WSJ News Exclusive | Israel Struggles to Destroy Hamas’s Gaza Tunnel Network

As much as 80% of Hamas’s vast warren of tunnels under Gaza remains intact after weeks of Israeli efforts to destroy them, U.S. and Israeli officials said, hampering Israel’s central war aims.

Thwarting Hamas’s ability to use tunnels is the keystone to Israel’s effort to capture top Hamas leaders and rescue the remaining Israeli hostages, Israeli officials have said. And Israel has said it has conducted strikes on hospitals and other key infrastructure in its pursuit of the tunnels.

Disabling the tunnels, which run for more than 300 miles under the narrow strip—or roughly half the New York City subway system—would deny Hamas relatively safe storage for weapons and ammunition, a hiding place for fighters, command-and-control centers for its leadership, and the ability to maneuver around the territory unexposed to Israeli fire, Israel has said.

Israel has sought various methods to clear the tunnels, including installing pumps to flood them with water from the Mediterranean, destroying them with airstrikes and liquid explosives, searching them with dogs and robots, destroying their entrances and raiding them with highly trained soldiers.

More than 25,000 people, the majority women and children, have been killed in Gaza since the start of hostilities, according to Palestinian authorities. Those figures don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

U.S. and Israeli officials have had difficulty precisely assessing the level of destruction of the tunnels, in part because they can’t say for certain how many miles of tunnels exist. The officials from both countries estimate 20% to 40% of the tunnels have been damaged or rendered inoperable, U.S. officials said, much of that in northern Gaza.

Israel is “thoroughly and gradually dismantling the tunnel network,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement. The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

Late last year, in an operation called “Sea of Atlantis,” Israel installed a series of pumps in northern Gaza, despite concerns about the potential impact of pumping seawater on the territory’s freshwater supply and above ground infrastructure. Israel’s bombing of the tunnels has inflicted widespread destruction to buildings on the surface.

Earlier this month, Israel installed at least one pump in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis to disrupt the tunnel network there, a U.S. official familiar with the effort said. The first pumps installed within Gaza used water from the Mediterranean Sea, while the latest pump draws water from Israel, the official said.

In some places, walls and other unexpected barriers and defenses slowed or stopped the water flow, U.S. officials said. Seawater has corroded some of the tunnels, but the overall effort wasn’t as effective as Israeli officials had hoped, U.S. officials said.

“Hamas’s strategy revolves around the tunnels—it is their center of gravity. They needed the tunnels to level the battlefield with the IDF,” said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and officer in the Marine Corps and Central Intelligence Agency. “The tunnels are where Hamas planned [before Oct. 7] to wait out Israel’s political will as Israel faced pressure for a cease-fire.”

Israel has units that specialize in clearing tunnels but many of those troops are engineers trained to destroy them, not search for hostages and top Hamas leaders, U.S. officials said. In particular, more troops are needed to clear the tunnels, the officials said.

In addition, Israel’s primary war aims—killing or capturing top Hamas leaders and rescuing the roughly 100 remaining hostages—are, at times, at odds, officials said.

“The question is: Is there a real way to get the hostages out alive?” said a senior Israeli military official. “Otherwise we would have been much more forceful in our approach.”

How can Israel safely work to extricate Hamas from its network of underground tunnels? Join the conversation below.

Some of the hostages are being held in a command center in a tunnel under Khan Younis, Israeli officials said. Hamas’s top leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar is hiding in the same location, according to the senior Israeli military official.

A raid on that command center could endanger the hostages, according to former Israeli officials and military analysts, a dilemma that amounts to a choice between killing Sinwar and negotiating the release of some or all of the remaining hostages.

The official said the military’s approach was focused on clearing “nodes” within the tunnels where Hamas leaders and fighters are hiding, rather than checking or destroying the entire system.

“It’s a very hard mission. It’s done slowly, very carefully. It’s urban warfare unseen globally,” the official said.

Even locating Sinwar and the remaining hostages could prove to be a difficult task.

Gershon Baskin, a hostage negotiator who facilitated the 2011 deal with Hamas that freed Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from captivity in Gaza, said Israel didn’t know where he was held for years.

“It’s unbelievable that this is Israel’s backyard and how little intelligence information they have,” he said.

Earlier this month, the Israeli military took reporters on a tour of the tunnels in southern Gaza, around Khan Younis, and said there was evidence hostages had been held there. But they couldn’t say when they had been moved.

In 2014, Netanyahu forewarned of a Hamas massacre plot. Nine years later, Oct. 7 happened

It's amazing to be shown over and over how clear the writing was on the wall –the long period during which the murderous plan that Hamas carried out in a string of Israeli border communities on October 7 was known to Israeli political and military officials.

"Everything has been known since 2014," said someone this week who served in an important security-related position at the time. "There's nothing new under the sun," quipped another source. "What happened on October 7 was born prior to Operation Protective Edge," he said, referring to Israel's major military operation in Gaza in July 2014.

People with access to the complete State Comptroller's report on Protective Edge have told Haaretz that the confidential section of the report includes a detailed description of a similar plan to that carried out by Hamas on October 7.

Many hundreds of terrorists would infiltrate into Israel through underground tunnels, "armed from head to toe, on jeeps and motorcycles," said in describing the 2014 plan. The goal was to commit a massacre in Israeli army positions and residential communities adjacent to the Gaza border, and to abduct soldiers and civilians as bargaining chips.

The prime minister at the time, and now, Benjamin Netanyahu, was well-aware of the danger. At a security cabinet meeting in June 2014, just prior to Operation Protective Edge, he characterized the Hamas plan as "a concrete threat to the State of Israel" and explained: "[The scenario] is different because abductions or infiltrations into our territory would change the balance between us and them, … a force of up to a battalion that enters and also kidnaps and also kills. It's hugely demoralizing. It wouldn't defeat the State of Israel. Even missiles still haven't defeated the State of Israel, but it would deal us a terrible blow."

The information about the Hamas plan, which was due to be carried out in the summer of 2014, found its way into the hands of Israel's Shin Bet security service in April of that year. One person described the information as "outstanding, confirmed by several sources, both human and technological."

Members of Hamas' elite Nukhba force were known to have been rehearsing raids on models of Israeli communities, and the menu also included infiltration with gliders and naval commandos. The hope, from what the material shows, was to reach Be'er Sheva.

A source who worked with Netanyahu told Haaretz that the head of the Shin Bet at the time, Yoram Cohen, met with the prime minister and presented him with the details of the plan. According to the source, "Cohen thought if Hamas tried to carry it out, it would necessarily lead to war, and Netanyahu himself took the information seriously." Another individual in a senior security position at the time said that Netanyahu "was the only one at the political level who deeply understood the horrible significance."

The explosive information was also provided to the Israel Defense Forces' chief of staff at the time, Benny Gantz, and to the head of the Intelligence Corps, Aviv Kochavi. Minutes of a meeting attended by the head of the Southern Command, Sami Turgeman and Shin Bet representatives stated that it wasn't simply a contingency plan. Turgeman also believed that if the plan were to be carried out, it would mean war.

