Report: Assassination of top Hamas commander likely aided by US eavesdropping
NBC cites unnamed officials saying Israel reached Marwan Issa, found damning info on UNRWA employees, using intel from hardware captured in Gaza, aided by US wiretaps
Israel’s detailed intelligence picture of Hamas’s inner workings, put together with the help of United States intel, “most likely” enabled the Israeli Defense Forces to assassinate Hamas’s number 3 official Marwan Issa, NBC reported Thursday, citing an unnamed Israeli official and other unnamed US government and intelligence sources.
According to the report, hard drives, laptops, maps and other materials seized by the IDF in Gaza — sometimes aided by American eavesdropping on Hamas, which has increased since the war began — also furnished Israel with the information that implicated 12 UNRWA workers of participating in the Palestinian terror group’s October 7 onslaught.
Israel’s allegations against UNRWA led multiple donor countries to withhold funds from the United Nations aid agency for Palestinian refugees in February. Issa, whose death by Israeli airstrike on March 10 was confirmed by the White House Monday, was deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.
Together with the Brigades’ commander, Mohammed Deif, and Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, Issa was considered a mastermind of the October 7 assault that sparked the war.
“They have more understanding and intelligence on Hamas than they ever had before,” the NBC report quoted Matthew Levitt, a former US Treasury and State Department official, as saying of the IDF. “They have the [human resources] and more. So their understanding of what Hamas was able to do is much, much more granular.”
The report cited unnamed US officials as saying that before October 7, American intelligence did not consider Hamas a high priority, but shifted resources toward the organization after failing to foresee the deadly attack.
The attack saw 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists storm southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and take over 250 hostages of all ages.
Vowing to dismantle the terror group, Israel launched an unprecedented ground and air offensive on Gaza, which has destroyed about half the Strip’s residences, displacing over a million people and effecting severe food insecurity in the coastal enclave.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 31,000 people in the Strip have been killed in the fighting so far, a figure that cannot be independently verified and includes some 13,000 Hamas gunmen Israel says it has killed in battle. Israel also says it killed some 1,000 gunmen inside Israel on and soon after October 7.
