betwinner Benny Gantz: What the World Needs to Understand About Iran

Oct. 7, 2023, marked the worst tragedy for the state of Israel and the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Some 1,200 people were murdered in Israel, and approximately 250 people were taken hostage on a single day; 101 of those souls are still held captive in Gaza. Hezbollah in Lebanon began its attack on the north of Israel the very next day, forcing nearly 70,000 Israelis from their homes. Iran, launching attacks first on April 13 and again on Oct. 1, has sent millions of Israelis into the safety of their shelters.

A year later, one must ask: What were Hamas’s leaders hoping for, and what are Iran’s leaders seeking to achieve?

What the Israeli military and political establishment failed to understand, in part, was the extent to which Hamas was driven by the goal of waging religious war. “The intel was there, but I underestimated the jihadi component of Hamas’s and Sinwar’s calculus,” a senior Israel Defense Forces intelligence commander told me early in the war, referring to Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader.

We also failed to act on the warning on the extent to which Hamas interpreted Israel’s domestic instability as a weakness that would impede Israel’s resolve and ability to respond to an attack. Intelligence has since shown how the heads of Hamas believed that at our weakest, we would not be capable of uniting.

According to Hamas’s plan, after its attack on Israel, the remaining components of Iran’s axis of evil — Hamas in the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the Shiite militias in Syria, Iraq and Iran — would join in a regional war with the ultimate goal of destroying the one and only Jewish state. A secret Hamas document reportedly uncovered in Gaza testified to such assertion: Written by the Hamas leader on Jan. 8, 2023, in it he claimed to have received a commitment from Iran that the axis would join the attack against Israel once Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Flood plan to invade Israel was activated.

So three rationales stood behind Hamas’s attack: jihadi fanaticism, an assessment that Israel was at a point of weakness and loyalty to Iran and its axis of evil. It is for these reasons that Oct. 7 and Iran’s subsequent attacks on Israel must serve as a stark warning to the region and the world regarding the Islamic republic’s uncompromising intentions and its outlook on the West.

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