Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War—those people said.

Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.

U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”

“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.

A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.

Asked about the meetings, Mahmoud Mirdawi, a senior Hamas official, said the group planned the attacks on its own. “This is a Palestinian and Hamas decision,” he said.

The Iranian delegation at the United Nations in New York didn’t respond to a request for comment. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has praised the attacks, saying in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the “Zionist regime will be eradicated at the hands of the Palestinian people and the Resistance forces throughout the region.”

A direct Iranian role would take Tehran’s long-running conflict with Israel out of the shadows, raising the risk of broader conflict in the Middle East.

Senior Israeli security officials have pledged to strike at Iran’s leadership if Tehran is found responsible for killing Israelis.

The IRGC’s broader plan is to create a multi-front threat that can strangle Israel from all sides—Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the north and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, according to the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members and an Iranian official.

At least 700 Israelis are confirmed dead, and Saturday’s assault has punctured the country’s aura of invincibility and left Israelis questioning how their vaunted security forces could let this happen.

Israel has blamed Iran, saying it is behind the attacks, if indirectly. ?? “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,” Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, said Sunday.

Hamas has publicly acknowledged receiving support from Iran. And on Sunday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi talked to Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah and Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh.

Iran has been setting aside other regional conflicts, such as its open feud with Saudi Arabia in Yemen, to devote the IRGC’s foreign resources toward coordinating, financing and arming militias antagonistic to Israel, including Hamas and Hezbollah, the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members said.

The U.S. and Israel have designated Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.

“We are now free to focus on the Zionist entity,” the Iranian official said. “They are now very isolated.”

The strike was intended to hit Israel while it appeared distracted by internal political divisions over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

It was also aimed at disrupting accelerating U.S.-brokered talks to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel that Iran saw as threatening, the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members said.

Building on peace deals with Egypt and Jordan, expanding Israeli ties with Gulf Arab states could create a chain of American allies linking three key choke points of global trade—the Suez Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Bab Al Mandeb connecting the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea, said Hussein Ibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

“That’s very bad news for Iran,” Ibish said. “If they could do this, the strategic map changes dramatically to Iran’s detriment.”

Leading the effort to wrangle Iran’s foreign proxies under a unified command has been Ismail Qaani, the leader of the IRGC’s international military arm, the Quds Force.

Qaani launched coordination among several militias surrounding Israel in April during a meeting in Lebanon, The Wall Street Journal has reported, where Hamas began working more closely with other groups such as Hezbollah for the first time.

Around that time, Palestinian groups staged a rare set of limited strikes on Israel from Lebanon and Gaza, under the direction of Iran, said the Iranian official. “It was a roaring success,” the official said.

Iran has long backed Hamas but, as a Sunni Muslim group, it had been an outsider among Tehran’s Shia proxies until recent months, when cooperation among the groups accelerated.

Representatives of these groups have met with Quds Force leaders at least biweekly in Lebanon since August to discuss this weekend’s attack on Israel and what happens next, they said. Qaani has attended some of those meetings along with Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, Islamic Jihad leader al-Nakhalah, and Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s military chief, the militant-group members said.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian attended at least two of the meetings, they said.

“An attack of such scope could only have happened after months of planning and would not have happened without coordination with Iran,” said Lina Khatib, director of the SOAS Middle East Institute at the University of London. “Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, does not single-handedly make decisions to engage in war without prior explicit agreement from Iran.”

The Palestinian and Lebanese militias’ ability to coordinate with Iran will be tested in the coming days as Israel’s response comes into focus.

Egypt, which is trying to mediate in the conflict, has warned Israeli officials that a ground invasion into Gaza would trigger a military response from Hezbollah, opening up a second battlefront, people familiar with the matter said. Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire briefly on Sunday.

Hamas has called on Palestinians in the West Bank and Palestinian citizens of Israel to take up arms and join the fight. There have been limited clashes in the West Bank, but no reports of clashes between Arabs and Jews inside Israel, as happened in May 2021 when Israel and Gaza last engaged in extended combat.

