Israel
Iran has denied this and the US has said it had no direct knowledge that Iran was behind the attack
The Israeli military said there was no concrete evidence of Iranian involvement in the Hamas attack from Gaza, after Iran’s Foreign Ministry denied it.
“Iran is an important actor, but we cannot yet say whether it was involved in the planning or training,” said Admiral Daniel Hagari, an Israel Defense Forces spokesman.
The Wall Street Journal claimed on Sunday, citing various sources, that the Revolutionary Guards, the main political arm of the Iranian military, had attended Hamas planning meetings in Beirut every two weeks since August, including two that included Iranian foreign ministers , Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
The Hamas attack has suddenly changed the face of Middle East diplomacy
At least one of these two meetings – on August 31 – was published by the official Iranian press at the time. There is no evidence that Hamas military operations were discussed.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said Sunday that Hamas was acting as a proxy for Iranian interests, including Tehran’s desire to prevent a possible peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Tehran openly and enthusiastically supports Hamas’ attacks, but at a weekly news conference, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said: “We have no role in decision-making on behalf of any party in the region, including the Palestinian nation… as far as we are concerned.” “is that we consider the resistance of the Palestinian people as legitimate resistance.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US had no direct knowledge that Iran was behind the attack.
“Iran has long supported Hamas and other terrorist networks throughout the region with resource skills training,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby said.
“And in that regard, Iran is clearly complicit here, but as far as concrete evidence of these types of attacks goes, no, we have nothing,” he said.
In June, Iran hosted a delegation of “officials from Gaza-based resistance movements,” the WSJ said, including the secretary general of Islamic Jihad, the second-largest militant group in Gaza. The delegation was led by the head of the Hamas political bureau.
Recently, Hamas’ representative in Lebanon was in Tehran for a conference on Islamic unity. In a report published on October 4, Tasnim news agency said the representative spoke to participants about the need for “all Islamist parties to do everything in their power to free al-Quds.” [Jerusalem]“.
Senior Israelis like Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have long claimed that Hamas is funded by Iran. In April, Gallant claimed that Tehran sent $100 million annually to Hamas, $700 million annually to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and tens of millions to Islamic Jihad.
Hamas used Iranian technology and logistical support to produce weapons locally, he said, but it is believed to rely mainly on weapons smuggling from its tunnels under the border with Egypt.
Historically, relations between the Muslim Brotherhood-born Hamas and Tehran have not been as ideologically close as Tehran’s relations with some other Islamic militant groups in the region, such as Hezbollah.
Some Hamas social media accounts claim that the Iranian army is seeking to deploy drones, but most observers believe that an escalation into a multi-pronged war is more likely to come from Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Across the Gulf, Arab leaders agreed that they ideally wanted to de-escalate the violence through a prisoner exchange and disagreed over how responsibility for the attacks should be attributed.
Qatar and Egypt are in talks about a prisoner exchange and are proposing that female prisoners and any children be exchanged first. Qatar said Israel was solely responsible for the violence because it refused to negotiate an agreed two-state solution.
But support for Israel, which was once taboo in Arab states, is also becoming louder. The United Arab Emirates, which was among the first Arab countries to sign a normalization agreement with Israel, was the most vocal in its criticism of Hamas. It said it was “appalled by reports that Israeli civilians have been kidnapped from their homes as hostages.”
The UAE demanded that “nihilistic destruction” should not derail normalization efforts, citing talks Saudi Arabia is holding with the US.
Bahrain, which also signed a normalization agreement with Israel, called for de-escalation. The Syrian Foreign Ministry, however, has informed Saudi Arabia that a deal with Israel is now impossible.
So far, Saudi Arabia, the country on which policy in the region will focus, has responded to the attacks with sharp criticism of Israel’s failure to negotiate a peace settlement with the Palestinians based on a two-state solution.
Some influential Saudi journalists say the scale of the bloodshed requires a bolder response from Riyadh than a retreat to long-standing positions. They say Saudi Arabia should not allow Hamas and Iran to derail talks with the US and that a deal that benefits the Palestinians, Israel and Riyadh itself should be explored and that this can be achieved , without angering China or Iran. But it seems like a precarious diplomatic path for such a conservative country.
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