Hamas planned to remove the bodies of British soldiers who perished in World War 1 and World War 2 from their graves in Gaza to blackmail the British government, documents the Daily Telegraph obtained from Israeli officials revealed, the outlet published on Friday.
In addition to British troops, the terrorists planned on targeting the more than 3,000 graves of Commonwealth soldiers buried in the Gaza Strip.
The document was uncovered by Israeli forces operating in Khan Yunis in January. Found in a Hamas compound, the 7-page document is thought to be connected to the now-deceased Hamas leader Mohammed Deif and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. It was reportedly found in a plastic sleeve marked “M’Raed.”
“[This] is possibly referring to Raed Salim Khalek, head of the Information and OSINT (open source intelligence) department in the Hamas military intelligence directorate,” the Israeli intelligence commentary on the document added.
The document is believed to have been written around October of 2022, a year before the terror group's October 7 attacks on southern Israel.
Why did Hamas plan this?
Hamas had planned to desecrate the graves in response to then-British Prime Minister Liz Truss’s comments that she wished to see her country’s embassy moved from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital of Jerusalem.
The soldiers' bodies would have been returned in exchange for Truss retracting her comments and a cash payment under the guise of land “lease fees” for the cemeteries - including a retroactive payment dating from 1917, the Telegraph added.
“If the British government does not meet the aforementioned demands, the Gaza Municipality will act to remove all the corpses from the cemeteries and collect them in a special location by judicial order, declaring that the corpses are considered captive until a solution or deal is found,” the document read. “The British government will find itself in an embarrassing position in front of the British people, its political elite, and its military if any country desecrates the corpses of its soldiers.”
While the document was written two years ago, the Telegraph noted areas holding Commonwealth cemeteries remain under Hamas control - meaning the graves are still at risk.
“There is no way to rule out that Hamas will use this strategy or other similar ones to influence external affairs or anything within their agenda in the future,” one Israeli official said.
“The tactic depicted in this document is intended to quite literally terrorize the people of the UK as a whole in order to influence political decisions,” an Israeli official told the Telegraph. “There is no way to rule out that Hamas will use this strategy or other similar ones to influence external affairs or anything within their agenda in the future.”
The validity of the document was questioned by Hugh Lovatt, a Senior Policy Fellow at the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, who told the source that the document was “no obvious forgery,” but there was no indication it was an official document.
“I would usually expect a Quranic/Islamic header such as ‘In the name of God the Merciful,’" he said.
Lovatt also said that the tone, which used “flowery” language, was “not in itself a red flag, but not what I would expect from a ‘working document.’”