From the Liveblog of
Sunday, September 28, 2025
Just 2 weeks before Oct. 7, Mossad reportedly said Hamas ‘not interested’ in armed conflict
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The Mossad put out a position paper shortly before October 7, 2023, downplaying the threat of an attack from Hamas, Channel 12 reports.
“We perceive that the leadership of Hamas in the Gaza Strip is not interested in military conflict with Israel at the present time, but will not be deterred if it is forced upon them,” the report quotes the spy agency’s assessment as saying.
The network says the paper was published just two weeks before Hamas’s devastating massacre in southern Israel, which killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages.
The terror group, the Mossad reportedly said, was “maintaining a high degree of readiness out of concern for Israeli countermeasures.”
“The broad interest of Hamas’s leadership in Gaza is to avoid escalation at present,” the paper said, according to Channel 12.
In a response to the network, the Mossad says it was not responsible for intelligence in Gaza. It does not go on to explain, in light of that, why it had composed the position paper.
“According to the distribution of responsibilities between the intelligence services… the Mossad has no responsibility for strategic alerts about the use of force in the Palestinian arena,” the Mossad statement says, adding that it thus attributed “low significance” to the paper.
“In accordance with that delination, the Mossad did not deal operationally in the Gaza Strip — neither in intelligence gathering, nor in running agents, nor in conducting special operations,” the statement says.
The Times of Israel Community.