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Secret documents obtained by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have revealed the militant group Hamas had planned the toppling of a skyscraper in Tel Aviv in an attack similar to the destruction of the World Trade Center in the United States on 9/11 over two decades ago.
Knewz.com has learned that the militant group had plotted a wave of attacks on Israel far "deadlier" than the Hamas incursion on October 7, 2023, per the recently obtained documents.
The secret documents include both electronic records and papers recovered by IDF officials from Hamas command centers in the Gaza Strip.
The documents detailed advanced plans for attacks using trains, boats, and even horse-drawn chariots, as well as the outlines of a combined assault on Israel on multiple fronts with the help of Iran and the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, targeting the embattled nation from the north, south, and east.
According to reports, the "trove of documents includes an annotated, illustrated presentation detailing possible options for an assault as well as letters from Hamas to Iran’s top leaders in 2021 requesting hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and training for 12,000 additional Hamas fighters."
Per the documents, the Palestinian militant group Hamas assumed that once it launched the initial attack on Israel, the terror group Hezbollah and Iran would soon join the operation, which would involve "linking and preparing the external fronts (Lebanon, Syria, and Sinai) and agreeing on mechanisms for communicating peacefully and in war."
The documents further mentioned Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar's "crystal clear" ambition—the destruction of the state of Israel.
IDF officials had recovered a series of letters – which were reportedly written in June 2021 – from Sinwar's command bunker in Khan Younis, Gaza, in January 2024, which contained the Hamas chief's requests to Iran for more money and training for a "division’s worth of new fighters."
The letters were signed by Sinwar and other Hamas leaders in Gaza and were addressed to the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Quds Force Chief Ismail Qaani, and Sayed Izadi, Quds Force’s Beirut-based head of Palestinian operations who was one of the three Iranian officials killed in the Israeli military strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, Syria, in April.
"We are in dire need of your standing with us with all strength, determination, support and backing; first to restore our strength and what has been exhausted in this confrontation or what has been targeted, and to develop our capabilities many times over," one of the letters read, per reports.
It is worth noting that Hamas's plans for the plotted attack on the Tel Aviv skyscraper – among others – involved extensive intelligence gathering.
The documents obtained by the IDF showed that the Palestinian militant group had created a considerable database of 17,000 photos, which included "satellite images to photos of Israeli cities and landscapes taken by drone cameras or gleaned from social media postings."
It has been reported that the images also included layouts of Israeli air bases and military installations, along with diagrams of the flight patterns of commercial aircraft using the Ben Gurion International Airport outside Tel Aviv.
Possible targets for the Hamas-planned 9/11-like attack on Tel Aviv were the Moshe Aviv Tower, a 70-story building that is Israel’s second tallest, and the Azrieli Center complex, which comprises three skyscrapers, a large shopping mall, train station, and cinema.
The outlined plans in the documents mention that the destruction of a skyscraper of considerable size in Tel Aviv should cause significant damage to the nearby military facilities as well.
However, the plans to carry out a 9/11-esque attack have been criticized by several news outlets as "aspirational" and somewhat impractical.
Furthermore, Hamas had admitted in the documents that the group had not figured out exactly how they could go about destroying a skyscraper in Tel Aviv.
Notably, the documents show that the militant group too finally realized how unfeasible attacking a building of that size would be, and turned their sights on an "easier target"—the railway system of Israel.
The document outlined several variations of a plan to transport explosives and soldiers into Tel Aviv using the Israeli railway network.
"The railway line is designated for transporting fuel, which is a weak point in the event of a train explosion after moving inside one of the cities (a moving bomb)," the documents further stated.