The WSJ is reporting that Iran helped plan the attack on Israel in Beirut, Lebanon and gave the go ahead for the attack last Monday.
Meanwhile the Biden administration is claiming they have seen no evidence that Iran was involved.
Here’s more:
Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.
Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War—those people said.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.
Biden administration officials have no clue and I think that’s on purpose…
U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.
Hamas is trying to take all the credit for the attack, denying Iran’s involvement:
A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.
Asked about the meetings, Mahmoud Mirdawi, a senior Hamas official, said the group planned the attacks on its own. “This is a Palestinian and Hamas decision,” he said.
The Iranian delegation at the United Nations in New York didn’t respond to a request for comment. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has praised the attacks, saying in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the “Zionist regime will be eradicated at the hands of the Palestinian people and the Resistance forces throughout the region.”
Iran is trying to create a multi-front threat against Israel that they hope will cripple them:
A direct Iranian role would take Tehran’s long-running conflict with Israel out of the shadows, raising the risk of broader conflict in the Middle East. Senior Israeli security officials have pledged to strike at Iran’s leadership if Tehran is found responsible for killing Israelis.
The IRGC’s broader plan is to create a multi-front threat that can strangle Israel from all sides—Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the north and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, according to the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members and an Iranian official.
WSJ reports the death toll at over 700 now…
At least 700 Israelis are confirmed dead, and Saturday’s assault has punctured the country’s aura of invincibility and left Israelis questioning how their vaunted security forces could let this happen.
As I’ve said so many times now, I hope this ends with Israel putting an occupation force in Gaza and controlling it. I fear that could inflame tensions in the region, but it is necessary for Israel’s security in my opinion.