Hamas Threatens Another October 7 And Used a United Nations Office to Say It

Hamas told Israel it is ready to carry out another October 7, and it chose a United Nations office to deliver the message. Senior Hamas figures said it out loud inside the Gaza headquarters of the UN humanitarian coordinator, Ramiz Alakbarov, and then asked him to pass it along to the Israelis.

Tel Aviv Israel. October 28. 2023. Action in support of hostages taken by Hamas (Shutterstock)

He did. Alakbarov relayed the warning to Major General Yoram Halevy, who runs COGAT, the Israeli body responsible for civilian coordination with the Palestinians. Halevy sent an urgent letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz, and Israeli television published a portion of it over the weekend. In that letter, Hamas is described as prepared to launch an attack in the model of October 7 whenever and wherever it sees an opening, inside Israel, in Judea and Samaria, or against Jewish and Israeli targets abroad. Halevy's own judgment was that nothing this direct had ever come through his office before.

Now read the reasons Hamas gave, because that is the part nobody is sitting with long enough.

Hamas complained that Israeli military activity inside Gaza, the steady westward movement of the yellow line that marks how much ground the IDF holds, and the Palestinian Authority's decision to cancel its own elections are all costing the organization its control on the ground. It said it will not accept that situation continuing.

So Hamas is losing its grip, and it admitted as much in a written threat it asked an international civil servant to carry to its enemy. Those complaints match, almost item for item, the demands Israel has been hearing for two years from capitals that insist a smaller Israeli footprint and a revived Palestinian political process are what will finally calm Gaza down. Hamas has now confirmed that the smaller footprint is the thing it needs most in the world.

Why Hamas threatens another October 7 right now

The timing explains a great deal. Israel votes on Tuesday, the Americans vote the following week, and anyone who watches Jerusalem knows that a government in the closing days of a campaign and an American administration heading into midterms are both unlikely to open a major new operation in Gaza. Israeli reporting says the security establishment understands this plainly, that its hands are effectively tied for the next week and a half. Hamas can read a calendar as well as anyone, and it is using the quiet window to put a price on Israeli pressure.

That is what makes this a negotiating move rather than an outburst. The framework Washington assembled asks Hamas to hand its weapons to an international body and asks Israel to withdraw in stages as that happens. Hamas has refused its half since the day the ink dried. Israel has refused to move any further until Hamas moves first. A great deal of the coverage files this under mutual stubbornness, two difficult parties and a stalled process in need of fresh mediation. That reading no longer survives contact with the evidence. One of the two parties has now stated in writing what it intends to do with the territory and the breathing room it is asking the world to hand it.

Sa'ad, Israel – May 9 2024, Cars remaining, burned cars after the attack on October 7th by Hamas. The cars were collected on the farmer's filled and serves now as an attacks memorial and a remainder. (Shutterstock)

And it said so through the humanitarian channel. That detail deserves far more attention than it is receiving. The senior United Nations humanitarian official in Gaza, a man whose office exists to coordinate relief for civilians, was used as a post office for a threat to massacre civilians. Either the United Nations states plainly that its Gaza offices are not available for that service, or every future claim it makes about its own neutrality is worth less than the letterhead it is printed on.

What coverage of Hamas rearming in Gaza keeps missing

In the same stretch of days, Israeli military officials walked their American counterparts through intelligence on what Hamas has been doing with the ceasefire. Hamas has rebuilt its manpower to roughly where it stood before the war, somewhere in the range of thirty thousand to forty thousand operatives. It has restored much of its tunnel network inside the quarter to third of Gaza it still runs. It has reestablished itself as the governing power there, and the large Gazan clans that outside observers once talked up as a rival authority have been pushed back to the margins. Israel's assessment of whether Hamas will ever voluntarily surrender its weapons is described as unequivocal, and the answer is no. The military conclusion that follows is that disarmament will require operations in parts of Gaza Israel does not currently hold.

A significant share of the surviving weapons stockpiles sits in areas Israeli ground forces never cleared during the war, and one reason those areas were never cleared is that Israel believed hostages were being held in them. Israel accepted military risk and operational limits in order to protect the living and recover the dead. The arsenal that survived the war is sitting in precisely those places. Hamas understood that trade from the very first week.

The money deserves a look as well. Israeli security officials name Iran and Turkey as the main sources of Hamas funding, and a large share of it now arrives as digital currency, converted on the ground by Gaza money changers who take a heavy cut for the service. Sanctioning suitcases of cash at a border crossing accomplishes nothing against a wallet address. Anyone serious about a demilitarized Gaza has to reach the wallets and the two capitals behind them, and so far nobody outside Israel seems interested in saying that out loud.

Notice what is absent from the Israeli file. The obstacle is not aid. Roughly six hundred aid trucks a day are entering Gaza and water supply per person has reached its highest level since the fighting began. Hamas is not holding onto its rifles because Gazans are hungry. It is holding onto them because it plans to use them again, and this week it said so.

What comes next is a decision, and it lands the moment the voting ends on both sides of the ocean. The Board of Peace is reportedly scouting secure sites for a Hamas weapons handover, with a call on the project expected after the Israeli election. Israeli intelligence says Hamas will never turn up at those sites. Israel has already declined to approve an outpost for the international force meant to stabilize Gaza, and that refusal was correct, because a foreign force that polices the line between Israel and Hamas without disarming Hamas gives the terror group a shield and a schedule. Verification committees and certification phases are worth something only if somebody is prepared to act on the day verification fails. Without that, they are a polite way of agreeing to be attacked later.

Israelis have two words for what October 7 taught them, lo od, never again, and they do not use them as decoration. They treat them as a security specification. A government that steps back from Gaza while tens of thousands of armed men promise a repeat has failed that specification, whatever the ceasefire looks like on paper, and no international committee will be standing at the fence at dawn to explain itself to the families.