While preparing a defense, Turgeman told his colleagues in the General Staff: "I don't want to call you on Saturday morning to report to you that five kibbutzim had been captured and that 80 terrorists were moving around in each of them."

The state of alert was raised and at a closed-door meeting, Chief of Staff Gantz said an escalation on the Gaza front "was getting closer." In June of that year, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon called it "a strategic operation that was about to be carried out."

For those in on the secret, it was also clear that Hamas wouldn't set an agreed upon date with Israel to attack. "It's reasonable that most of the systems won't know [the timing for it being] carried out until the last moment," minutes from an IDF Southern Command meeting stated. Intelligence Corp officials warned: "We have to be prepared for the possibility [that Hamas would attack] without [our] being able to provide a warning."

The security cabinet was only brought into the picture in July of that year, several days after Operation Protective Edge was under way. Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen, who presented the members of the security cabinet with the details of the Hamas plan, described it as dramatic. For his part, Gantz added: "There's a complete understanding" that if it were to be carried out, it would bring about "a very widescale [military] campaign." Netanyahu summed it up: "At the moment, the goal is to prevent the [Hamas] operation."

In the non-confidential portion of his report, State Comptroller Joseph Shapira refrained from getting into the details of the Hamas plan but between the lines and quotes from senior political and security officials, one can get a sense of it. "A significant hostile operation from Gaza towards Israel was ready months before Protective Edge," he wrote. In Protective Edge itself, documents were found that added details regarding the plan.

"Their way was blocked through the tunnels, so they went with breaking through the [border] fence," a former senior security official told Haaretz. "There's no doubt about one thing – political officials and military officials had already known about Hamas' intentions for a decade, and they were obligated to look after defending against such a possibility."

Speaking to Haaretz this week, a source who worked closely with Netanyahu noted remarks that Netanyahu made in July at a memorial ceremony for soldiers killed in Operation Protective Edge. "On the eve of that operation, we already knew about plans to send in hundreds of terrorists," the prime minister said, "to enter our communities, to enter kindergartens, kibbutzim, cities, to abduct soldiers and civilians, … to kill and sneak back" to Gaza.

The state commission of inquiry that will investigate the failures of October 7, the greatest failure in the country's history, will need to look back 10 years to understand how the country's political and military leadership, which was well-aware of Hamas' "grand plan" allowed it to be carried out. The failures come into even sharper relief in light of the fact that over the past year, there were those in the IDF Intelligence Corps who were warning that Hamas had not abandoned its plan and that it was still clandestinely working on it.

Where Is Hamas Getting Its Weapons? Increasingly, From Israel.

The very weapons that Israeli forces have used to enforce a blockade of Gaza are now being used against them.

Israeli military and intelligence officials have concluded that a significant number of weapons used by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attacks and in the war in Gaza came from an unlikely source: the Israeli military itself.

For years, analysts have pointed to underground smuggling routes to explain how Hamas stayed so heavily armed despite an Israeli military blockade of the Gaza Strip. But recent intelligence has shown the extent to which Hamas has been able to build many of its rockets and anti-tank weaponry out of the thousands of munitions that failed to detonate when Israel lobbed them into Gaza, according to weapons experts and Israeli and Western intelligence officials. Hamas is also arming its fighters with weapons stolen from Israeli military bases.

Intelligence gathered during months of fighting revealed that, just as the Israeli authorities misjudged Hamas’s intentions before Oct. 7, they also underestimated its ability to obtain arms.

What is clear now is that the very weapons that Israeli forces have used to enforce a blockade of Gaza over the past 17 years are now being used against them. Israeli and American military explosives have enabled Hamas to shower Israel with rockets and, for the first time, penetrate Israeli towns from Gaza.

“Unexploded ordnance is a main source of explosives for Hamas,” said Michael Cardash, the former deputy head of the Israeli National Police Bomb Disposal Division and an Israeli police consultant. “They are cutting open bombs from Israel, artillery bombs from Israel, and a lot of them are being used, of course, and repurposed for their explosives and rockets.”

Weapons experts say that roughly 10 percent of munitions typically fail to detonate, but in Israel’s case, the figure could be higher. Israel’s arsenal includes Vietnam-era missiles, long discontinued by the United States and other military powers. The failure rate on some of those missiles could be as high as 15 percent, said one Israeli intelligence officer who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

By either count, years of sporadic bombing and the recent bombardment of Gaza have littered the area with thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance just waiting to be reused. One 750-pound bomb that fails to detonate can become hundreds of missiles or rockets.

Hamas did not respond to messages seeking comment. The Israeli military said in a statement that it was committed to dismantling Hamas but did not answer specific questions about the group’s weapons.

Israeli officials knew before the October attacks that Hamas could salvage some Israeli-made weapons, but the scope has startled weapons experts and diplomats alike.

Israeli authorities also knew that their armories were vulnerable to theft. A military report from early last year noted that thousands of bullets and hundreds of guns and grenades had been stolen from poorly guarded bases.

From there, the report said, some made their way to the West Bank, and others to Gaza by way of Sinai. But the report focused on military security. The consequences were treated almost as an afterthought: “We are fueling our enemies with our own weapons,” read one line of the report, which was viewed by The New York Times.

The consequences became apparent on Oct. 7. Hours after Hamas breached the border, four Israeli soldiers discovered the body of a Hamas gunman who was killed outside the Re’im military base. Hebrew writing was visible on a grenade on his belt, said one of the soldiers, who recognized it as a bulletproof Israeli grenade, a recent model. Other Hamas fighters overran the base, and Israeli military officials say some weapons were looted and returned to Gaza.

A few miles away, members of an Israeli forensic team collected one of the 5,000 rockets fired by Hamas that day. Examining the rocket, they discovered that its military-grade explosives had most likely come from an unexploded Israeli missile fired into Gaza during a previous war, according to an Israeli intelligence officer.

The Oct. 7 attacks showcased the patchwork arsenal that Hamas had stitched together. It included Iranian-made attack drones and North Korean-made rocket launchers, the types of weapons that Hamas is known to smuggle into Gaza through tunnels. Iran remains a major source of Hamas’s money and weapons.

But other weapons, like anti-tank explosives, RPG warheads, thermobaric grenades and improvised devices were repurposed Israeli arms, according to Hamas videos and remnants uncovered by Israel.

Rockets and missiles require huge quantities of explosive material, which officials say is the most difficult item to smuggle into Gaza.

Yet Hamas fired so many rockets and missiles on Oct. 7 that Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense system could not keep up. Rockets struck towns, cities and military bases, giving cover to the militants who stormed into Israel. One rocket hit a military base believed to house part of Israel’s nuclear missile program.

Hamas once relied on material like fertilizer and powdered sugar — which, pound for pound, are not as powerful as military-grade explosives — to build rockets. But since 2007, Israel has enforced a strict blockade, restricting the import of goods, including electronics and computer equipment, that could be used to make weapons.

That blockade and a crackdown on smuggling tunnels leading into and out of Gaza forced Hamas to get creative.

Its manufacturing abilities are now sophisticated enough to saw into the warheads of bombs weighing up to 2,000 pounds, to harvest the explosives and to repurpose them.

