Who Was Really Behind October 7?
Let’s start with a question: What does it take to plan October 7? You need military engineers who understand electronic warfare. You need someone who has studied the blind spots of a billion-dollar surveillance system for years and a drone operator trained to hit specific targets in a specific sequence. You need paraglider instructors, you need explosives experts who know exactly how to bring down a reinforced border fence in under eight minutes. You need a logistics chain that moves weapons, cement, and equipment across international borders undetected for years.
Now ask yourself: does that sound like it came from a population where 40% of marriages are between first or second cousins, with all the documented genetic and developmental consequences that come with it? A territory with no military academy, no strategic research institution, no history of complex multi-front operations?
The October 7 massacre was a multi-country operation; Hamas might have pulled the trigger. But someone else built the gun, loaded it, aimed it, and told them when to fire. Let’s go through the operation — piece by piece — and understand: who actually did each part? What we reveal is a network of states, intelligence agencies, and military powers that used Palestinians as the hitmen and walked away clean.
Who Planned It?
It all began in 2021, with a letter. Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif — the two men at the top of Hamas’s military hierarchy- sat down and wrote a formal request to Esmail Qaani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force. They asked 500 million, not to build Gaza, not to invest in food or medicine for Palestinians, not for infrastructure or education, but for the destruction of the State of Israel. Qaani wrote back and said that, despite Iran’s difficult economic situation, the struggle against Israel and the United States is the regime’s top priority. The money would come.
That letter was the birth certificate for October 7. What followed was the architecture of Iranian military engineers, intelligence officers, and Quds Force operatives who worked inside Gaza and across the region to build something unprecedented. They studied Israeli military bases, mapped blind spots in the border surveillance system, and identified which towers to hit first, which communities were closest, and which bases were most exposed. They drew up a blueprint so detailed that it included rocket barrages, drone strikes on cameras, paragliders, and simultaneous ground breaches at more than thirty locations.
When Israeli intelligence obtained a copy more than a year before the attack, analysts dismissed it, not because it was wrong, but because they could not believe Hamas was capable of it. They were right. Hamas wasn’t. Iran was.
The man who maintained the operational link between Tehran and Gaza was Mohammad Saeed Izadi, commander of the IRGC’s Palestine Corps. He moved the money and weapons, coordinated training, and kept the lines open between Sinwar and the supreme leader.
Sinwar and Deif planned everything from inside the tunnels, communicating with Iran via encrypted messages and physical couriers who moved in and out through the smuggling networks beneath the Egyptian border. The letter you see was written in Arabic and passed by hand. The Hamas leadership abroad, including Ismail Haniyeh, Saleh Arouri, and Khaled Meshaal, lived freely in Qatar, Turkey, and Lebanon. They flew business class, stayed in five-star hotels in Doha, and met face-to-face with Izadi and Qaani. They were the bridge, the ones who could sit across a table from Iranian generals and say: The plan is ready.
On October 2 — five days before the attack — a meeting took place in Beirut. Around the table: senior figures from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, for final authorization. Everyone in that room knew what was coming. Everyone said yes.
That same week, 500 Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters — men who had left Gaza through the Rafah crossing into Egypt, traveled to Iran on foreign passports, and spent weeks in IRGC training facilities — completed their final combat session on Iranian soil. Qaani attended in person. He wanted to see the product before it was deployed. They flew back, crossed through Rafah again, and returned to the tunnels they had left. Five days later, those same men would stop training for the mission and begin living it.
Who Built It?
Five hundred kilometers of tunnels beneath Gaza, between 350 and 500 miles of reinforced concrete passageways, some descending over 200 feet underground, wide enough for vehicles, equipped with electricity, ventilation systems, running water, fiber optic communication lines, blast doors, weapons depots, command centers, field clinics, kitchens, and holding cells stocked for months. Over 5,000 separate shafts leading down into the darkness.
The entire project took 15 years and cost over $1 billion. One billion dollars. In a territory that cannot feed itself without international aid.
How did Hamas gain the knowledge? The answer might surprise you. The tunnels beneath Gaza were built according to a blueprint from Pyongyang. Yes. North Korea, Pyongyang. For decades, North Korea has been building the most sophisticated underground military network on Earth — tunnels beneath the Korean DMZ, wide enough for tanks, deep enough to survive nuclear strikes, and capable of moving 30,000 troops per hour without a single satellite detecting a trace. It is the one thing North Korea does better than anyone else in the world. And Iran knew it.