The Iranian official said that if Iran were attacked, it would respond with missile strikes on Israel from Lebanon, Yemen and Iran, and send Iranian fighters into Israel from Syria to attack cities in the north and east of Israel.

Initially, some of the ravers didn’t notice the sound of the explosions over the thumping music. Others, used to rockets from Gaza, shrugged them off.

“We heard sirens and rockets, tons of rockets,” said Millet Ben Haim, 27, who attended the festival with a group of friends, posing with one of them just minutes before the attack and sticking her tongue out for the camera.

Then the music stopped. A voice boomed from the loudspeakers over the tented stages and the chill-out area that organisers described as a “playground for adults.”

“Guys, we have red alert,” the voice warned, in a video. “Red alert.”

Videos verified by The Post show people leaving hurriedly and in droves, a few jogging, many glancing back to look at the sky. “Everything okay,” a voice off camera says in English.

A person wearing a yellow safety vest, dressed in black directs crowds away from the stages. Then the gunfire started.

The first rockets were fired just before dawn, arcing through the sky over thousands of revellers who had been dancing through the night at a trance music festival – billed as an event celebrating “friends, love and infinite freedom.”

Initially, some of the ravers didn’t notice the sound of the explosions over the thumping music. Others, used to rockets from Gaza, shrugged them off.

“We heard sirens and rockets, tons of rockets,” said Millet Ben Haim, 27, who attended the festival with a group of friends, posing with one of them just minutes before the attack and sticking her tongue out for the camera.

Then the music stopped. A voice boomed from the loudspeakers over the tented stages and the chill-out area that organisers described as a “playground for adults.”

“Guys, we have red alert,” the voice warned, in a video. “Red alert.”

Videos verified by The Post show people leaving hurriedly and in droves, a few jogging, many glancing back to look at the sky. “Everything okay,” a voice off camera says in English.

A person wearing a yellow safety vest, dressed in black directs crowds away from the stages. Then the gunfire started.

The festival site was just three miles from the fence that divides Israel from the Gaza Strip and its besieged millions. The ravers were told not to bring firearms or sharp objects onto the festival grounds. They were tired and defenseless, trapped in a wide-open area that offered few hiding places.

Ben Haim saw the militants in the distance, closing in on foot. “I took the car keys from a friend of mine that was really wasted and got as many people in the car as possible and started driving like crazy,” she said. “The people who stayed, most of them got kidnapped or murdered.”

But cars were being shot at on the roads and there were gunmen everywhere, she said.

Gal Raz, 31, thinks it was less than an hour after the attack began when it became clear the area was being overrun. He also started to drive out with a group of friends.

“We heard shots. There were cars with corpses on top of them that blocked the road,” he said. “We couldn’t get out.”

Ben Haim and her friends jumped out and started to run through the fields.

“Every direction we ran we had more people shooting at us; we were running for two hours trying to escape. We started crawling in bushes. Eventually I realised I couldn’t run anymore.”

She and her friends and a stranger lay down in a bush and covered themselves with leaves.

“We stayed silent and tried to reach the police and people to help us. The police said they can’t help us because too many people were kidnapped.”

Noa Argamani, 25, was also hiding in the bushes with her 29-year-old boyfriend Avinatan Or, who messaged Argamani’s father around 10 a.m. to let him know they were safe.

The couple were trying to reassure him, said Shlomit Marciano, 25, a childhood friend of Argamani’s. It was the last message the family received.

On Saturday, they saw the couple in a video circulating on Palestinian social media. It shows Argamani screaming as she is separated from her boyfriend and driven off on a motorcycle.

Or appears to have his hands bound and is pushed along by several young men.

“You can absolutely see it was her,” said Marciano, who is staying with Argamani’s parents. “I think I haven’t fully accepted it yet; I slept in her bed last night. It’s crazy.”

Argamani had debated not going to the festival, but not because of security concerns. “If she knew it was tense right now, then I think she wouldn’t have gone, but we knew nothing,” Marciano said. “She wasn’t sure because it was far and expensive. I told her, ‘Go, you’re young.’ I regret that.”