“They have a military industry in Gaza. Some of it is above ground, some of it is below ground, and they are able to manufacture a lot of what they need,” said Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser and head of its National Security Council before stepping down early last year.

One Western military official said that most of the explosives that Hamas is using in its war with Israel appear to have been manufactured using unexploded Israeli-launched munitions. One example, the official said, was an explosive booby trap that killed 10 Israeli soldiers in December.

The military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, has flaunted its manufacturing abilities for years. After a war in 2014 with Israel, it established engineering teams to collect unexploded munitions like howitzer rounds and American-made MK-84 bombs.

These teams work with the police’s explosive ordnance-disposal units, allowing people to safely return to their homes. They also help Hamas gear up for the next war.

“Our strategy aimed to repurpose these pieces, turning this crisis into an opportunity,” a Qassam Brigades commander told Al Jazeera in 2020.

Qassam’s media arm has released videos in recent years showing exactly what they were doing: sawing into warheads, scooping out explosive material — usually a powder — and melting it down to reuse.

In 2019, Qassam commandos discovered hundreds of munitions on two World War I-era British military vessels that had sunk off the coast of Gaza a century earlier. The discovery, Qassam boasted, allowed it to make hundreds of new rockets.

Early in the current war, a Qassam video showed militants assembling Yassin 105 rockets in a sunless manufacturing facility.

“The most essential way for Hamas to obtain weaponry is through domestic manufacture,” said Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Middle East policy analyst who grew up in Gaza. “It’s just a tweak of chemistry and you can make pretty much whatever you want.”

Israel restricts the mass importation of construction materials that can be used to build rockets and other weapons. But each new round of fighting leaves behind neighborhoods of rubble from which militants can pluck pipes, concrete and other valuable material, Mr. Alkhatib said.

Hamas cannot manufacture everything. Some things are easier to buy from the black market and smuggle into Gaza. Sinai, the largely uninhabited desert region between Israel, Egypt and the Gaza Strip, remains a hub for arms smuggling. Weapons from conflicts in Libya, Eritrea and Afghanistan have been discovered in Sinai, according to Israeli intelligence assessments.

According to two Israeli intelligence officials, at least a dozen small tunnels were still running between Gaza and Egypt before Oct. 7. A spokesman for the Egyptian government said its military had done its part to shut down tunnels on its side of the border. “Many of the weapons currently inside the Gaza Strip are the result of smuggling from within Israel,” the spokesman said in an email.

But the besieged streets of Gaza itself are increasingly a source of weapons.

Israel estimates that it has conducted at least 22,000 strikes on Gaza since Oct. 7. Each often involves multiple rounds, meaning tens of thousands of munitions have likely been dropped or fired — and thousands failed to detonate.

“Artillery, hand grenades, other munitions — tens of thousands of unexploded ordnance will be left after this war,” said Charles Birch, the head of the U.N. Mine Action Service in Gaza. These “are like a free gift to Hamas.”

How a Druze mom fooled Hamas into revealing its attack plans on Oct. 7, saving her town

Druze mother of four Nasreen Yousef helped to prevent a bloodbath in her community on the southern Gaza border on October 7 by using her native Arabic to convince terrorists that she would give them money and smuggle them out, while she gathered critical intelligence and passed it to the IDF.

Nasreen, her husband Eyad, and their four children live in the predominantly Jewish village of Moshav Yated, just four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the Israeli border with Gaza and the border with Egypt’s Sinai.

The Yousef home, the closest to Moshav Yated’s perimeter fence, was the first stop for Hamas terrorists ordered to attack the community in the early hours of October 7, she told Channel 12/Keshet TV, which first broke the story of her unlikely role in stopping the massacre.

The terrorists breaking into the small farming community were among thousands of Hamas operatives who crossed into Israel from Gaza that day, murdering some 1,200 in brutal circumstances, abducting 253, and shooting and burning their way through dozens of Gaza border villages and towns.

During the attack, Eyad Yousef joined the moshav’s security team despite a broken leg in a cast, while Nasreen, 46, and the children hid in their protected room at home, along with members of a neighboring family.

But when Eyad and friends caught a terrorist about to enter the family’s yard, Nasreen walked out of the house to try to find out how many more armed Hamas men were on their way.

Nasreen Yousef filmed by her daughter Shiran, 13, talking to Hamas terrorists near the yard of her home on Moshav Yated, close to the southern Gaza border, October 7, 2023.

“I told him, ‘Look me in the eyes, I’m not frightened of you,'” she recalled, adding that the young gunman had an expression on his face that she subsequently discovered was due to him being on drugs.

Nasreen managed to convince the gunman that she was on his side and would help to get him to safety, she told The Times of Israel.

He told her where in the perimeter fence he had entered through and revealed that many more fighters were on their way or already inside the moshav. Some were in a nearby greenhouse, others were in mobile homes, and a third cell was heading for a memorial site.

At around 10 a.m., Eyad and other moshav security team members found four Hamas operatives in the greenhouse and brought them to the Yousefs’ yard.

Nasreen told The Times of Israel, “I was in flipflops, running backward and forward with bits of string and cable ties to tie them up, with towels and floor rags for hoods.”

“I don’t know where I got the courage from, why I didn’t panic,” she went on. “As my husband got dressed that morning, he said it would be an honor to die in uniform, not in a protected room.  I knew that if they came, they’d kill us. I had to protect my home.”

At some point, three IDF officers came and asked if anyone spoke Arabic. Nasreen was able to tell them how the terrorists had come in, and then the cellphone of one of the terrorists rang.

“I look at the screen and I see Elayesh written in Arabic, and I answer the phone,” she said.

The man on the other end asked who she was. She said she replied, ‘I’m called Nasreen, I’m an Arab, you have nothing to be afraid of, I’m hiding the guys. I have a secret apartment.'”

During the 40-minute conversation, she would put the man on hold to translate to the officer standing next to her, she explained.

Pretending that she wanted to arrange enough food and water for the gunmen, she asked how many more were on their way, and from where. She told the caller that all the men with her had already eaten.

At some stage, the man on the phone became suspicious and asked to speak to one of the terrorists. She approached the one that he named.

“I said, ‘Listen, I’ll give you money, food, gold… I’ll put you into uniform and smuggle you out, but you have to say what I tell you to say,'” she continued.

The man cooperated, saying Nasreen was a “good woman” and that the men had been given food and water.

Nasreen then took back the phone and told the man on the other end that the IDF was everywhere, that she couldn’t keep the men safe for long, and again asked how they were coming through. He told her about an opening in the fence.

She told him she..had a hiding place where she could shelter terrorists from the IDF. The caller had no idea that a soldier from the IDF standing next to her and listening in.

'I told him I want to help them and told him to tell them to come to the pink house. I told him I will make sure that there is food and water, clothes, everything they need, and a place for them to hide.'

Nasreen said that the phone call with the terrorist ended with him saying, “Inshallah [if Allah wills it], tonight we’ll conquer Israel.”

..quickly passed on this information to the IDF soldiers so they could intercept them.

