What does Hamas look like in the Haaretz investigation?

It was thought that 7 October might have come to an end last year, when an agreement for the release of all living hostages and the return of the bodies of the dead had been reached between Israel and Hamas, with various mediators from the United States involved. Instead, that horrific day for Israel has continued to loom large over the country’s daily life and has become a spectre and a dead end in the election campaign leading up to the vote on 27 October. This was evident this week in an article published by the daily newspaper Haaretz. 

The exclusive report, which details the warning that Benjamin Netanyahu is said to have received from the President of the United Arab Emirates, has added to the torment of an election campaign that has become a barometer of the divisions in the country, the pent-up anger and the fears that have shown no sign of abating for three years. A continuous process of self-analysis, a heart-wrenching sense of guilt verging on self-flagellation, is reshaping the narrative of what happened that day: a massacre perpetrated by Hamas, which intended to target Israeli citizens and catch them napping in their beds or out in the Negev desert at dawn – the young people at the Supernova festival, in fact, were an unexpected boon to the Hamas terrorists’ plans for slaughter; seeing so many sleepless youths, they paused and delayed their assault on some of the kibbutzim. One of the problems with the investigation by Haaretz – a newspaper staunchly opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is that, in its efforts to demonise the Prime Minister, it takes a lenient view of the terrorist organisation and its leader, Yahya Sinwar, who is portrayed as committed to economic negotiations, eager to conclude them before the attack, and inclined to release the hostages almost immediately after the pogrom. Michael Milshtein, a former intelligence officer and head of the Forum for Palestinian Studies at the Moshe Dayan Centre, has spent his professional life studying Hamas and, on reading the investigation, “I couldn’t help but ask myself some questions”, he admits in an interview with Il Foglio. His questions do not concern the Prime Minister’s responsibility: “I believe the core of the report is true – that a warning from the Emirates did reach him, concerning something worrying that was happening in Gaza. But I doubt that Bin Zayed knew the details.” For Milshtein, it is not reasonable to believe that Sinwar tried to communicate his intentions to Israel; “I believe rather that the warnings that reached the Emirates were a reconstruction put together by Mohammed Dahlan – a former Fatah official, Sinwar’s university friend, who fled the Strip after becoming a target of the Islamists – who, whilst speaking with Hamas leaders, began to harbour suspicions and passed them on to Bin Zayed. This is the account I believe to be the most accurate; I do not think Sinwar wanted to make his intentions known to Israel.” Milshtein starts from a simple premise: the events of 7 October were not organised in two weeks or a month. Sinwar did not suddenly begin planning how to kill as many Israelis as possible when Netanyahu stopped paying attention to the ceasefire negotiations in the Gaza Strip; ‘he spent years devising every single element and now, according to the investigation, did he want Israel to know and manage to thwart his plan? And he sends word of this to the Emirates? For Sinwar, 7 October was the mission of his life, the offensive bearing his signature; is it perhaps reasonable to believe that he suddenly wanted to abandon it for the sake of Gaza’s economic relations, for the workers’ contracts?’ Sinwar is not the sort of man to send a message intended to cause the failure of his destructive offensive – one he had thought through so carefully, spoken about and promoted. “From the documents smuggled out of Gaza, it’s clear that workers were certainly not the focus of his attention. Some parts of the article are strange; at times they sound ridiculous.” It’s a mindset, it’s about building a career: “Sinwar was working for jihad, not for economic agreements.” He was patient, he waited, he threw Israel into turmoil and caused a war that destroyed the Strip. “He planned everything for ideological reasons; a terrorist thinks like that – he doesn’t look for reasons to be stopped, he doesn’t give up his war for the sake of economic well-being.” According to the investigation, even the head of the Shabak intelligence service had been alerted before Netanyahu, yet he would not have done anything anyway. It was only at that point that Bin Zayed decided to call the Prime Minister: “The Emirates knew something; they had more hunches than hard evidence. It is unthinkable that a head of the Shabak would remain inactive in the face of a strong warning.”

The entire Middle East is closely following this election campaign, which is proceeding smoothly; even leaders in the Arab world have their preferences: “They would like a different government, even though they know that foreign policy would remain the same, but Netanyahu is seen as a source of instability, particularly domestically. No one will champion a different foreign policy; they know this. Preferring anyone as long as it’s not the current Prime Minister means, for the Arab world, seeking the least worst solution.” What is clear, not least from the direct channel established by Bin Zayed with Netanyahu, is that no one wants an unstable Israel right now, “except for the terrorist gangs in Gaza”.