- Middle East
An earlier version of this article appeared in the September 2026 issue of ‘The Arena’ Magazine, published by the Abba Eban Institute for Diplomacy & Foreign Relations at Reichman University, Israel. This English version has been revised and adapted from the Hebrew original.
Hamas’s invasion of Israel on the morning of October 7, 2023, operation ‘Al Aqsa flood’, marked a rupture in Israel’s national security concept. In the period preceding the attack, both the political and military echelons appear to have operated on the assumption that Hamas was deterred and had little interest in an all-out confrontation. October 7 proved that Israel failed both to deter Hamas and to detect this failure. This compounded failure has another angle that has received limited attention: a possible nuclear angle. Newly surfaced evidence indicates that for almost two decades Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who masterminded the October 7 attack, explicitly contemplated Israel’s nuclear weapons, their presumed ability to prevent Israel’s ‘dismantlement,’ in his words, and what he saw as a potential Israeli nuclear retaliation against Hamas in the wake of the planned attack. Thus, beyond the glaring failure of Israel’s conventional deterrence, in this case, lies a less-examined question: whether October 7 also exposed a failure of the nuclear deterrence component within Israel’s broader, multilayered deterrence posture, as projected towards Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
Two recently resurfaced Sinwar media interviews show that he was preoccupied for almost two decades with Israel’s nuclear capabilities and their role in Israel’s national security doctrine. In these two interviews, Sinwar linked his alleged support for a truce with the idea that Israel’s nuclear weapons guarantee that it could not be ‘dismantled’ militarily. While it is impossible to know whether his support for a truce reflected a sincere view or served propaganda purposes, his nuclear comments show that these capabilities preoccupied him.
In a 2006 interview with Israeli journalist Yoram Binur, Sinwar discussed Israel’s nuclear capabilities in the fluent Hebrew he perfected during his 22 years of incarceration for the murder of four Palestinians suspected of collaboration with Israel. He told Binur: “We know that we do not have the ability to dismantle Israel. We understand that Israel is sitting on 200 nuclear warheads and has the most sophisticated and aggressive air force in the region. We will not recognize Israel, but [we] are prepared to agree to a long-term ‘hudna’ [truce].” In 2018, he reiterated the nuclear point in an interview with Italian journalist Francesca Borri, published in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. “A new war serves no one’s interests, certainly not ours. Who wants to confront a nuclear power with only four slingshots at his disposal? War achieves nothing.” These two ‘nuclear’ comments seem to suggest that during this period, Sinwar distinguished between Hamas’s ability to inflict harm on Israel and its inability to threaten the state’s existence. It seems that he viewed Israel’s nuclear arsenal as an ultimate safeguard against an existential military threat from a powerful state, while viewing Hamas’s more limited capabilities as falling below that threshold.
While in jail, Sinwar completed 15 academic courses through Israel’s Open University, focusing on Israeli and Jewish history and politics. He may have been introduced to the idea that nuclear weapons could protect states from existential military threats posed by other states in one of these courses, since this conclusion also aligns with a widely accepted assumption in nuclear deterrence literature. According to the accepted wisdom of this field, nuclear weapons are not useful tools to deter terror organizations like Hamas and are not tailored for such threats. This is because deterrence revolves around issuing threats, and these organizations generally lack territory with critical assets whose destruction they can credibly threaten; they also do not regard the survival of their organization, its members, or the population at large as paramount. This is particularly true of organizations driven by extremist religious ‘death cult’ ideologies, which may view escalation, self-sacrifice, and a devastating response from their adversary as desirable outcomes. Instead, in the deterrence literature, nuclear weapons are accepted as useful tools to deter existential, or ‘catastrophic’, threats to the states that possess them from other states, while having limited utility in deterring non-existential threats or in compellence.
Within Israel’s broader deterrence posture, scholars have widely credited the nuclear deterrence component with deterring existential military threats from other state actors. A frequently cited example is Egypt’s October 1973 war plan. Official Egyptian sources have claimed that Egypt’s decision to limit its war aims and occupy only a narrow 10-12 km-deep area bordering the Suez Canal during the 1973 Yom Kippur War stemmed from this nuclear deterrence calculation. Some dispute this claim, arguing that Israel’s conventional deterrence shaped this result. Saddam Hussein's decision to launch 39 Scud missiles at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War is similarly attributed to his assumed understanding that such a limited, non-existential threat would not trigger the Israeli nuclear doctrine, and a similar logic may be applied to Iran’s missile barrages in the recent cycles with Israel.
Sinwar’s nuclear comments reveal a preoccupation with how to pose an existential threat to Israel, a question that continued to shape his strategic thinking in the period leading up to 7 October. Until May 2021, Hamas held that Israel could not be destroyed through a military operation. However, Hamas documents from 2021–2023, captured by the IDF in Gaza, shed light on how this assessment subsequently changed in the aftermath of operation ‘Guardian of the Wall’. This shift is now at the heart of a growing wave of research, and has been analyzed by Sobelman, Brun, Rosset and others.