So Iran made a call.
After the 2006 Lebanon War, North Korean military engineers quietly landed in southern Lebanon. No press conference, no announcement. They came as construction workers, under the cover of a company with a civilian name, and went to work alongside Hezbollah in the hills of southern Lebanon. They taught them everything. How deep to go, how to reinforce concrete at that depth, how to wire electrical, ventilation, and communication lines, how to build blast doors, how to hide an army beneath a city, and leave no trace above ground.
Hezbollah was an excellent student; within a few years, they no longer needed the North Koreans. They had become the instructors. When Hamas needed to build, Iran sent Hezbollah. That is how a North Korean military doctrine, developed to move troops beneath the Korean peninsula undetected, ended up beneath the kindergartens and hospitals of Gaza. Through a chain of instruction, passed from teacher to student to student over two decades, while the world was busy writing reports about Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.
The tunnels were deliberately built beneath Gaza’s most protected civilian structures — hospitals, schools, mosques, and UNRWA offices — because Hamas knew Israel would hesitate to strike them. Hamas’s military wing’s main command headquarters was built directly beneath Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility. A major Hamas data center was discovered beneath UNRWA’s own headquarters in Gaza City, connected to the agency’s electrical grid. Tunnels ran under elementary schools. Weapons depots were built beneath children’s bedrooms. It was the architecture of a strategy that used Palestinian civilians as construction material.
And if you thought North Korea was the surprising part — wait. Because the cement used to build those tunnels? Guess who paid for it? Not Iran or Qatar, but you.
UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, funded salaries, utilities, and construction projects across Gaza for decades, with billions of dollars from Western taxpayers, including Americans. UNRWA paid the salaries of tens of thousands of workers in Gaza, and Hamas decided who was hired. UNRWA-funded construction projects, and Hamas controlled the contractors. UNRWA paid the electricity bills for its facilities, and Hamas tapped into those power lines to run the tunnels beneath them. It was not theft in the traditional sense; Hamas did not break into the safe. Hamas ran the bank.
Year after year, budget cycle after budget cycle, while UN officials filed reports, attended conferences, and posed for photos in front of aid trucks, the money kept moving. The UN was not just a bystander. It was a utility provider. It was a funding source. It was the address. At least 42 UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 attack. Read that again. Forty-two employees of the United Nations. And the world is still debating whether to resume funding.
So who built it? Hamas held the shovels. North Korea drew the blueprints. Iran built the company that oversaw the work. Hezbollah transferred the knowledge. Qatar and the United Nations paid the bills. And the world called it a humanitarian crisis.
Who Armed It?
On the morning of October 7, the sky over southern Israel filled with paragliders. Armed Hamas terrorists, descending from motorized paragliders directly over the border fence and into the Supernova music festival, where 364 young people were dancing. At the same moment, 2,200 rockets left Gaza in a single salvo. While the sky burned, 1,500 fighters hit the border fence at over thirty points simultaneously, with explosives and bulldozers. Motorboats struck the coast near Zikim. Three fronts. One morning. One minute of chaos, then another, then another, until chaos became massacre. Now ask yourself: where did it all come from?
In July 2023, three months before October 7, Israeli forces intercepted 16 tons of explosives smuggled from Turkey and bound for Gaza — and that was just one shipment, one they happened to catch. The 2,200 rockets launched that morning were not bought on the black market. They were manufactured in Gaza, in factories hidden beneath civilian buildings, assembled with Iranian components, technical expertise, and funding. Hamas had spent years quietly building a domestic arms industry while the international community debated the morality of the blockade.
And the paragliders. Here is where it gets strange. Hamas had been training with motorized paragliders for years — the doctrine drawn from North Korea, which has used military paragliders for decades. Three months before October 7 — the outgoing EU envoy to Gaza, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, filmed himself soaring over Gaza’s coast on a motorized paraglider, shouting “Free Palestine” and telling the Palestinians watching: “You can do exactly the same thing.” He called it the first paragliding flight in Gaza’s history.