A later video appears to show Argamani being held captive, sitting on cushions in a room with a tiled floor, sipping from a bottle of water. “At least we know she’s alive,” Marciano said.

Others don’t have that assurance.

Tali Atias believes that her 23-year-old daughter Dorin who she last heard from shortly before 7am on Saturday might be among the hostages. She told her mother that the area was being attacked and that she was seeking shelter.

Atias has posted on social media and called her daughter’s friends to find out where she is, but to no avail. “We don’t know what’s going on” or “what to do,” Atias

The family of Shani Louk feel similarly helpless. The 22-year-old posed for a mirror selfie just before parting for the rave, her long dreadlocks partially covered by a headscarf, looking coyly to the side, eyelids flicked with eyeliner.

“She loved to party,” said her cousin Tom Weintraub Louk, 30. Family members desperately tried reaching Louk and her Mexican boyfriend after news broke of the festival being overrun.

But then they saw the video posted online.

“We recognised her by the tattoos, and she has long dreadlocks,” Louk said.

In the video, the woman is facedown in the bed of the truck with four militants, apparently being paraded through Gaza. One holds her hair while another raises a gun in the air and shouts, “Allahu akbar!” A crowd follows the truck cheering. A boy spits in her hair.

When it comes to national security, whether we’re talking about the whole bureaucracy or individuals within the bureaucracy, the trend will be to entropy.

When nothing happens, it’s hard to remain endlessly vigilant.

Indeed, even when bad things happen, humans eventually become inured. Constant adrenalin is impossible.

The same must hold true in Israel.

As I wrote yesterday, it’s been 50 years since a full-scale state-military attack on Israel. Even though Israel’s been on the receiving of endless smaller attacks, humans find it incredibly difficult to maintain a constant high level of vigilance.

Vigilance requires imminent fear, and Israel put systems in place that she thought would protect her and her citizens.

She could have instilled imminent, panicky fear into her frontline workers only by having told them that any failure on their part, no matter how small, would mean that they and their families would be summarily executed by hungry dogs, as they do in North Korea.

Eventually, fear gets calloused over, you get used to things, and you let your guard down.

When I called him on Saturday afternoon for his read on the Hamas attack on Israel, I was stunned by his first response: “This is the worst day that I can remember in military terms in the history of Israel, including the blunder of the Yom Kippur war, which was terrible.”

Nahum is a careful reporter who has covered every major event in Israel for the past half century, and when he explained his rationale, I realised it was an understatement.

This is not your usual Hamas-Israel dust-up. The Gaza-Israel border is only 60 kilometres long, but the shock waves this war will unleash will not only thrust Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza into turmoil but also slam into Ukraine and Saudi Arabia, and most likely Iran.

Why? Any prolonged Israel-Hamas war could divert more US military equipment needed by Ukraine to Israel, and it will make the proposed Saudi-Israeli normalisation deal impossible – for now. And if it turns out that Iran encouraged the Hamas attack to scuttle that Israeli-Saudi deal, it could raise tensions between Israel and Iran and Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, and also between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This is an incredibly dangerous moment on multiple fronts.

But going back to Nahum’s point: why is this war such a disaster for Israel, worse than the Yom Kippur surprise attack from Egypt and Syria, which happened 50 years and one day ago? For starters, says Nahum, there is the sheer humiliation of it for the Israeli military: “In 1973 we were attacked by the biggest Arab army, Egypt.”

This time Israel was invaded in 22 locations outside the Gaza Strip, including communities as far as 24 km inside Israel, by a military force belonging to “the equivalent of Luxembourg”. And yet, this tiny force not only invaded Israel, overwhelming Israeli border troops, but it also took Israeli hostages back to Gaza across that same border – one where Israel had spent roughly $US1 billion ($1.57 billion) erecting a barrier that was supposed to be virtually impenetrable. That is a shocking blow to Israel’s deterrent capabilities.

Second, he notes, Israel has always prided itself on the ability of its intelligence services to penetrate Hamas and Palestinian militants in the West Bank and get early warnings.

For the past few weeks, as anyone following the news from Israel knows, Hamas was conducting what appeared to be practice manoeuvres for just this kind of attack all along the Gaza border – right before the eyes of the Israeli military.