“I felt short of breath and ended the conversation,” she continued. “I told the officer that I couldn’t go on anymore. Even in my worst dream, I never thought I’d have a conversation with a Hamas member, in my language, which I’m not ashamed of, and that I’d manage to save a lot of people and stop all of those monsters.”

She went on, “If I hadn’t gone out and asked questions and spoken, probably half our community, or most of them, wouldn’t be around anymore.”

Eyad Yousef and a neighbor guarded the five terrorists, including the first one who entered, from Saturday morning until around 3 p.m. the following afternoon.

Nasreen made coffee to keep them awake through the night, and stood guard, moving from window to window in her house to look for additional infiltrators.

Armed with Nasreen’s intelligence, a Caracal army unit arrived on Sunday morning. At around lunchtime troops managed to catch 15 terrorists hiding in an orchard next door — those Nasreen had been told were in the mobile homes. They were taken to the orchard packing house. At roughly the same time, an army helicopter spotted a third cell, also of around 15 men, at the memorial site and killed them from the air.

But that was not before daughter Shiran, 13 — assuming she was going to be killed — had found her mother, at around lunchtime on Sunday, and tried to say goodbye.

When asked why she had left the protected room, Shiran told her mother that a close friend, Ido Hubara, 36, from nearby Kibbutz Sufa, had been murdered, while defending his community.

“Ido was like a brother to me, his family was like my family,” Nasreen said.

Having already heard from a friend that two other friends from nearby Kerem Shalom had also been killed, Nasreen said she went outside and started attacking the hooded and handcuffed terrorists.

“I found myself beating them with a pipe, swearing at them, I went crazy,” she said until she heard a Caracal soldier telling her not to go near them.

By 3 p.m. on that Sunday, Eyad Yousef was able to take a break to get his family and the neighbor’s family out of the protected room and to a safe place.

Nasreen said the terrorists were taken away by the Shin Bet security service only on Monday.

Host Guy Pines and his team at Channel 12/Keshet TV discovered the story by chance via Brothers in Arms, which was organizing a 12th birthday party for Sivan Yousef in the Eilat hotel where the family has been staying with other Gaza border evacuees since the war began.

While other girls her age had been celebrating bat mitzvah parties, Sivan feared nobody would come to her birthday celebration because she was Druze. A friend of Nasreen’s had reached out to Brothers in Arms, a protest group that shifted to organizing recovery efforts after October 7, to help.

Eyad Yousef’s job in the IDF — he is a sergeant major with 20 years of service under his belt — had taken the family southward away from the main concentration of Druze towns in northern Israel. Nasreen said that they were the only Druze family living in the Gaza border area, and had been warmly welcomed by Moshav Yated.

Only around 150,000 Druze live in the country, where they constitute 1.5 percent of Israeli households, according to Central Bureau of Statistics figures for 2022. But they stand out from the general Arab population for their loyalty to the Jewish state and brave service in the IDF.

Druze men are the only Israeli minorities, apart from members of the small Circassian community, to be conscripted into the IDF. Many Druze reach senior army positions, and hundreds have died — and continue to die during the current war — for the state.

But some still experience discrimination. On the day that this reporter spoke to Nasreen, a classmate had phoned Sivan and called her a “dirty Arab,” repeating a taunt that has become familiar to both Sivan and Shiran.

“Sivan’s self-confidence is rock bottom,” said Nasreen. “She cries all the time. The school said they would deal with it. I always hear that sentence.”

Nasreen, who worked as an administrator for the Clalit health fund until the war, has not worked since and tries to keep herself occupied cleaning the hotel room until the children come home. Her husband is fighting in Gaza.

Through tears, she explained that she had lost many friends on October 7, and suffered from recurring nightmares.

Psychologists were made available, but they came and left, and it was too hard to tell the same story over and over.

She said she had received two useful sessions of psychiatric support from a professional who had also gone elsewhere, and that since then, she had been “living on the anxiety pills she gave me.”

It was only the day before Channel 12 came to film that Shiran, 13, revealed that she had filmed her mother’s interactions with the terrorists through the protective room’s blinds. Those images have now made it around the world.

“I never wanted to tell the story. To have the media around. I don’t want people to call me a hero,” Nasreen said. “I just protected my home and my community.”

Hamas terrorist waits near four other fellow gunmen in the Yousef family’s yard at Moshav Yated, close to the southern Gaza border, October 7, 2023


Soldiers from the mixed-gender Caracal unit guard terrorists in a packing house close to the Yousef’s home in Moshav Yated, southern Israel, on October 7, 2023


Hamas terrorists caught in orchards lie bound and hooded outside a packing shed belonging to neighbors of the Yousef family on Moshav Yated, close to the southern Gaza border, October 8, 2023.


Nasreen Yousef filmed by her daughter Shiran, 13, talking to Hamas terrorists near the yard of her home on Moshav Yated, close to the southern Gaza border, October 7, 2023.


Documents showing terrorist were to be paid for the operation.

WSJ News Exclusive | U.S. Failed to Stop Drone Attack Because of Identification Mixup

The U.S. failed to stop a deadly attack on an American military outpost in Jordan because the enemy drone approached its target at the same time a U.S. drone was also returning to base, U.S. officials said Monday.

The return of the U.S. drone led to some confusion over whether the incoming drone was friend or foe, officials have concluded so far.

The enemy drone was launched from Iraq by a militia backed by Tehran, U.S. officials said. The outpost, Tower 22, sits in Jordan, near the borders of Iraq and Syria.

An American defense official said on Monday that the U.S. has yet to find evidence thus far that Iran directed the attack, which killed three U.S. troops and wounded dozens of others.

Sunday’s attack signaled an escalation in hostilities that have been growing since the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. President Biden said the U.S. would respond.

The U.S. is weighing strikes against militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as within Iran, the officials said. An attack on Iranian soil seemed like a less likely option, U.S. officials said.

In addition to determining how to respond to the drone attack on Tower 22, the administration is also considering strikes against Houthi targets in response to their attacks on commercial U.S. military ships. On Friday, a U.S. destroyer, the USS Carney, shot down a ballistic missile fired toward it from a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen, the Pentagon said, marking the second time the U.S. has announced that the group has targeted one of its military vessels.

The Biden administration has to weigh a response forceful enough to deter Iranian allies from conducting further attacks on U.S. forces and interests while avoiding getting bogged down in another war in the Middle East.

The Reagan administration attacked Iranian ships and offshore oil platforms in clashes with Tehran, but the U.S. military hasn’t previously attacked targets on Iranian territory.

Former officials have said the administration might choose from a variety of options short of striking Iranian territory, such as attacking Iran’s  paramilitary Quds Force personnel in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, hitting Iranian ships at sea or conducting a major attack on the Iranian-backed militia group that is assessed to be responsible.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Monday said the U.S. was still working to establish who was specifically responsible for the attack, but believed the perpetrators were supported by Kataib Hezbollah, which is one of Iran’s main militia allies and is based in Iraq with forces in Syria.

Biden would respond “in a time and manner of his own choosing” and “in a very consequential way,” Kirby said in an interview with CNN.

