Al Jazeera Report Says Hamas Planned to Abandon 7 October Operation Under Conditions

Conditions attached to the plan

Hamas leaders reportedly set conditions under which they would abandon the 7 October 2023 operation, according to meeting records examined by Al Jazeera. The documents suggest the plan remained conditional months before the assault, while also describing military objectives that included defeating Israel’s Gaza Division and capturing soldiers. That combination matters: the records present the operation as a decision tied to stated grievances, but also as a military plan with defined aims.

The records were discussed in an investigation broadcast Friday on Al Jazeera’s The Hidden is Greater. One account describes a meeting on 11 February 2023 about “Project Fahd,” the operation’s codename. According to the account, the plan would be dropped if Israeli attacks on Al-Aqsa Mosque and in prisons stopped. The report doesn’t establish how the leaders would have judged whether those conditions had been met, or whether they were negotiating demands, setting a threshold for action, or doing both.

Yahya Sinwar, then Hamas leader in Gaza, and Mohammed Deif, who led the group’s armed wing, reportedly attended. Both were killed by Israeli forces in 2024. Middle East Eye said it couldn’t independently verify the document, a limitation readers should keep in view when assessing what the record can establish. A document examined by a broadcaster can offer a rare account of internal deliberations, but its provenance and wording still shape how confidently those deliberations can be reconstructed.

Documents describe grievances and military aims

The meeting record framed the decision to proceed as a response to what it called Israeli violations. “The brutality at Al-Aqsa has reached unacceptable levels, and the same applies to the treatment of prisoners,” it said. It also claimed there had been “no signs of progress” politically and accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of reversing previously agreed commitments. Those are claims recorded in the document, not independent findings established by the account itself.

The distinction is important. The record, as presented, helps show how Hamas leaders described their reasons and the conditions they attached to a possible operation. It doesn’t by itself settle the accuracy of those allegations, explain how much weight each grievance carried, or establish that the stated conditions were the sole factors in the decision. Here's the thing: the language of justification and the planning of an attack appear side by side, and readers need to account for both.

The document’s stated operational goal was to defeat the Israeli military’s Gaza Division, which is responsible for operations along the Gaza border. It also listed capturing as many Israeli soldiers as possible as an objective. These aims indicate that the plan described in the records went beyond a symbolic action: it anticipated a confrontation with a specific military formation and sought captives. The available account doesn’t provide enough detail to assess the full operational plan or how its authors expected those aims to be achieved.

The Hamas-led assault on southern Israel killed about 1,200 people and resulted in 251 people being taken captive. Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza killed at least 73,000 Palestinians over two years, according to the source report. The scale and consequences of the assault, the captivity, and the war form the essential context for the earlier meeting record. They also make it necessary to distinguish between what the document says leaders intended and what the events that followed did to people on both sides.

Ceasefire claims and continuing conditions

A US-brokered ceasefire took effect in 2025 with stated aims that included ending the war, easing Israel’s siege and withdrawing Israeli forces from Gaza. The report says attacks and home demolitions continued, Israeli control expanded over parts of the strip, and at least 1,500 people were killed after the ceasefire began. It also says restrictions on aid deliveries largely remained in place, limiting access to food, medicine and shelter supplies. These details complicate any account that treats the ceasefire’s start as a clear endpoint to the conflict’s effects.

That said, the supplied report doesn’t provide a detailed breakdown of the post-ceasefire deaths or the circumstances behind each development it describes. Its account is still significant because it sets the agreement’s stated aims against conditions it says persisted on the ground. If you're working in this space, that gap between declared objectives and reported conditions is a central point to track: an announced ceasefire can mark a formal change while leaving questions about security, movement and basic needs unresolved.

Rare footage traces Deif’s leadership

Al Jazeera’s investigation also presented previously unseen footage, recordings and documents about Deif’s early life and secretive leadership of Hamas’s armed wing. The footage showed him in a tunnel meeting with military commanders, some of whom have since been killed, as well as visiting a rocket production site and military operations rooms. The scenes offer a glimpse of the organisation’s internal settings and Deif’s role within them, though the report’s description alone can’t establish when each recording was made or how representative the footage is of his work.

Before 7 October, no images of Deif were publicly known, and little information was available about his health after seven Israeli assassination attempts. He headed the al-Qassam Brigades from 2002 until his death in an Israeli air strike in July 2024. During that period, the group grew from a guerrilla force into a quasi-military organisation with an estimated 30,000 fighters. The change in scale helps explain why footage of commanders, production sites and operations rooms attracts attention: it gives viewers material for understanding the group’s military structure, even if it can’t fill every gap in the historical record.

What the records add

The investigation’s value lies in bringing together internal records and images that were not previously public, while leaving room for questions about verification and interpretation. The reported meeting account adds detail about how Hamas leaders framed the proposed operation months before it took place; the footage broadens the picture of Deif’s leadership. Neither form of evidence answers every question about planning, responsibility or the choices made by the people involved.

This is more significant than it looks. The records place stated political grievances beside explicit military objectives, giving readers a clearer view of how the group’s leaders described the plan to themselves. Yet the account also comes with limits: one outlet’s examination, another publication’s inability to verify the document independently, and no full operational record in the material presented here. A useful reading is therefore a careful one. The documents can inform the history of the assault without serving as the whole history.