But it appears that Israeli intelligence interpreted the moves as Hamas just trying to mess with the heads of the Israeli military and make commanders a little nervous, not as a prelude for an attack.

Israeli intelligence apparently believed that Hamas desperately needed more financial assistance from Qatar, which has given Hamas more than $US1 billion in aid since 2012, and work permits for Gazans to work in Israel – and both Israel and Qatar have always required a quiet border in return.

“The intelligence interpretation is that they were training for something that they would never dare to do,” Nahum says. “It was bad judgment and arrogance.” Hamas instead launched an incredibly complex and sophisticated invasion from land and sea.

But now we get to the really terrible part for Israel. Hamas was not only able to cross into Israel and attack its communities and army bases, but it was also able to kidnap several Israelis – reportedly including some older people, children and at least one soldier – and take them back to Gaza. Associated Press photos “showed an abducted elderly Israeli woman being brought back into Gaza on a golf cart by Hamas gunmen and another woman squeezed between two fighters on a motorcycle,” AP reported. Pictures of Israeli bodies taken to Gaza and being dragged into the streets were circulating on the internet.

On Saturday, Netanyahu promised to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in Gaza, but what if Hamas is holding Israeli civilians who could be used as human shields? That will curb Israel’s room for retaliation.

“Everything the army does in Gaza going forward will require them to take into account the impact it could have on the lives of civilian hostages,” Nahum says.

Finally, Nahum notes, the top ranks of the military and the prime minister, who chairs the security cabinet, know right now that down the road there will probably be some kind of commission of inquiry into how the Hamas invasion was allowed to happen.

So they must now conduct this war, make excruciating decisions about trade-offs among deterrence, retaliation, getting hostages back from Hamas and maybe even invading Gaza, knowing all the time that even if they manage all of these perfectly, some kind of inquiry awaits them at the end of the road. It is not easy to think straight under those conditions.

As this column has been pointing out ever since Netanyahu came back to power, his politics of division have done terrible damage to Israel. He prioritised a judicial putsch to strip the Israeli Supreme Court of its power to oversee his government – over all other priorities. In the process, he fractured Israeli society and its military. And people have been warning for months how dangerous this could be.

Just this past week I quoted a former director-general of the Israeli Defence Ministry, Dan Harel, telling a Tel Aviv democracy rally that “I have never seen our national security in a worse state” and that there has already been damage to the reserve units of essential Israel Defence Forces formations, “which has reduced readiness and operational capability”.

But as bad as Netanyahu has been for Israel, Hamas has been a deadly curse for the Palestinian people since it took over Gaza in 2007. The billion-plus dollars in aid that it received from Qatar alone over the years could have gone into building Gaza into a productive society, with decent schools, universities and infrastructure, that might have been a model for a future Palestinian state with the West Bank.

Such a deal, as it was being drawn up, would also benefit the more moderate West Bank Palestinian Authority – by delivering it a huge infusion of cash from Saudi Arabia, as well as curbs on Israeli settlements in the West Bank and other advances to preserve a two-state solution. As a result, West Bank leaders might have earned a desperately needed boost of legitimacy from the Palestinian masses, threatening the legitimacy of Hamas.

That US-Saudi-Israel deal also would have been a diplomatic earthquake that would have most likely required Netanyahu to jettison the most extreme members of his cabinet in return for forging an alliance between the Jewish state and the Sunni-led states of the Persian Gulf against Iran. Altogether, it would have been one of the biggest shifts in the tectonic plates of the region in 75 years. Following this Hamas attack, that deal is now in the deep freeze, as the Saudis have had to link themselves more closely than ever with Palestinian interests, not just their own.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has noticed. Last Thursday in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, he said Ukraine was being propped up “thanks to multibillion donations that come each month”. He added, “Just imagine the aid stops tomorrow.” Ukraine “will live for only a week when they run out of ammo”.

