It may be too early to build a complete picture of the reasons that led to the recent attack launched by the Hamas group against Israeli villages near Gaza. However, one thing remains certain: the attack occurred at a time and in a place that the Israeli government did not expect. And the immediate question was way? To whom one of the answers adopted by Netanyahu's team was "the failure of the intelligence agencies."
However, this answer, even if it contains a grain of truth, cannot divert attention away from a greater failure: the inability of Israeli leaders to properly analyze the intelligence available to them. It now appears that Hamas may have carefully hatched a plan to anesthetize the Israelis regarding about the imminent threat coming from Gaza.
In this regard, Major General Yahya Safavi, a security advisor to “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei in Tehran, said: "Hamas planned the attack for two years, and wanted to divert Israeli attention away from Gaza". However, he did not say whether the Iranians were involved in this planning, but he hinted that they were aware of the plot.
On several occasions, Ali Khamenei has publicly called for “the need to revitalize resistance” in the West Bank. On two occasions, Jordanian police confiscated arms shipments and money sent from Iran via Iraq. Subsequently, a series of clashes in Jenin succeeded in convincing the Israelis that a “new front” was forming in the West Bank.
On the northern front, Iran transferred some Hezbollah units from Syria to Lebanon, a move that the newspapers claimed was aimed at confronting the threats of ISIS. For the first time since the 2006 ceasefire agreement, active officers of the Revolutionary Guard appeared in southern Lebanon, under the apparent reason of friendly visits.
In an effort to pretend that something was being prepared in Lebanon, General Ismail Qaani, commander of the Quds Force, visited Beirut twice to hold what Iranian media described as “consultations” with Hezbollah leaders.
In addition to the above, Hamas orchestrated another trick by leaking information to Israeli informants about the existence of “special plans” by the “Islamic Jihad Movement for the Liberation of Palestine” to attack Israel with Iranian support.
Relations between Tehran and Hamas were marred by tension, when the latter decided to support armed groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Therefore, in 2015, Hamas and the Quds Force fought a nine-month war near Damascus.
This page was closed in 2019, when Hamas sent a high-level delegation to Tehran. However, even at that time, Tehran did not fully trust Hamas - a fact that the Palestinian group's leaders exploited in their plan to deceive the Israelis.
Hamas' scheme included other elements, including its proposal to double work permits inside Israel for Gaza residents. Prior to the latest attack, about 25,000 Gazans used such permits. At the same time, Israel shortened the delay in transferring to Hamas customs duties collected on goods entering the Strip.
Reports, which could not be independent, indicated that Hamas, through a complex network of informants, provided “valuable intelligence” to Israel about Islamic Jihad and emerging armed groups in the West Bank. This reinforces the narrative that Hamas was trying to build a new character, different of a guerrilla group.
To reinforce the narrative that Hamas was looking forward to a long period of calm, its senior leaders moved their families to Qatar, where figures like Khaled Meshaal, who remains an icon in the eyes of many Gazans, and Haniyeh have lived for years.
In addition, those who planned the hoax took advantage of another factor. The issue of inciting religious groups against secular opponents may have become part of the collective memory of Israeli intelligence.
This trick was used in Lebanon with the emergence of armed Shiite groups to confront and ultimately eliminate the presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the south. The fact that Tehran controls Hezbollah is also an advantage. Because Iran as a state must respond to both conciliatory and hostile moves by an adversary, while a non-state group, such as Fatah or many other Palestinian armed groups, will always be unpredictable.
Inside Gaza, Israel tolerated the establishment of Hamas, because by portraying Israel's enemies as a group of religious fanatics wishing to impose their faith aligns better with international public opinion, which may sympathize with non-religious groups simply demanding "the right to self-determination."
Whether this was a hoax or not, what remains certain is that Israeli leaders were misled into thinking that Gaza was calm, and that future threats would come from the West Bank and Lebanon. For this reason, Israel reduced the force formed to confront any threat emanating from Gaza, while increasing the number of forces in the West Bank and close to the Lebanese ceasefire line.