“We don’t want to see these attacks continue. And we want to make it clear that they’re unacceptable. We also want to make it clear that we’ll do what we have to do to protect our troops, our facilities, our national security interests in the region,” Kirby said. “But we don’t seek a war with Iran. We’re not looking for a wider conflict in the Middle East.”

Iran has denied any link to the drone strike. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani on Monday called any allegations of Iranian involvement “baseless accusations” designed to draw the U.S. back into another war in the Middle East.

“The responsibility for the consequences of provoking allegations against Iran lies with those who bring up such baseless claims,” Kanaani told reporters in Tehran.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella of pro-Iranian militias, claimed responsibility for attacks on three U.S. bases in Syria, including Al Tanf, which is close to the attacked outpost near the Iraqi and Jordanian borders.

A Telegram channel close to pro-Iranian militias said Sunday’s attack marked retaliation for a U.S. strike in the south of Baghdad a few days ago, during which two militia members were killed.

The killing of three American service members significantly raises the stakes for the U.S. In an election year, the Biden administration will be under even more pressure to act robustly.

“The breadth of the spectrum of next moves by the U.S. in concert with its allies has widened,” said Andrew Borene, a former senior official at the National Counterterrorism Center and now executive director at Flashpoint, an intelligence firm. “There is risk in not doing enough, and seeing more attacks on U.S. forces and international commercial shipping, and there is also clearly a risk in escalating a conflict with Iran itself.”

For years, Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq have sought to drive out American troops from the Middle East. Since Oct. 7, Iran’s network of armed groups across the region has stepped up attacks on Israeli and American interests, aiming to impose a cost for the war in Gaza.

Even if the U.S. hits back at the militias in Iraq and Syria, the militant groups are likely to continue escalating their campaign against U.S. forces in the region, said Hamdi Malik, an expert studying Shiite militias with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank.

“Any change in behavior can only happen as a result of exacting costs on the Iranian regime itself rather than the militias in the region. At the moment they’re very comfortable,” Malik said. “Imagine what they’re thinking. At the moment, they have managed to entangle both their main enemies, the United States and Israel, in a few conflicts in the region.”

Lebanese militia Hezbollah has exchanged hundreds of missiles and rockets with the Israeli military across the border and lost more than 150 fighters in the skirmishes. The Iranian-backed Houthi group in Yemen has attacked vessels in the Red Sea, disrupting global shipping.

Iranian militias in Iraq have also claimed responsibility for recent ballistic missile attacks on the U.S. Al-Asad Airbase that caused minor injuries to American and coalition personnel.

Such attacks have appeared designed to avoid crossing red lines that might prompt direct military retaliation against Tehran itself. As clashes have intensified, however, and Israel has refused demands by Iran and its allies to cease fighting in Gaza, Iran and the U.S. have gradually been drawn deeper into the conflict.

The U.S. has responded to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea with airstrikes on Yemeni soil, most recently on Saturday. Two Navy SEALs were lost at sea during an operation to seize a vessel carrying Iranian-made missile parts bound for Houthi rebels in Yemen. Earlier this month, an Israeli airstrike killed five military advisers with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria.

For decades, Iran has provided the financial and military backbone of a network of loyal militias across the Middle East that serves to broaden its military footprint and push back against American and Israeli influence. The groups include Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq and Syria, and Palestinian groups such as Hamas.

While funded and armed by Tehran, those groups have domestic agendas of their own and operate with some measure of autonomy, which allows Tehran to distance itself from their actions, and largely avoid any blowback.

During the Iraq war, Iranian-backed militias there killed more than 600 U.S. soldiers, according to the Justice Department, without prompting direct American retaliation on Iranian soil. A 2020 U.S. airstrike that killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force and the architect of its foreign alliance of militias, happened while he was on a trip to Baghdad.

After Sunday’s drone strike, Revolutionary Guard members and Afghan militia fighters under the organization’s command in Syria fled from three locations near the eastern city of Deir Ezzour, fearing potential U.S. strikes, according to Syrian officials and government advisers.

“I don’t expect any strikes in Iran,” an Iranian diplomat said. “But there will be attacks on pro-Iranian militias and that will fuel a cycle of revenge that could spiral out of control.”

Iran-backed militias have carried out more than 150 attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria since mid-October.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military returned to operations in areas of northern Gaza, from where it had pulled out most of its troops. Israel urged Palestinians to evacuate from parts of Gaza City and northern Gaza to the central part of the strip. The Israeli military had largely shifted focus to Khan Younis in the south of the enclave, where Israel believes Hamas’s leadership is hiding underground, but Israeli officials said the group was trying to re-establish civilian control with its police force in areas of northern Gaza.

Over the past day, the military said it had killed armed militants in skirmishes and used warplanes to bomb antitank posts, tunnel shafts and observation posts used by Hamas.

Escalating Militia Attacks on U.S. Troops Risk Washington-Tehran Confrontation

When a drone laden with explosives was found late last month lodged in the upper floors of U.S. barracks in Iraq, Pentagon officials quickly realized how close the suspected militia-launched weapon came to killing American personnel.

In this case, the explosives failed to detonate, and there were no reports of injuries. But as the number of these attacks escalates, so too does the risk of a deadly incident that will demand a response from the U.S. military, edging it closer to direct confrontation with Iranian-backed groups it suspects are responsible.

“They are aiming to kill,” a U.S. defense official said. “We have just been lucky.”

The attack on U.S. troops at the al-Asad air base highlights the dilemma facing the Biden administration as it attempts to deter Iranian-backed militias while avoiding conflict with Iran or antagonizing the U.S.-allied government in Iraq, where many of the attacks were launched.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an unannounced visit to Baghdad, saying it focused in part on sending a message to those actors who threaten U.S. personnel in the region or elsewhere in the world.

“I’ve been very clear that attacks, threats, coming from militia that are aligned to the rounds are totally unacceptable,” Blinken told reporters. “We will take every necessary step to protect our people. We’re not looking for conflict with Iran. We’ve made that very clear, but we’ll do what’s necessary to protect our personnel.”

The Pentagon confirmed the barracks attack, saying it highlighted “the potential danger these drone and rocket attacks by Iranian-backed proxy groups present to U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, which is why we take them so seriously and have taken action in response.”

Hours after the drone landed on the barracks, the U.S. said it launched strikes on two bases in eastern Syria that it believed were used by Iranian groups, the first U.S. offensive military response to a wave of drone and rocket attacks on troops based in Iraq and Syria.

But those U.S. strikes—which the Pentagon said hit a weapons and an ammunition storage facility in Abu Kamal, Syria, near the border with Iraq—don’t appear to have deterred groups from launching attacks. The U.S. has described the strikes as self-defense measures separate from its military support of Israel. There have been at least 11 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since then.

The Pentagon declined to say why it struck targets in Syria and not Iraq, where a majority of attacks have occurred, and where it maintains U.S. troops and contractors.

A defense official said the U.S. decision to hit the two Syrian sites was intended to send a message to militia groups in the region that the U.S. would respond to threats to its forces, while mitigating the risk of escalation.