Can anything good come from this terrible new Hamas-Israel war? It’s far too early to say, but another longtime Israeli friend and analyst I trust, Professor Victor Friedman (no relation), who teaches behavioural science at Jezreel Valley College in central Israel and knows the Israeli Arab community very well, wrote to me late on Saturday, saying: “This horrid situation is still an opportunity, just like the Yom Kippur war turned out to be an opportunity that ended with a peace agreement with Egypt. The only real victory will be if what happens next – probably Israel going into Gaza – creates conditions for a real, stable settlement with the Palestinians.”

In light of what the Palestinians did on Saturday, he says, they can “claim some ‘victory,’ no matter what happens next”. The point is, he adds, “Someone needs to think beyond more force and more force.”

Personally, I do not believe that Hamas can ever be a partner for a secure peace with Israel. Hamas has had way too many chances for way too many years to prove that the responsibilities of governing in Gaza would moderate its goal of destroying the Jewish state. It turns out to be nothing more than a Palestinian Islamist mafia, interested only in preserving its grip on Gaza and ready to serve as a cat’s paw for Iran instead of making its main goal a new future for Palestinians there and in the West Bank. Its history of rule in Gaza is shameful.

The polling – which has been distributed between No campaigners and senior Liberal party officials during the weekend – comes from a UK firm called Focal Data who has used a technique similar to that used by the Australian newspaper during the 2022 election campaign, which came very close to the seat by seat result at that election.

The modelling predicts victory for Yes will not occur in any Liberal seats although Yes will come close in two of them – the marginal seat of Sturt in South Australia held by James Stevens, where 51 per cent are set to vote no and Bradfield, the marginal seat held by Liberal frontbencher Paul Fletcher, where No leads 53-47.

The largescale nationwide poll went 61-39 the way of the No case and then demographic modelling is used in a technique called MrP recording data about the people who respond and using that to devise a mathematical model of how various groups of people are likely to vote.

The poll predicts absolute landslide No results in Queensland seats including Bob Katter’s seat of Kennedy (84.9 per cent no), David Littleproud’s seat of Maranoa (81.5 per cent against).

Other large No votes above 70 per cent are found in Riverina, Indi, Moncrieff, Fisher, Grey, Hyume, Longman, Bowman, Cowper, Lyne, Calare, Durack, Herbert, Leichhardt, Fadden, Foreest, Groom, Gippsland, Nicholls, Canning, O’Connor , Capricornia, Hinkler, Flynn, Dawson Wright and Mallee has the third highest No vote at 77 per cent.

The seats that are voting Yes include every seat in the Australian Capital Territory and a number of Labor and Greens seats also voting Yes as well as the Independent seats of North Sydney and Clark in Tasmania.

The poll finds Tanya Plibersek’s seat of Sydney is voting Yes 70.4 per cent, Anthony Albanese’s Grayndler 64.5 per cent, Melbourne 64 per cent, Canberra 62 per cent and then the following seats between 40 and 50 per cent – Adelaide, Fenner, Brisbane, Macnamara, Reid, Higgins, North Sydney, Clark, Bean, Perth, Kingsford Smith, Griffth, Greenway, Wills, Cooper, Bennelong, Ryan and Chisholm.

Other Independent seats are projected to vote no by a small margin: Kooyong 50.2 per cent no and Wentworth 50.4 per cent.

Then there are a range of marginal seats in terms of voting No, polling 53 or under.

Julian Leeser’s seat of Berowra is 53 per cent No and also between 50 and 53 per cent are Sturt Goldstein, Maribyrnong, Barton, Chifley, Parramatta, Newcastle, Hotham, Moreton, Fraser, Boothby and Hindmarsh.

The poll shows the closer seats are to CBDs, whether it is in Sydney, Brisbane, Hobart, Melbourne or Perth, there are more people voting Yes.

And in Queensland and Western Australia and other rural parts a devastating No result is forecast.

The seat by seat polling comes after today’s Newspoll in the Australian hammered a nail into the Yes result.

It showed that support for the Voice had fallen another two points to just 34 per cent with No up two to 58 per cent and 8 per cent of voters say they didn’t know which way to go.

When people were forced to commit in that poll, the result was a 63-37 win for the No campaign.