least a year, of gestation.

The shocking answer is simple: Mossad and Shin Bet were perfectly aware that a Hamas attack against Israel was coming. Are these just suppositions or cheap conspiracy theories? No, there is documentary evidence that, once made public, was played down, reduced to little more than vague unfounded hypotheses and then, by preventing its circulation, removed from the international press and forgotten.

According to a report on Channel 12 news, a Shin Bet source had been operating in the Gaza Strip for some time and, eventually, produced a report alleging that Hamas was planning a major attack in early October.⁽¹⁾ This information went directly to a senior Shin Bet officer whose identity has, of course, remained unknown. This was a couple of months before October. It also specified that the attack would take place in the week after Yom Kippur.

In November 2023, the authoritative New York Times (NYT) broke the news that Israeli government officials knew perfectly well that Hamas was organising a powerful attack and that this knowledge dated back to almost a year before that fateful 7 October.⁽²⁾ With the same irrefutable authority, the NYT quoted a 40-page document entitled “Jericho Wall” that came into the possession of the Israeli secret services. While not indicating the exact day of the attack, it specified in detail how to get round Israel's defensive structures and what type of attack it was supposed to be. In hindsight, it was possible to verify that this document described in detail what then tragically happened. It spoke of an attack from the sea with dinghies and small boats, from the sky with hang gliders and with the help of drones, by land with light motorcycles and a few pick-ups, with the addition of a few trucks to bring as many prisoners as possible back to the Gaza Strip.

Ten days before the event, the head of the Egyptian secret services, Abbas Kamel, according to several reliable sources, and never denied by him, warned the Israeli secret services that there would be an attack by Hamas militants in a few days time.⁽³⁾ Given the conflict between al-Sisi’s Egyptian government and all forms of fundamentalism, from its quintessential enemy the Muslim Brotherhood and beyond, the news, which has also gone around the world without any reaction from the Israeli secret services, can only be true. Not only that, Netanyahu himself would have been personally informed.

Obviously both Shin Bet and Netanyahu were careful not to take it into consideration, because it would have disturbed their plans. The first admitted to being aware of it but believed that the contact was unreliable, and that such a plan could not have been within Hamas's technical-military capacity. So they let it drop! The second, after 7 October, shamelessly denied knowing anything about it and that he had never been warned, to avoid being held responsible for the attack itself and the capture of 220 hostages. In other words, if Shin Bet had taken the information seriously, it would have informed Netanyahu and acted to prevent it so that everything that happened afterwards would not have occurred. But things went very differently on purpose.

So why, despite knowing about the attack, did Israel let it happen? Here too, the answer is as simple as it is cynically tragic. Such a treacherous attack against defenceless civilians, massacred like animals for slaughter, presented a golden opportunity for Netanyahu to implement a military action of a “legitimate” retaliation which had already been planned: that of reorganising the balance of power in the Middle East to its advantage, without world public opinion, first and foremost the US, being able to hinder it. That golden opportunity handed the winning card of “legitimate defence” of the sacred national borders to be played against the blind barbarity of Hamas, against its Shiite allies, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Yemeni Houthis, and the jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq. All of this is aimed against Iran, because it has been Israel’s number one enemy for decades. It is a fight both for political-economic supremacy in the region, and because Tehran has for decades intensified the financing and the supply of weapons to the entire Shiite galaxy, plus the Sunni Hamas. And we should not forget that violence between individuals and groups on both sides had been going on for months before 7 October.⁽⁴⁾

However, the mother of all causes for the terrifying war in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, remains the 7 October event.

The Real Causes of the Middle East Crisis

If it is true that the Arab world has always rejected the existence of the State of Israel and preached its destruction (from the rejection of the 1948 UN Resolution 181 on the birth of the Zionist State to the four Arab-Israeli wars that followed), it is equally true that in recent times many Arab states, starting with Egypt, have accepted Israel’s right to exist and the integrity of its borders. The result was that the objective of wiping Israel off the map of the Arab world remained the political baggage of jihadist nationalists, first and foremost Hamas. In fairness, however, it must be said that a few years ago (2017), in its new charter, there was no longer any explicit reference to the destruction of the State of Israel, even if, in fact, it remains on the agenda. On the other hand, Netanyahu, on television on all the national news channels, after 7 October, in the midst of the war against Hamas, map in hand, reiterated that Israel (Eretz Israel) goes from the right bank of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving zero room for the hypothesis of two peoples and two states or any other negotiated solution. In practice, the two nationalisms, the Zionist and the jihadist, preach the same thing and behave accordingly.