In all, there have been at least 31 attacks on U.S. installations in Iraq and Syria over the past two weeks, the Pentagon said, in what officials have described as a response by Iranian-backed militias to the U.S. support of Israel since it came under Hamas assault on Oct. 7. At least 21 troops have been injured in these attacks, according to the Pentagon.

While several groups have claimed responsibility for the attacks on U.S. forces, they appeared to be coming from militant groups affiliated with Iran, the Pentagon has said, without specifying which groups.

Defense officials have said they believe the attacks on U.S. troops may be intended to force the U.S. to divert resources from Israel to protect its forces or to send a message that the region opposes U.S. support for Israel.

The U.S. hasn’t said how it would respond if a significant number of troops were harmed by such an attack, something officials both in the region and at the Pentagon said they fear. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. in 2019 launched a strike on three sites in Iraq and two in Syria targeting an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia it blamed for a rocket attack that killed an American contractor and wounded four U.S. troops.

Troops of the 98th Division raided an underground tunnel located under the Bani Suheila cemetery in the heart of Khan Yunis,  the IDF reported on Monday. While inspecting the tunnel, the fighters found explosives and sliding doors and eliminated terrorists who were inside.

Inside the tunnel, the Israeli forces unearthed the office of the eastern Battalion commander from the Khan Yunis Brigade, from where he directed the October 7 attacks, according to the IDF.

In addition, troops found operation rooms, a battalion combat war room, and bedrooms of senior officials of the Hamas terrorist organization.

The tunnel is part of an underground labyrinth dug by Hamas terrorists. It is about a kilometer long, some 20 meters deep, and contains several complexes. the IDF noted.

Tunnel destroyed by engineering forces
At the end of the examination, the tunnel was destroyed by engineering forces.

Lt.-Col. Barak, operation branch officer at the 98th Division, said of the find, “We are in the center of the town of Bani Suheila, here in the Gaza Strip, right below the cemetery of Bani Suheila, and we are actually standing at the entrance to a cynical Hamas tunnel, which we are going to enter, you pass under the entire cemetery complex.

"From here is a wide tunnel with rooms, with electricity and running water and all the enabling infrastructure. Behind me is a kitchen complex. The kitchen we are in includes all the appliances.

"We see a wide kitchen in which those cursed terrorists planned to stay during the fighting. This space under the cemetery, tens of meters underground, would have enabled them to live long-term here.

"We know now that in the Guardians of the Walls Operation, this is where the seniors sat and actually managed the fighting," he added.

"We arrived at this complex that is under the cemetery, the same cynical use of a tunnel under a cemetery, just like the same cynical use of tunnels and trapped compounds – in mosques, In schools, in kindergartens."

Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ Faces Moment of Truth After Attacks on Israel, U.S. Base

Weeks after Israel invaded Gaza in response to Hamas’s deadly attack on Oct. 7, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei convened a meeting of militia leaders across an alliance Tehran calls “the axis of resistance.”

The attack, which Khamenei had publicly praised as an “epic victory,” marked a crescendo of four decades of Iranian efforts to train and arm a network of nonstate militant groups as a way to threaten its enemies and extend its influence in the Middle East.

But behind closed doors, the Iranian leader told senior Hamas representatives, along with Lebanese, Iraqi, Yemeni and other Palestinian militia leaders, that Tehran had no intention of directly entering the conflict and widening the war, according to two high-ranking officials from Hamas and two from Hezbollah. Side battles, he told the delegates, risked distracting the world from Israel’s devastating incursions in Gaza. The message: Hamas was on its own.

Now the axis faces a moment of truth. As Iran’s allies stoke even more fires across the region—from attacks on shipping in the Red Sea to Sunday’s drone strike that killed three U.S. troops in Jordan—they are pushing their benefactor closer to the brink of a direct conflict with Washington that it has long sought to avoid.

Iranian military and financial power forms the backbone of the alliance, but Tehran doesn’t exert full command and control over it. Not every member shares Iran’s Shiite ideology, and all the groups have domestic agendas that sometimes conflict with Tehran’s. Some operate in geographically isolated areas, making it tricky for Iran to provide weapons, advisers and training. That includes Hamas, which is a Sunni movement, or the Houthis in Yemen, whose attacks on shipping have upended global trade flows and triggered U.S. and U.K. counterstrikes.

U.S. officials blamed Sunday’s drone strike on an Iran-backed group, and the White House on Monday said it believed the perpetrators were supported by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian militia ally based in Iraq, with forces in Syria. President Biden said he was weighing how to retaliate. Iran rejected any involvement.

The approach has allowed Tehran to avoid sweeping retaliation from Israel and the U.S. that might destabilize its clerical rule,
said Norman Roule, a former Middle East expert with the Central Intelligence Agency. Iranian aggression, he said, “now invariably involves actions that are attributable to Tehran but which Iran can deny sufficiently.”

The Oct. 7 attack is testing that model like never before. In dealing the biggest single blow ever to Israel—killing more than 1,200 people, most of them civilians—the assault has triggered a massive Israeli military campaign aimed at eradicating Hamas. Israel has laid waste to swaths of the Gaza Strip and targeted Hamas leaders, most brazenly in an airstrike in Beirut in January that killed Saleh al-Arouri, the group’s political deputy, who weeks earlier had participated in the meeting in Tehran with Khamenei.

That has created a major dilemma for Tehran: Come to the defense of its Palestinian ally, risking a regional war that could engulf Iran proper, or stand aside and watch the potential decimation of a vital partner in the alliance?

“What happens if Hamas is completely eliminated? And then, if they are eliminated, would not that mean that the balance of power has shifted to Israel’s favor?” a senior Hezbollah official said. He described the Oct. 7 assault as a “catastrophic success.”

The attack served Tehran’s interests, pausing a diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia—another regional rival—and allowing Iran to cast itself as the champion of the Palestinian cause.

Iran’s leadership moved to head off any retaliation by Israel or the U.S. by swiftly denying any involvement in the planning or execution of the assault. Hamas and Hezbollah officials offered conflicting accounts of Iran’s possible prior knowledge. The Wall Street Journal has reported that some Hamas and Hezbollah officials said Iranian security officials greenlighted the attack, noting that others questioned that account.

In either case, the attack couldn’t have happened without many years of Iranian support for Hamas in the form of weapons, money and training, said Afshon Ostovar, an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who specializes in Iran’s military ventures in the Middle East.

“Whether they move in lockstep in this action or that action is less important than how they move collectively over time,” Ostovar said. “Iran armed them to do this: to take the war to Israel in a way that Iran couldn’t.”

The axis rises

Iran-backed groups form a land bridge across the Middle East and connect in an alliance that Tehran calls the ‘Axis of Resistance.’ Here’s what to know about the alliance that includes Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

The axis of resistance was born out of Iran’s quest to expand its military and ideological influence across the Middle East after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The network of extremist militant groups it built took advantage of weak states and instability to gain military and, often, political power. Spanning Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and the Palestinian territories, the alliance allowed Iran relative freedom of movement from Tehran to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

In 1982 the Quds Force, an arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, began fostering relations with young Lebanese militants during the chaos of Lebanon’s civil war, training and arming them to harass Israeli soldiers and wage guerrilla warfare. The militia that emerged, Hezbollah, became Iran’s most potent ally, training Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as Iran funneled financial aid and weapons to them.