Participation in the May 2021 cycle of fighting was not limited to Hamas in Gaza, but saw rocket fire from Lebanon and Syria, a drone launched from Iraq, and the riots in Israel’s mixed Jewish-Arab cities. The documents show that for Sinwar, Hamas leaders, and other members of the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’, this success demonstrated the destructive potential of a wide regional multi-front war against Israel. This was a dramatic turning point that led, in Brun’s words, to a new theory of victory. From this point on, Hamas leadership adopted the view that, through careful planning and collaboration with Hezbollah, Iran, and other actors in the axis, Israel could be destroyed in one fell swoop.
From May 2021 to October 2023, Hamas focused on planning the attack that would serve as an opening blow of a wider war intended to expressly and explicitly bring about Israel’s destruction. The plan called for a surprise invasion from Gaza that would shatter Israel’s defenses and confidence, while Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed forces opened additional fronts, as Palestinians in the West Bank and inside Israel joined in. The planning documents explicitly stated that Iran was not expected to enter the war against Israel directly, consistent with its “ring of fire” strategy at the time, which sought to exert pressure on Israel through regional proxies while avoiding direct confrontation. The expressed strategic aim, to dismantle the state of Israel, was repeatedly expressed and detailed in these documents. In one letter from Sinwar to the Iranians from 5 June 2021, he writes: “This imagined entity is weaker than people think. With the help of Allah, with your assistance, and with the support of our nation, we are capable of uprooting it and removing it, in the near future… ”; the captured documents contain many more explicit references. In Israel, once the documents were analyzed and pieced together, this plan was labeled as ‘the annihilation plan’.
A central component of the annihilation plan was for Hamas and Hezbollah, backed by Iranian funding and assistance, to build sufficient military strength to pose a combined existential threat to Israel. As prescribed by deterrence literature, Sinwar was explicitly not deterred by Israel’s nuclear capabilities, referring to them overtly. Two handwritten planning documents by Sinwar show that he considered Israel’s nuclear doctrine and the possibility of Israeli nuclear retaliation against Hamas once the operation began. Written in August 2022, roughly a year before the attack, in these two documents Sinwar details that during the planned attack, Hamas operatives would be instructed to "document and broadcast” the torture of Israeli civilians and soldiers, listing explicit examples of violence including: “... stepping on the heads of soldiers, shooting at point-blank range, slaughtering people with knives, blowing up tanks, prisoners kneeling with their hands on their heads, and the like," as well as burning entire neighborhoods to the ground. This was meant to encourage Hezbollah in Lebanon, alongside Palestinians in the West Bank and inside Israel, to join the envisioned violent uprising, and to shock the Israelis into collapse. In response to the planned atrocities, Sinwar anticipated that: “The enemy will not hesitate to use the means and weapons at its disposal. Not only through strikes, but through additional means as well. It may even use a nuclear bomb. But first, it will be taken by surprise by the attack and descend into chaos…”.
Although Israel does not officially acknowledge its nuclear weapon status, maintaining a policy known as ‘nuclear ambiguity’, or alternatively, as ‘nuclear restraint’, it is widely assumed to be the Middle East’s sole actor possessing these weapons. Given this policy, Israel has never published an official nuclear doctrine, but scholars such as Yair Evron have long outlined its presumed contours. In this respect, some of Sinwar’s assumptions regarding Israel’s nuclear doctrine were grounded. The literature suggests that Israel would be likely to consider using nuclear weapons only in exceptionally extreme circumstances that pose an existential threat, such as an armored invasion across the Green Line, the destruction of the Israeli Air Force, or the use of unconventional weapons against the home front. Sinwar expressly wanted the planned attack to constitute such an existential threat.
Sinwar’s apparent expectation of Israeli nuclear retaliation seems to have overlooked fundamental strategic and operational considerations, perhaps reflecting the influence of his jihadist ideology. These two documents offer no explanation for why he believed an Israeli leader would order a nuclear strike in southern Israel or Gaza, beyond imagining a panicked act of last resort. Such a strike would have risked catastrophic civilian casualties on both sides of the border, devastating the affected area through blast, heat, and radiation and potentially exposing surrounding territory to radioactive fallout. It would also have carried immense legal and diplomatic costs without offering a clear military advantage over Israel’s conventional weapons. Sinwar’s apparent willingness to accept these risks corroborates the views in the existing literature, which argue that nuclear threats are not effective against ideologically committed militant organizations.
