Hamas’ plan: to destroy relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia

To put the relations between Israel and neighboring Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, into crisis. According to Middle East analysts and journalists, this may be one of the reasons why Hamas launched its violent attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people. The terrorist organization operating in the Gaza Strip would be forced to take action, as it fell into the trap of the “normalization” process, in addition to taking revenge on the apartheid regime it had been subjected to for nearly 70 years and preventing Palestine from being gradually erased from the map. An agreement was signed by Benjamin’s government, Netanyahu, with Arab-Muslim countries that had denied recognizing Israel for decades.

A Torah in Riyadh

The final piece of this long process of officially acknowledging the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East occurred a few days before the October 7 attack. Between late September and early October, for the first time in history, some ministers of the Israeli government officially traveled to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, to attend a series of international conferences. First came Tourism Minister Haim Katz, followed by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi. An event that was widely reported in the Israeli press and summarized in a photograph published in the Times of Israel on October 3 this year. According to expert New York Times journalist Thomas L. Friedman, this footage taken by the Israeli Communications Minister’s team may have been what “emotionally” accelerated Hamas’ decision to attack, which it had been preparing for months.

In the photo, a member of the Israeli mission is seen praying in his hotel room, wearing a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and kippa for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, and holding a Torah scroll. You can see Riyadh’s skyline from the window. “For Israeli Jews, this photo is the realization of a dream, the ultimate expression of acceptance in the Middle East, more than a century after the beginning of the Zionist movement to build a modern democratic state in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people,” wrote Thomas L. In his opinion piece, Friedman points out that “the possibility of praying with the Torah in Saudi Arabia, where Islam was born and the home of its two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, is a level of acceptance that touches Islam.” The soul of the Israeli Jew.” It is an image that may have touched the souls of Hamas militants in the opposite sense.

Washington mediation

In recent years, the mission of Netanyahu and his far-right government has been to demonstrate internationally that Israel has the right to exist, that it can expand territorially at the expense of the Palestinians, and that it can effectively wipe out the Palestinians from the occupied territories. Full consent of the circle of Arab states. For example, Netanyahu has made Egypt one of his main trading partners, even though Cairo has been diplomatically committed to various “ceasefires” between Israelis and Palestinians since the early 1980s. The normalization process with Saudi Arabia is currently ongoing and is supported by the United States, which has prioritized the creation of commercial relations between its two main partners in the Middle East. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described this as a “national security” goal. Succeeding in this initiative would mean deeply isolating Palestine and its inhabitants.

The occupation of Gaza is being evaluated

Friedman suggests that Hamas expects to receive an equally violent reaction from Israel with its bloody attack. The invasion of the Gaza Strip, which has caused massive casualties to Palestinian civilians, will be part of a plan to force Saudi Arabia to withdraw from the Washington-brokered agreement with Israel. There is also a message addressed to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, which participated in the Abraham Accords prepared by the Trump administration in 2020. They, too, faced Netanyahu’s anger towards the Palestinian people in Gaza, the majority of whom are children and youth. They may feel compelled to back away from Israel to avoid compromise with a “tyrannical” state.

Pull the warriors

Besides the issue of diplomatic relations, there is another aspect that should not be underestimated: Hamas’s ability to attract fighters to Gaza who are ready to sacrifice themselves against the Israeli army. Gazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, told Al Jazeera: “From the beginning, we sent 1,200 fighters who managed to destroy Israel’s image, its security, its intelligence and its image as a superpower.” “We have a lot of fighters and a lot of people who want to support us,” Hamad argued, “Even people on the border in Jordan, Lebanon and other places want to come here and fight with us.” It’s a message that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Source: Today IT

\