While the cowardly action against defenceless civilians had for Hamas the twin purposes of showing that it was the only force capable of punishing Israel, unlike the corrupt Palestinian National Authority (PNA) of Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), and of pleasing its Iranian sponsor and raising the Arab world against its mortal enemy, the terrible response of Israel, which has been a hundred times worse, had other purposes that went beyond punishing Hamas. In fact, it has deliberately targeted the civilian population, it has widened the war zone to Lebanon and Syria. It has blocked humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza, and it has prevented the Red Crescent from helping the victims. It even wilfully and repeatedly hit the UNIFIL positions, so that they could not get in the way of their plan as inconvenient international witnesses.⁽⁵⁾ This is to achieve their wider aim of a reorganisation of the balance of power in the Middle East post-7 October. This realignment is based on the points listed below. They have never been publicly acknowledged but are being pursued with the utmost ferocity. In this regard, it is worth mentioning a joint statement by American volunteer doctors in the Strip, according to which the deaths among the civilian population could actually exceed 90 thousand of which a third are children, the target, amongst their other methods, of snipers of the Israeli army.⁽⁶⁾

Here are the points in question:

1. The first and most important point is to create the conditions in fact to arrive at the exodus (flight) of the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, if not total, at least quantitatively significant, and leave only a small "Indian reserve" easy to control in the land of Palestine. The hoped-for exodus would include opening the Sinai Peninsula for resettlement, but at the moment the project seems difficult to implement due to the reticence of Egypt, which fears the presence of jihadism in general, and that of the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. In this regard, al-Sisi has refused a substantial package of billions of dollars offered by the Israeli government, judging the risk to be significantly higher than the presumed economic benefit represented by the amount on offer.⁽⁷⁾ For the inhabitants of the West Bank, the gradual loss of their territory and the destruction of homes and cultivated fields continues daily, with the murderous violence of settlers backed by IDF troops. As well as Sinai, Jordan and Syria, which already host hundreds of thousands of refugees, would also become places of "transfer". How things will end remains to be seen, but that is what the Israeli government is working hard to achieve. It goes without saying that such a plan, whether it works or not, is not flaunted but hidden behind the "right of Israel to defend itself".
2. The second objective, a corollary of the first, is to completely annihilate Hamas and all its allies in the area (under the rubric of: “we take no prisoners”). On Israel’s hit list along with Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, are al-Nusra in Syria and similar organisations in Iraq which, for the moment, are not in Israel’s sights, but are likely targets in the future. Then there are tensions with Qatar, which finances Hamas, and with Turkey, whose president, on several occasions, has expressed himself very harshly towards Netanyahu, calling him "the new Hitler". These last two countries, which intend to play a decisive role in the Mediterranean against Israel's hegemonic ambitions, are not on Israel's blacklist. Qatar is geographically distant and further expanding the range of the theatre of operations would be a huge mistake. And there is no question of taking on Turkey: first, because it does not finance Hamas, and second, because it is the strongest military power in the Mediterranean after the USA. Therefore, Israel "limits" itself to striking, in addition to Gaza, Lebanon, with intense bombings on Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, namely the two largest tentacles of the republic of the ayatollahs. To pursue all these objectives, Netanyahu not only decided to kill Nasrallah the day after the latter had called for a humanitarian ceasefire, but went so far as to strike UN posts positioned along the Blue Line that separates Lebanon from Israel, wounding a dozen soldiers.
3. Is a corollary of point two. Hit Iran hard, destroy its nuclear power plants, even if the uranium enrichment needed to build atomic weapons is only at 60%, and not the necessary 90%. From the Israeli perspective, it would be a preventive action, necessary for its security and for bringing the government of Tehran to its knees, once and for all. The plan would also include the destruction of oil facilities (wells, pipelines, etc.), missile installations and weapons depots. At the moment Netanyahu has received "a hint" from Washington to limit itself to the annihilation of military facilities, and avoid those related to uranium enrichment or oil facilities. According to the Pentagon’s analysts, Iran must be brought to its knees economically and militarily, but with caution. There is still a lot of time before they can build the atomic bomb, whilst Iranian oil, 90% of which is exported to China, is better left untouched so as not to wake up "the sleeping dog", or rather, the one pretending to be sleeping. The current American administration, like those to come, knows that the accounts with China will have to be settled and there will be heavy costs, which will bring a deeper crisis to both East and West. But they want to be the ones to control when and how, so, at the moment, everyone is standing still, waiting for the developments of the Middle Eastern crisis and the announced Israeli attack on Iran, taking into due consideration the fact that, despite not intervening directly in the conflict between Hamas-Lebanon and Israel, Russia, China and Turkey and, to a lesser extent, also Qatar, India and Brazil have spoken out in favour of the Palestinians. All the pieces are on the board, but the next game has yet to begin
4. Last but not least, there is the perennial problem of gas and oil, which emerged in 1990. A vital issue for both the Palestinians and Israel. It consists of the ownership, management and marketing of the offshore gas and oil fields, 36 kilometres from the coast of the Gaza Strip. The two fields, which for ease of discussion we will call Marine 1 and Marine 2, have proven reserves of 35 billion cubic metres of gas and a technical extraction capacity of 1.5 billion cubic metres per year, but although they belong to the Palestinian territories, Gaza cannot use them without Israel's say-so. In practice, the fields remained partially unused until 2016, when management was taken over by Shell, which lasted until 2018 when it withdrew over disagreements with Israel. Arab observers state that there were contacts between Hamas and Israel before 7 October to try to find a solution to the issue. However even these failed over Israeli demands and vetoes. Given the economic and strategic importance of the two gas fields, we cannot rule out the possibility that the gas-oil issue played a role both in the 7 October attack and in Israel's violent response. Two months before October 2023, Hamas had declared that "Gaza’s gas is owned by all Palestinians in Gaza (note the exclusion of Abu Mazen's PNA) and they alone have the right to invest in it (…) Israel occupation cannot impose its requirements and restrictions on our capabilities and natural wealth".⁽⁸⁾ The same was true for the statements made by Lebanese Hezbollah, which “threatened Israel with war if Lebanon is not allowed to exploit its share in the Karish gas field” on the border with Israeli territory.⁽⁹⁾ Other problems were required to unleash the war in the Middle East, problems that we have tried to identify, but equally certainly the energy issue was another motive behind the tragic episode of 7 October and the extremely violent Israeli response. Taking exclusive possession of these fields is undoubtedly an invaluable advantage.