How the equipment got there was never officially explained. Any civilian attempting to bring a paraglider across would have had it confiscated on the spot. Von Burgsdorff had diplomatic status. He used it until August, then left his post. Three months later, Hamas fighters descended from the sky over the Nova festival on the same equipment he had demonstrated, killing 364 people. He later said, “It doesn’t matter what Hamas did.” Draw your own conclusions.
The rifles in their hands were Iranian, the missiles were North Korean. The drones were Iranian-designed. The explosives came from Turkey. The rockets were assembled in Gaza from components shipped through Egypt, built with Iranian knowledge, Iranian money, and Iranian engineers who never once set foot where the cameras could find them.
A patchwork arsenal from around the world. In the hands of fighters from a strip of land, the world is called a prison. This is the part that should make you stop, because the weapons tell a story not just about Hamas, but about the world. Iran supplied the ideology, the money, and the missiles — openly, proudly, because the destruction of Israel is written into the founding charter of the Islamic Republic and repeated by its supreme leader every single year.
North Korea supplied the tunnel doctrine and weapons technology because it sells to anyone who pays and asks no questions. In the weeks before October 7, Russia gave millions of dollars to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. China supplied weapons and looked the other way because a Middle East in flames keeps America distracted and Taiwan unprotected. Turkey and Qatar funded and sheltered Hamas leadership for years. Erdogan’s Turkey and the Qatari royal family are patrons of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological parent of Hamas. For them, this was not geopolitics. This was brotherhood.
Each of these countries needed a proxy because none could do it on its own. So they built one. October 7 was Iran's operation, Russia's money, North Korea's blueprints, Qatar's checks, Turkey's safe houses, and China's silence wearing a Hamas mask.
Who Trained Them?
Iran. But not only Iran. In the Book of Samuel, God gives Saul a direct command: go to war against the Amalekites and destroy them completely. Every man, every woman, every child, every animal. The reasoning was not cruelty; it was a memory. The Amalekites had attacked Israel from behind in the desert, targeting the weak and the elderly when the nation was most vulnerable. God remembered and instructed Saul to finish it.
Saul goes to war and wins decisively, but he makes a choice that will define his legacy forever. He spares Agag, the Amalekite king. That is the most dangerous kind of mistake: the one that feels righteous as you make it. And Israel makes the same one.
After Hamas won the 2006 elections and took control of Gaza, Israel made a choice that would define the next seventeen years. It trained Palestinian security forces, not to fight Israel, but to govern. To maintain civil order, manage borders, and suppress rival factions like Islamic Jihad. Israel taught them the mechanics of a functioning state because it believed that governance creates responsibility, and responsibility creates something worth protecting.
Both stories ended the same. Agag lived, and, generations later, his offspring, Haman, rose to become the second most powerful figure in the Persian Empire. Haman was an Agagite, a descendant of the Amalekite royal line that Saul could not bring himself to finish. He came within a single decree of destroying every Jewish person in the known world. The mercy Saul showed in one century became the genocide attempt of the next. The pattern is identical.
Israel not just trained the Palestinians, but it also allowed Qatari money into Gaza. a intended for schools, hospitals, water treatment, roads, and civilian infrastructure. Israel itself helped build factories and pave the foundations of what was supposed to become a functioning society. The theory was straightforward: give people something to lose and they will choose not to lose it. Hamas took every dollar and built tunnels.
Saul learned it too late; he spared a king who should not have been spared, called it mercy, and handed the next generation a genocidal enemy that almost did not survive. Israel keeps making the same mistake, believing that a two-state solution is possible. Hamas and the innocent palestinians are are showing us again and again and again who they are, and it's time to believe them.
Hamas is still there. Still armed. Still recruiting. Still broadcasting the same ideology that sent 3,000 fighters across the border on a Saturday morning to murder children in their beds.
Who Paid For It?
Qatar sent tens of millions of dollars a month to Gaza for years. Iran contributed weapons, technology, and ideology. Israeli intelligence estimates that Iran transferred $100 million a year to Hamas in the years leading up to the attack. The money moved through front companies, currency exchanges, and money couriers — many operating out of Turkey, where Hamas maintained offices, bank accounts, and an entire financial infrastructure under the protection of a NATO member state.
Russia’s contribution was quieter but documented. In the weeks before October 7, millions of dollars moved to Hamas through a cryptocurrency exchange based in Moscow. Crypto leaves traces. These traces were found. No consequences followed.
