JERUSALEM (VINnews) — The Washington Post reported Sunday that in the years prior to the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Hamas leaders planned a “far deadlier” wave of terror attacks, potentially including an attempt to topple a Tel Aviv skyscraper-
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The report said that plans included using trains, boats, and potentially horse-drawn wagons as well as coordinating parallel attacks by allied terror groups for a simultaneous assault on Israel’s northern, southern, and eastern borders.
The report, based on 59 pages of letters and planning documents in Arabic, are a “fraction” of what the IDF has confiscated since Israel began its ground invasion into Gaza on October 27, 2023.
Hamas leadership is recorded to have approached Iran for funding of hundreds of millions of dollars and training for an additional 12,000 men. It is unclear whether Iran was aware of these plans or how it responded to the requests, but the IDF believes that Hamas tried to draw Iran into a direct confrontation with Israel – something that Iran has so far avoided.
Among the documents found, there are official correspondence from 2021 by Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, in which he requests from Iran economic and military support on a large scale. He wrote that with Iran’s support, Hamas will be able to destroy Israel in just two years.
In an unrelated incident, Israel security forces revealed on Wednesday that they had foiled a terrorist plot to blow up the Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv, following a month-long undercover investigation.
The Israel Police and the Israeli Security Agency arrested five suspects, residents of Tayibe, an Arab-Israeli city located in central Israel, in connection with the plot, Channel 12 reported.The suspects, in their 20s, identified with Islamic State, or ISIS, which conquered large areas of northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria in 2014, only to lose control in 2019 to a combination of Iraqi, Kurdish and U.S. forces.
The terrorists’ plan included a shooting attack and car bombing to bring down the towers. According to the investigation, the suspects watched videos of terror attacks in Syria and debated the quantity of explosives needed to bring down the towers.
An indictment is expected to be issued in the coming days.
