One of Hamas’ October 7 aims was to block Israel-Saudi peace, documents show

One of the motivations behind Hamas’ deadly attack on October 7, 2023, was to torpedo efforts to normalise relations between Israel and Saudi-Arabia, according to minutes of a high-level meeting recovered by Israeli troops from a tunnel in Gaza.

In the documents salvaged from a hidden Hamas tunnel in the Strip are minutes from a meeting on October 2, 2023, where the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar told senior commanders that only an “extraordinary act” would derail the fast‑evolving deal. “There is no doubt that the Saudi-Zionist normalisation agreement is progressing significantly,” he said.

If a deal was brokered between Israeli and Saudi-Arabi, “most Arab and Muslim governments would line up behind it,” he warned, side-lining Hamas and its “resistance project”.

This page shows some of the Hamas members present at the meeting (Credit: IDF)[Missing Credit]

The documents say the coordinated attack, in which around 6,000 terrorists stormed the southern border of Israel, killing 1,200 and taking 251 hostage, had been under preparation for two years. The assault was part of a broader campaign to engineer a “strategic shift” in the region, bringing together other members of the so‑called Axis of Resistance into the fight against Israel.

In one internal briefing dated August 2022, it says it was the movement’s “duty” to confront the “real threat” of growing Israeli normalisation with the Arab world, which at that time already included the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – the signatories of the 2020 Abrahams Accords brokered by US President Donald Trump during his first term in office.

"Despite the internal threats, internal divisions and political fragmentation that the Zionist entity is suffering from, it is still developing its foreign relations with Arab and Islamic countries,” the briefing warned. 

By 2023, the prospect of Saudi‑Israeli talks had advanced further than in any previous effort: draft US security guarantees for the kingdom, US approval of civil nuclear technology and a roadmap for Palestinian self‑governance were all on the table, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Another memo, also discovered in the underground tunnel, was a 2023 report that advised accelerating the conflict in the West Bank and Jerusalem to further disrupt the prospect of Saudi-Israeli normalisation. 

And a document dated from October 3, 2023 shows Hamas had published a job advert searching for a university‑educated operative to spearhead its anti‑normalisation campaign.

Since October 7, 2023, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has maintained that he will not sign a normalisation agreement with Israel unless the Gaza war ends, and a diplomatic process for Palestinian statehood is agreed upon.