The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday what many have feared in the wake of the attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah on Israel, which is that Iran was involved in the planning. "The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gave the final go-ahead last Monday in Beirut," the WSJ reported.
The report, citing senior members of the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups, said that officers within Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been involved in the planning of the attack since August. That attack, begun in the early morning hours on Saturday, saw attacks from land, air and sea. A music festival was invaded by paratroopers and armed men in vehicles, and left 260 young Israelis dead, others were kidnapped and murdered.
The meetings where the terrorist attacks were planned happened in Beirut, Lebanon, where Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers and members of Hamas, which is backed by Iran, and Hezbollah. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaking for the Biden administration while making the rounds of the Sunday news programs, said that he didn't think anyone saw this coming.
"This is an attack that I don't think anyone saw coming in the immediate," Blinken told NBC's Kristen Welker.
"We will have plenty of time, Israelis will have plenty of time to look into that, all of us will have time to look into that," Blinken went on to say. "The focus now has to be on making sure that Israel has what it needs to deal with this attack. And to make sure its citizens are safe and secure."
He also indicated in a CNN interview that the US has "...not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship."
A US offical did not confirm or corroborate the meetings, per the WSJ. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran said the "Zionist regime will be eradicated at the hands of the Palestinian people and the Resistance forces throughout the region."
"The zionist regime is dying," he said.
Elon Musk's X flagged the posts from the Ayatollah as a rules violation, but left them up in the public interest.
Israel blamed Iran for the attacks. Many on social media pointed out that the attacks come not even a month after the US authorized the unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian funds as part of a prisoner swap deal to secure the release of five American citizens.
"We know that there were meetings in Syria and in Lebanon with other leaders of the terror armies that surround Israel so obviously it’s easy to understand that they tried to coordinate. The proxies of Iran in our region, they tried to be coordinated as much as possible with Iran," said Gilad Erdan, Israel's UN ambassador.
Part of the motivation to launch the attack now is that it was intended to come at a time when Israel was dealing with internal political struggles, and to disrupt the US-brokered peace talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