Qassem Soleimani, a charismatic Iranian commander, took over the Quds Force in the late 1990s. He channeled money, weapons and military advisers to prop up a string of Shiite militias in Iraq after the U.S. invaded the country in 2003. The militias killed more than 600 U.S. soldiers, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Soleimani rose to prominence across the region as the mastermind of Iran’s shadow wars.

As Soleimani won the trust of marginalized Shia groups in Iraq, he also deepened Iran’s relations with Hamas, which stretched back to the early 1990s. The Palestinian group needed a foreign sponsor willing to circumvent the international sanctions imposed on it after winning elections in Gaza in 2006. Iran helped smuggle rockets and other military equipment to Hamas through tunnels from Egypt. After Egypt cracked down, the Quds Force helped Hamas develop domestic weapons capabilities.

Iran’s allies, while dependent on Tehran, all had agendas of their own, which at times tore at the seams of Soleimani’s axis. Yemeni Houthi rebels seized the country’s capital, San’a, against Iranian advice. Iraqi militia leader Qais al-Khazali once defied Iranian orders not to attack U.S. forces, saying “the Americans occupy our country, not yours.” Hezbollah, as it became one of Lebanon’s largest political parties, was forced to balance voter demands at home with Soleimani’s plans for the militia abroad.

During Syria’s civil war, Soleimani deployed Hezbollah, along with militias of Iraqis, Afghans and others, to help defeat a rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad. That put Soleimani’s forces at odds with Hamas, which supported the mostly Sunni uprisings of the Arab Spring. Hamas trained Syrian rebels in guerrilla-warfare tactics, and its members were among the many who disappeared into Assad’s prison system.

Differences were ironed out after Yahya Sinwar, a senior Hamas official, took the helm in Gaza in 2017 following his release from Israeli jail in a 2011 prisoner swap. Sinwar, who according to his former Israeli interrogator had reached out to Iran while in prison, shifted Hamas’s focus in Syria and dispatched a delegation to Tehran to mend ties. Hamas also held a public reconciliation meeting with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, though some friction persisted between the two groups.

By pulling Hamas closer, Iran was trying to turn the page on the sectarian wars in Syria and Iraq and gain legitimacy across the region as an advocate of the Palestinians, said Mohanad Hage Ali, deputy director of research at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, who has studied Iran’s network of militias for nearly three decades.

The road to Oct. 7

In early 2020, Soleimani was killed in a U.S. drone strike outside Baghdad’s international airport. The U.S. and Israel hoped the death of Soleimani, who had assumed an almost mythical status among his followers, would curtail the Quds Force as a regional power. That didn’t happen.

Soleimani’s successor and longtime deputy, Esmail Qaani, was less well-known to the public, but he quickly stepped into the role.  

“The Quds Force is an enterprise and he is the CEO. At the end of the day, he’s the guy who pays their salaries,” Ostovar said of Qaani.

Under Qaani, Iran increasingly began to promote the idea of a unified front with its militia allies. Palestinian groups became more closely aligned internally as well. Under Hamas leadership, nearly a dozen Palestinian groups began conducting wargames exercises, overseen and publicized on a channel on the Telegram messaging app. Israeli intelligence noticed the exercises but didn’t take them seriously, according to current and former Israeli security officials.

In May 2021, Israeli police forces stormed the compound of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, firing tear gas and stun grenades after clashes with Palestinians protesting the eviction of residents in the eastern part of the city. The conflagration at Al Aqsa, a mosque that is central to both Shia and Sunni Muslims, prompted widespread regional condemnation of Israel.

In a speech broadcast on Al Jazeera, Sinwar warned “the multitudes of our people and nation will set out, cross the borders, and swarm like a flood to uproot your entity.” Sinwar added that Hamas was grateful to Iran in providing money, weapons, and expertise over the years, adding: “They have supported us in everything.”

In late 2021, Hamas officials met with Hezbollah leader Nasrallah and his deputy, Naim Qassem, in Beirut to discuss ways to retaliate against Israel for the storming of Al Aqsa, according to the two Hamas and two Hezbollah officials. Iranian security officials didn’t participate in the meeting, the officials said.

Meanwhile, animosity between Israel and Iran was heating up. In May 2022, an Iranian commander in charge of a Quds Force unit tasked with kidnapping and killing Israelis abroad was shot dead on the street in Tehran.

His was the latest in a string of assassinations in Iran presumed to be the work of Israel, including the killing two years earlier of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, regarded as the father of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. Israel hasn’t confirmed or denied any involvement.

The rash of assassinations piled pressure on the Quds Force to respond. That summer, officials from Hamas, the Quds Force and Hezbollah met regularly to draft scenarios to attack Israel, including one from Gaza, one from south Lebanon and one from Syria, the latter of which was quickly ruled out, according to the two Hamas and two Hezbollah officials. A fourth option involved simultaneous infiltrations from south Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, the officials said. Another senior Hamas official said general plans for action against Israel were discussed, but no timing was set for an attack.

In the spring of last year, five Revolutionary Guard commanders were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Syria, among them an adviser to Qaani. The Quds Force commander held a series of meetings with militant leaders across the region with the aim of launching a fresh wave of attacks on Israeli targets, the Journal reported at the time. One of the meetings, which was also reported in Lebanese and Israeli media, was held at the Iranian Embassy in Beirut and attended by Qaani, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh and al-Arouri, his deputy.

Hezbollah had come to play a central role in coordinating activities in the alliance, particularly since the killing of Soleimani. It had helped the Revolutionary Guard train militias to fight Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, where military bases usually housed Iranians on one floor and Hezbollah on another, a Hezbollah security insider said. It also allowed Palestinian militants to fire at Israel from territory Hezbollah controlled in southern Lebanon.

“This year, more than ever, we have seen the axis of the resistance be strong, capable and cohesive, as we have seen on the ground in recent weeks,” the Hezbollah chief said in a speech last spring after Palestinian militants fired a barrage of more than 30 rockets at Israel, the largest such attack from Lebanese soil since the country’s 2006 war with Hezbollah, although his group claimed not to have been informed beforehand.  

Iran, meanwhile, was growing concerned about a broader diplomatic realignment in the Middle East, after Israel in 2020 had signed a watershed agreement known as the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to normalize diplomatic relations. The deal was meant to reset regional power dynamics and sideline Tehran. An even bigger agreement was now in the works between Israel and Saudi Arabia in what would be the most momentous Middle East peace deal in a generation.

Iran worried that Israel’s deals with Arab nations would allow it to expand its influence in the region. In internal discussions, the Quds Force vowed to spoil normalization efforts, according to an Iranian official and an adviser to the Guard. Quds officials feared a rapprochement would limit the axis in carrying out attacks on the Arab Peninsula or the Red Sea, where the Houthis and the Revolutionary Guard routinely have hijacked vessels and disrupted global shipping, said the Iranian official and the Guard adviser.