All this while waiting for the attack on Iran that will surely come by 5 November, that is, before the American elections. This is not so much a symbolic date as a strategic one. Biden has promised to withdraw military aid to Israel if it does not allow the health and food relief authorities, halted since 1 October, to enter the Strip, if it does not stop hitting UN facilities, and if it does not stop pursuing the total destruction of Gaza and southern Lebanon. Even if Biden's threats had previously turned out to be empty since they had no deterrent force, after 9 October’s long phone call with Biden, Netanyahu had to accept that the bombing of Iran must only concern military facilities and not nuclear and oil facilities. Netanyahu hopes that the next president, whoever that may be, may be even more accommodating towards Israel's plans. In the meantime, the Israeli army continues its work of total destruction to create a new "status quo" from which it would be difficult for any of the actors in the Middle East, whether directly or indirectly involved, including the US, to reverse. Not even the death of Sinwar, after those of Haniyeh and Nasrallah, will stop Israel because the underlying target remains Iran. Furthermore, and for the first time, a small contingent of Israeli soldiers (130) has officially declared that they no longer want to fight for their government because they believe that this war is no longer a war of defence but a massacre of civilians.⁽¹⁰⁾ A small thing, but even if it never takes the road of revolutionary defeatism, it is an important signal against war and its infinite barbarity. It should be imitated by all soldiers and workers called to fight for causes and interests that are not theirs. In this case, the example applies not only to Israeli soldiers but also to Palestinian fighters. Don’t shoot each other, but turn your weapons against those who send you to the slaughter.

Notes to the Translation:

Image: Wafa (CC BY-SA 3.0), commons.wikimedia.org

(1) timesofisrael.com

(2) nytimes.com

(3) timesofisrael.com

(4) See e.g. the dispute around the Al-Aqsa mosque and the resulting clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police, the assassinations and covert bilateral attacks between Israel and Iran, etc.

(5) ispionline.it

(6) theguardian.com

(7) thecradle.co

(8) newarab.com

(9) thecradle.co

(10) haaretz.com