And then there was UNRWA — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, funded by Western taxpayers, staffed by international civil servants, operating under the United Nations flag. A lawsuit filed in a New York federal court accused seven UNRWA officials of knowing that Hamas had siphoned over one billion dollars from the agency for tunnel construction and weapons.
So who paid for it? Qatar sent the cash. Iran sent the weapons and the ideology. Russia laundered the crypto. Turkey provided the banking infrastructure. And the United Nations provided the address.
Who Knew?
Thousands of miles away, in real time, before most of the world had even processed what was unfolding, Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, was celebrating the attack as it happened. Not hours later, but as the kibbutzim were being overrun, Samidoun was publishing statements and coordinating celebratory events across Western cities. In Berlin, members of its German branch took to the streets to hand out pastries in celebration. The question that never received a satisfying answer was simpler: how did they move that fast?
Then there were the photographers. As Hamas fighters were still moving through kibbutzim, families were still hiding in safe rooms, and the world was still trying to understand what was happening, a freelance photojournalist named Hassan Eslaiah was already there, photographing a burning Israeli tank and documenting terrorists as they breached the fence at Kibbutz Kfar Azza. His photos ran on AP and CNN. He was not wearing a press vest. In a video he posted to his own Facebook page, he was riding on the back of a motorbike carrying what appeared to be a grenade.
Three other photographers — Yousef Masoud, Ali Mahmud, and Hatem Ali — also had their credits on AP images taken at the border that morning. Ali Mahmud had the shot of the pickup truck carrying Shani Louk’s body. Hatem Ali photographed Israelis being dragged into Gaza. A fifth and sixth photographer, working for Reuters, had crossed the border as well. All of them, somehow, in position, on what should have been a quiet Saturday morning.
So, who did October 7?
The men who crossed the border, entered homes, and committed the atrocities were Palestinians and Hamas members. Iran conceived it, funded it, armed it, trained it, and approved it. North Korea provided the tunnel doctrine and the weapons technology. Hezbollah transferred the knowledge and attended the planning meetings. Qatar wrote the checks, Turkey provided the banking infrastructure, and the training grounds. Russia laundered the crypto. UNRWA provided the cover, the electricity, and in some cases, the personnel.
Hamas was the instrument, behind them stood a network of states, intelligence services, and international institutions that will never stand trial, never face consequences, and are already building whatever comes next.
So the next time you see images of hungry children in Gaza, remember who actually fed them, treated them, and kept their lights on. Israel brought sick Palestinian children across the border for treatment in its own hospitals. Israel built roads, connected water, and invested in a territory it was trying to help stabilize. While Israel was doing that, Iran was building rockets, Qatar was writing checks for tunnels, Turkey was running safe houses, Russia was laundering crypto, and North Korea was drawing underground blueprints. Every one of them had the money and the means to feed those children. Every one of them chose weapons instead. The children are hungry because the adults in Tehran, Doha, Ankara, Moscow, and Pyongyang decided that destroying Israel was worth more than building Gaza.
And it is not a strategy. It is an obsession. It is the kind of pathological, all-consuming fixation that entire civilizations have burned themselves down pursuing. The money that built the tunnels beneath Gaza could have fed every hungry child on Earth — not once, but many times over. The minds that mapped Israeli blind spots and calculated rocket trajectories could have cured diseases, built cities, and lifted millions out of poverty. Instead, they spent twenty years digging holes in the dark, pointing everything they had at the Jews.
The nations that participated in the October 7 massacre did not only betray Israel. They betrayed their own people. Every dollar sent to Hamas was stolen from their citizens. Every million funneled into tunnels and rockets was a million that did not build a school, a hospital, or a future. If that is not betrayal, if that is not a special kind of moral bankruptcy, then the word has lost its meaning. The world sees you. It knows exactly who you are.
Thanks for reading so far. If this piece gave you a clearer picture of what actually happened that morning, please share it. The people who need to read this most won’t find it on their own. You can also support this work by becoming a paid subscriber, leaving a one-time contribution, or picking up a copy of one of my books. All of it keeps this going.
Much love,
Yama Bar
Mind boggling. If they had put a tenth of this effort into improving their people’s lives, Gaza would be Singapore on the Mediterranean.
Thank you for reporting the news so the New York Times doesn’t have to.