Just two weeks before Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, a Mossad paper downplayed the terror group’s appetite for war—yet Israel’s spy agency stresses it was never tasked with Gaza strategic warnings.
Channel 12 News dropped a bombshell revelation Saturday night: two weeks before Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre, the Mossad circulated a position paper assessing that Hamas leadership “did not seek military confrontation with Israel at this time.”
The paper, written in late September 2023, noted that Hamas’s leaders in Gaza preferred to “avoid escalation,” though they were “not deterred” if a clash were forced upon them.
But in a swift response, the Mossad pushed back against claims of failure. The agency emphasized that since 2005, Israel’s political echelon had formally excluded the Mossad from responsibility for Palestinian strategic warnings, leaving Gaza intelligence primarily to the Shin Bet and IDF.
“The weight of the aforementioned document in decision-making processes was minimal to negligible,” Mossad stated. “The Mossad did not operationally engage in the Gaza Strip—neither in intelligence gathering, agent operations, nor special missions.”
The revelation adds new layers to the intelligence debate surrounding Oct. 7, underscoring how Hamas successfully masked its genocidal intentions until unleashing the worst terror assault on Jews since the Holocaust. While critics will focus on the assessment itself, Mossad’s clarification highlights that responsibility for Gaza’s battlefield warnings lay elsewhere.
