Gaza terrorists heard joking during Oct. 7 attack in newly released intercepted calls

Gaza terrorists joked about the October 2023 invasion of Israel as the attack was taking place, according to contemporaneous phone calls released in a US federal investigation on Tuesday that gave an inside view of terrorists’ immediate reaction to the Hamas attack and their preparations to join the invasion.

The call logs were released in the case against Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi, who allegedly assembled a team of armed terrorists and crossed into Israel to join the attack, and later lied on his visa application to enter the US. He was arrested in Louisiana last year.

Al-Muhtadi was allegedly a member of the Gaza-based terror group the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the National Resistance Brigades.

He and his team were not aware of the Hamas attack before it took place, only finding out about the invasion on social media early in the morning of October 7, 2023, after the attack had started. The attackers killed some 1,200 people and took another 251 hostage.

As part of the federal probe into Al-Muhtadi, investigators released transcripts of phone calls he made while preparing to join the attack. The calls were intercepted, recorded and translated from Arabic into English. Prosecutors had previously released fragments of the conversations in court filings. Israeli investigators are working with US authorities on the investigation.

On the calls, Al-Muhtadi and his team are heard scrambling to join the Hamas attack by sharing information about the invasion, coordinating transportation and assembling weaponry.

At 8:12 a.m., Al-Muhtadi told an associate on a phone call to “get ready,” that the “borders are open,” and that other individuals were passing by in a Toyota pickup truck, apparently to join the invasion.

Thirty minutes later, still in Gaza, Al-Muhtadi and another individual celebrated and joked as they exchanged information about the attack.

Both hailed the invasion, saying, “Our guys are celebrating inside [Israel],” and that Palestinians were celebrating in Gaza.

The transcript indicated the pair repeatedly laughed during the call, including about the expected destruction of Gaza.

“From now till the afternoon, half of Gaza will be lost. There will be nothing left except my kiosk,” Al-Muhtadi said.

His associate said, “The Jews are still in shock.” Al-Muhtadi responded, “They are still drunk, because it’s the last day of their Eid,” using an Arabic term to apparently refer to Simhat Torah, the Jewish holiday on which the attack took place.

The pair already knew that Israelis had been taken hostage. Al-Muhtadi said, “There is kidnapping, and it’s a game, which will be a good one.” He said he expected a hostage deal to lead to a ceasefire.

“If things go the way they should, Syria will take part, Lebanon will take part, and it’s going to be a third world war,” he said. “This war will last two months, a month, or it will be a war of attrition.”

They also joked about Palestinians who worked in Israel, saying, “No other workers will enter Israel, and Gaza will be set back about fifty years.”

“The guys are calling, I swear by God. They want to go inside,” Al-Muhtadi said.

Other call logs showed the banality of the preparations, as the terrorists discussed getting coffee, lacking space in a car used to invade Israel, searching for a “welding machine,” and whether they should close their stores. One of the terrorists on a call said he would meet the others inside Israel without any weapons because he couldn’t find any.

By 9:33 a.m., Al-Muhtadi said on a call, “I went inside,” while laughing and telling two other terrorists, “Come in, boys.”

Al-Muhtadi told his associates to turn off their phones on that call. Investigators later found that his phone had linked to a tower in Israel, near Kfar Aza, at around 10 a.m., indicating he had crossed the border.

Court filings did not indicate whether Al-Muhtadi had killed or taken hostages during the attack.

After he arrived in the US, messages showed that Al-Muhtadi was unconcerned about being arrested.

In September 2024, a week after he entered the US, an associate advised Al-Muhtadi against communicating with “the resistance guys.”

“You are now under surveillance for everything,” the associate said in a Facebook message, adding, “Do not publish anything.”

“There is democracy here,” Al-Muhtadi told him.

“If you post Al-Sinwar’s picture, no one will tell you anything,” he added in an apparent reference to the slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

“Here, no one puts his nose in other people’s business. There is freedom,” he said.

In a related case, a jury last month charged Al-Muhtadi’s wife, Nieama Hsnein Al-Ghazzawi, with conspiracy to commit visa fraud due to her role obtaining Al-Muhtadi a visa.

Al-Ghazzawi, a US citizen, was indicted last month and the indictment was unsealed last week. Much of the case remains under seal.

In January 2024, Al-Ghazzawi and Al-Muhtadi traveled from Gaza to Egypt in order to move to the US, prosecutors said. Al-Ghazzawi prepared a visa application for her husband, corresponded with the US State Department to arrange the visa and served as his visa sponsor.

Al-Ghazzawi knowingly made false statements on Al-Muhtadi’s visa application, such as stating that her husband did not have firearms training, had never been in an armed group and had no ties to terrorism, prosecutors said.

Investigators said that Al-Ghazzawi had in fact known about her husband’s membership in the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and his participation in the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.

Al-Ghazzawi emailed the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe to set up a charity campaign to cover her husband’s visa application fees and airfare, prosecutors said, in one of a series of US crowdfunding campaigns that allegedly raised funds for terror groups.

Kfar Aza, where Al-Muhtadi allegedly crossed the border, was one of the communities hit hardest in the onslaught. During the attack, some 250 terrorists swarmed the unsuspecting community of around 950 residents. The attackers took over the village in an hour, killing 62 residents and 18 security personnel, and taking 19 civilians hostage.

Prosecutors in the Al-Muhtadi case noted that a Tanzanian exchange student, Joshua Mollel, had been stabbed to death and shot by at least one member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the area of Kfar Aza during the attack, according to footage of Mollel’s killing.