By September, Israeli intelligence began to detect an uptick in hostility from Palestinian militants, including Hamas, which posted a video showing a drill for a commando operation that included an amphibious attack using divers. Hamas even constructed a replica of an Israeli kibbutz and trained to storm it in full view of Israeli security forces—a scenario eerily similar to what would happen on Oct. 7.

Still, Israel remained convinced that the real threat was on its northern border. “We could see these exercises, but they repeated them every two months. We thought this was just a statement reiterating their stand as a resistance movement,” said an Israeli official.

In a speech on Oct. 3, Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, warned Arab governments trying to mend ties with Israel that they were making a mistake. Khamenei told an Islamic unity conference in Tehran that “resistance forces throughout the region” would eradicate Israel. “Defeat awaits them,” he said.

The attack
In the early hours of the morning on Oct. 7, a barrage of at least 3,000 rockets rained over Israel in the span of about 20 minutes.

Nearly 3,000 Palestinian militants, most of them Hamas members, breached the barrier from Gaza on pickup trucks, motorcycles and in paragliders. Heavily armed and in black fatigues, they entered kibbutzim in the south and gunned down unarmed civilians, recording the atrocities with body cameras. They burned Israeli military vehicles and stopped cars on highways, executing drivers and passengers. At an outdoor music festival near Re’im, militants embarked on a massacre and killed at least 360 participants. When they left, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members took more than 200 hostages with them into Gaza. It was the most serious breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

The scope and scale of the attack left governments around the world wondering how Hamas managed to blow through the defenses of one of the Middle East’s most powerful militaries, despite having been under a strict blockade for nearly two decades.

American intelligence agencies maintain that while Iran likely knew that Hamas was planning operations against Israel, it didn’t know the precise timing or scope of the Oct. 7 attack. Israeli intelligence agencies also say they don’t have evidence of direct Iranian involvement in the attack.

The Journal reported that Iranian security officials had given the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut the week before, on Oct. 2, citing senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials, who also said officers of the Revolutionary Guard had worked with Hamas since August to devise the attack. Those officials and an additional high-ranking Hamas member continue to stand by those assertions.

Other Hamas and Hezbollah officials, however, have contended that all details about the attack, including the scope and the date, were kept tightly under wraps by the military wing of Hamas.

“Everyone was aware of the need to carry out an extraordinary action,” Husam Badran, a senior member of Hamas’s political wing based in Doha, said in an interview. But “details of the military operation were up to the Qassam Brigades,” he said, referring to the military wing.

Some parties to the alliance have an interest in expanding the war by drawing Iran into it, while others, including Iran itself, seek to prevent further escalations. The compartmentalized nature of the alliance members’ interactions may mean that even senior officials don’t always have a complete picture of events.

The aftermath
While Iran initially hailed the Oct. 7 attack as a tremendous victory for its axis of resistance, its leaders quickly distanced themselves from any notion that it had been involved.

Other allies also denied prior knowledge. Hezbollah chief Nasrallah was angered by news of the attack, according to a Western official who speaks to senior Hezbollah figures. After remaining silent for nearly a month, Nasrallah delivered a speech insisting that Hezbollah hadn’t taken part. He said the time wasn’t right for Hezbollah to wage all-out war with Israel but warned that calculation could change.

The U.S. warned Iran, publicly and through the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which handles U.S. interests in the country, that it would retaliate against any aggression. Iran told the U.S. that it couldn’t control how its allied groups across the region would react to the Israeli offensive in Gaza, said a person briefed on the Swiss backchannel, and that, “those groups may take it upon themselves to escalate if there is no cease fire.”

Quds Force commander Qaani shuttled between Iran, Syria and Lebanon to try to keep actions by Iran’s allies from spiraling out of control, according to a Western security official, a senior Lebanese official and the Revolutionary Guard adviser.

From Lebanon, Palestinian groups and Hezbollah shot missiles and small-arms fire at northern Israel, hitting population centers, forcing Israel to evacuate towns and displacing tens of thousands from the border area.

The Houthis in Yemen, in a rare intervention against Israel, fired rockets at the southern Israeli city of Eilat and attacked Israeli-linked vessels in the Red Sea.

In recent weeks, the Houthis have launched fresh attacks against commercial ships around Yemen, including a missile strike on the Gibraltar Eagle, a U.S. bulk carrier. The U.S. and the U.K. have responded with airstrikes on Houthi positions inside Yemen. The Biden administration said it would again designate the Houthis as a terrorist organization, following years off its terror list.

The exchanges have rattled global markets, upended international shipping routes and pulled the Biden administration into a wider conflict that risks exacerbating regional tensions. Still, the calculated skirmishes have steered clear of a direct confrontation between Iran and the U.S., stopping short of a full-blown regional war.

After the deadly drone strike on U.S. troops in Jordan Sunday, the Biden administration said it would respond forcefully against the perpetrators.

“But we don’t seek a war with Iran,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told CNN Monday. “We’re not looking for a wider conflict in the Middle East.”

Analysts say that the Hamas attack went against the way Iran for four decades has kept the conflict against its enemies at low intensity to avoid retaliation that could topple the Islamic Republic.

“Iran has survived for so long, unlike Saddam Hussein and other authoritarian regimes, because they understand the balance of power in the region,” said Hage Ali, of Carnegie in Beirut. He called Iran’s strategy one of “long-term attrition.”

The attack has also hurt Iranian interests. A monthslong truce collapsed between Iranian-backed militias and U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. held up the delivery of $6 billion in funds it had parked in Qatar as part of a prisoner swap that was completed in September, and any hopes Tehran had of further relief from sanctions imposed on its nuclear program appear extremely slim for now.

“They got trapped at their own game,” said the Western security official.

When Hamas political chief Haniyeh and his deputy Arouri in November traveled to Tehran for a meeting with Khamenei, they were told the Islamic Republic supported Hamas but didn’t play any role in the militants’ surprise attack on Israel, according to Iranian state media.

Haniyeh and Arouri left the meeting disappointed but provided Iran with a list of weapons they might need if the war continues beyond six months, including antitank missiles and shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, Hamas officials said.

Shortly after the meeting, according to senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials, a larger gathering of Iran’s allies took place in Tehran. Attendees included Haniyeh and Arouri as well as Quds Force commander Qaani, senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safi al-Din, Houthi ambassador to Tehran Ibrahim al-Dulaimi and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah.

In the meeting, Khamenei told the group he was aware of growing discontent with Nasrallah’s speech saying the time wasn’t right for a wider conflict, the Hamas and Hezbollah officials said. Khamenei defended the strategy of avoiding an all-out war, saying that he didn’t want to take away attention from the Palestinian struggle, which he said was playing out in Hamas’s favor despite the continuing losses in Gaza, the officials said.

Iran had built its axis of resistance to ensure its own survival, not that of Hamas. While the Palestinian group is an important ally, Iran wasn’t going to risk the destruction of its strongest partner, Hezbollah, to save it, said Emile Hokayem, an expert on security and nonstate actors in the Middle East with the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“They’re not going to deploy Hezbollah in a war the Iranians don’t see as existential,” he said.