In the end, the October 7 attack was launched without a prior Hamas warning to Hezbollah and Iran, taking the two allies by surprise. Sinwar’s hope that broadcasting the atrocities would convince members of the Axis of Resistance, and especially Hezbollah, to join the attack alongside the Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank failed to materialize. While on US campuses students were mobilized against Israel, the same was not the case for Israel’s Arab population. Of the more than 1,200 Israelis Hamas murdered that day, including the casualties caused by rocket attacks, 24 were Arabs and Bedouins; six Bedouins were taken as hostages, dead and alive, to Gaza. The attack drew massive, widespread condemnation from the Israeli Arab public, with one poll showing that 80% of the Israeli Arab public opposed it. Israeli Arab leaders urged their public to show restraint, and Mansur Abbas, the leader of the Islamic Ra’am party, called the attack an action that went against Islamic values. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank also failed to join the Hamas-led assault, although protests and clashes occurred during the week that followed it. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas initially refrained from explicitly condemning the assault, later voicing opposition to killing or abusing civilians on both sides, without explicitly condemning Hamas.
In a letter sent on 7 October to Iran and Hezbollah, published in the Israeli media, Sinwar and two of his top right-hand men explained that keeping them in the dark was necessary to maintain operational secrecy and preserve surprise, since advance disclosure could have exposed the operation and allowed Israel to launch a devastating preemptive strike. It is possible that this Hamas call may have been accurate, from an operational perspective, since we now know, based on the 2024 Israeli pager operation in Lebanon and the June 2025 surprise attack against Iran, that Israel has managed to infiltrate both Hezbollah and Iran relatively deeply. While Hamas claimed operational secrecy as the reason for keeping its allies in the dark, other motivations, such as hubris, may have been equally or more influential. Moreover, beyond preserving surprise, withholding the attack’s timing may have given Sinwar an opportunity to attempt ‘alliance entrapment ’; he may have sought to present Iran and Hezbollah with a war already underway, expecting them to feel compelled to assist. This would have bypassed their reluctance or veto power, presenting them with a ‘done deal’.
In the same letter, Hamas leaders ask their allies for specific assistance. They wanted Hezbollah and the other armed groups in the “axis of resistance” to join immediately and at full strength, but explicitly, and following the plan’s exisiting logic, stated that Iran was not expected to join the war directly. They requested massive rocket barrages to overwhelm and exhaust Israeli Iron Dome interceptors, alongside strikes on airfields, military headquarters, and strategic targets intended to disable Israel’s air force. They also called for a large Hezbollah ground offensive to seize territory and its inhabitants, exploiting the shock and confusion they expected the bombardment to produce, and for sustained attacks across multiple fronts, including intensive bombardment and drone attacks for two or three days, which they claimed could bring about Israel’s rapid collapse. Their request went unanswered.
Hezbollah entered the fighting on October 8, but its involvement remained limited, consisting primarily of rocket, mortar, and anti-tank fire. The Shiite militias in Iraq did not participate in the attacks, while the Houthis began launching missiles and drones toward Israel only on October 19. Both Iran and Hezbollah could have entered the war more intensely. Iran, specifically, could have launched barrages of missiles and drones against Israel as early as October 7, as it did in April 2024 and in later rounds; so why did they both refrain? Without concrete information about decision-making in Tehran and Beirut, several complementary explanations are possible.
Several explanations may account for Iran’s decision not to participate directly in Hamas’s October 7 attack. According to Brigadier General (res.) Shimon Shapira, Tehran’s strategic priorities differed fundamentally from Hamas's: Iran sought to buy time for diplomatic talks with the Biden administration aimed at lifting sanctions. Operational considerations may also have played a role. Iran’s missile and drone capabilities may not yet have been sufficiently developed to deliver barrages on a scale its military leadership considered necessary to achieve its objectives. Alternatively, Iranian leaders may have regarded Hamas’s plan as unworkable and therefore seen little reason to join the attack. Iran’s restraint may also help explain Hezbollah’s limited involvement. Shapira argues that Tehran likely held Hezbollah back from invading Israel and fully entering the conflict on October 7 because it viewed the organization primarily as a deterrent against an Israeli attack on Iran and its nuclear facilities, “not fulfilling dreams of Palestinian liberation.” Hezbollah’s own calculations may have reinforced that restraint. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, may have judged that, once Hamas had forfeited the element of surprise for any subsequent attack, an invasion of northern Israel had a diminished chance of success.
“Al-Aqsa Flood” requires reassessing the place of nuclear deterrence in Israel’s national security concept and in the deterrence literature more broadly. The attack undermined two long-standing, if assumed, Israeli assumptions: that non-state organizations do not pose an existential threat to it, and that state actors like Iran will be deterred from participating in the creation of such an existential threat due to its nuclear deterrent. ‘Al-Aqsa flood’ shows how states and non-state organizations can divide roles to circumvent classical deterrence logic. A state can refrain from posing a direct existential threat while building, financing, and coordinating proxy forces that work toward the same outcome. Accordingly, the discussion of nuclear deterrence can no longer focus solely on relations between states. It must account for hybrid threats combining states, terrorist organizations, and advanced conventional capabilities.
