
Hamas planned to launch a 9/11-style attack on Israel that was intended to be far deadlier than the October 7 massacre that took place in 2023, according to an exclusive Washington Post report purportedly based on unearthed records by Israeli officials.
The plans reportedly date back many years to the October 7 attacks and included bringing down a Tel Aviv skyscraper, while trains, boats and horse-drawn carriages could also be used to carry out the attack.
According to the report, electronic data and documents were recovered by Israeli officials from Hamas command centers and showed the advanced planning that had been done. Some of the plans made by the terrorist group appeared to be "ill-formed and highly impractical," terrorism experts told the Post.
In addition, letters from the terrorist group addressed to Iranian leaders were also found, and they indicated that Hamas had sought their help in launching the attacks, the report said.
The Washington Post writes that a letter written by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in 2021 was found among documents addressed to several senior Iranian officials, requesting financial and military support while promising that, with Iran's help, the group terrorist would be able to destroy Israel within two years.
"We promise you that we will not waste a minute or a penny if we fail to achieve this sacred goal," a June 2021 letter signed by Sinwar and other Hamas officials said, according to the Post.
While the report noted that the authenticity of the documents "cannot be definitively determined," it also stated that the content appeared to be consistent with post-October 7 US and allied intelligence assessments of Hamas' plans and relations with Iran.
The Post also spoke to Israeli officials who were not involved in collecting the comments and said they "independently assessed that they were true."
Israeli officials' reported findings "also included more than 17,000 photographs — from satellite images of Israeli cities and landscapes taken by drone cameras or collected from social media posts," the Post wrote.
Photographs of Israeli airbase diagrams and images were reportedly found depicting the flight patterns of commercial aircraft that had used Ben-Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv.