In recent weeks, a variety of documents captured by the IDF during its operations in Gaza have been made available to the public, providing specific details about the extent of Iran’s role in planning and supporting the October 7 invasion. The evidence contradicts several statements made by Biden-administration officials, as well as the disavowals of Iranian leaders.

Kyle Orton, drawing on both the newly uncovered sources and those previously available, argues that Hamas began growing closer to Tehran in 2012, shortly after Yahya Sinwar was released from an Israeli prison and assumed an important role in the organization. Most likely, planning for the 2023 attack began after the brief round of fighting between Israel and Hamas in May 2021:

Captured documents show Sinwar and five other Hamas officials signed letters in June 2021, right after the war with Israel, to the Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani, as well as one a month later to Mohammad Said Izadi, the head of the IRGC’s “Palestinian office” that manages Hamas and the IRGC’s other Palestinian assets. Sinwar et al. informed Iran’s leaders that Hamas had a plan to destroy Israel within two years, and asked for additional funding, plus training for 12,000 Hamas fighters, to accomplish this.

In his own analysis of the released documents, Nadav Shragai explains:

Three months before the massacre, . . . in late June 2023, a Hamas delegation led by Ismail Haniyeh—[the Qatar-based head of Hamas], later assassinated by Israel in Iran—and Saleh Arouri—later assassinated by Israel in Lebanon—visited Iran. The delegation held a series of meetings with state leaders there, headed by Supreme Leader Khamenei. . . . The Revolutionary Guard commander Hossein Salami said in that same meeting that the Iranians see “signs and possibility of removing Israel from the map.”

At the end of that month, Saleh Arouri traveled to Tehran and presented Hamas’s plans for the invasion of the Gaza border communities to Izadi. The Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani . . . was present at training sessions for hundreds of Hamas operatives held on Iranian soil during September, just weeks before the massacre.

The only thing that Hamas might have kept to itself is the exact date of the attack. Moreover, Orton concludes, “the documents do not sustain the idea that Iran ‘hung Hamas out to dry,’” contrary to what some observers have claimed. The interventions of Hizballah and the Houthis appear to have been expected from the beginning:

The IRGC network has not done more in Gaza because it cannot, not because it was unwilling. The lesson in all this is that the Iranian revolution can be thwarted when there is the will to do so.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.