Senior Hamas officials held a high-level meeting in Gaza on October 2, 2023, during which Yahya Sinwar proclaimed that an “extraordinary act” must be carried out to sabotage the normalization process between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. Minutes of the meeting were found by the IDF in a Gaza tunnel and reviewed by the WSJ. During the meeting, Sinwar claimed, “There is no doubt that the Saudi-Zionist normalization agreement is progressing significantly,”—a process he said would “open the door for the majority of Arab and Islamic countries to follow the same path.” According to the report, Hamas aimed for an action that would create a profound shock that would prevent any continuation of the reconciliation process between moderate Arab countries and Israel. The WSJ also reviewed another document uncoved by the IDF that showed that in October 2022, a job advertisement was published on behalf of Hamas’s Arab-Islamic Cooperation Department, seeking to recruit a person for a position whose purpose was to “market the movement’s programs against normalization,” including recruiting civil organizations in Arab countries to call for boycotts. Another document from September 2023 found in Gaza recommended the escalation of attacks in Yehuda and Shomron and Jerusalem in order to make an Israeli-Saudi deal more difficult. The report said that another meeting regarding the October 7 attack took place in Beirut, with the participation of Hamas representatives and Iranian security officials, during which Iran approved the planned attack. However, it should be noted that some Hamas and Hezbollah senior officials dispute this account, saying that the details of the October 7 attack were kept secret by Hamas’s military wing in Gaza. The documents show that Iran also provided Hamas with weapons, funding, and training for the attack, including combat training in the weeks leading up to October 7. However, both Iran and Hezbollah told  Hamas that they do not want to reach a direct and full-scale war with Israel. (YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)