Related Articles
Days after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Pentagon quietly dispatched several dozen commandos to Israel to help advise on hostage recovery efforts, U.S. officials said.
Those troops from the Joint Special Operations Command were quickly joined by a group of intelligence officers, some working with the commandos in Israel and others back at the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va.
For more than a year much of the attention, and criticism, around American support for Israel has focused on the U.S.-made bombs and weaponry Israel has used to attack Gaza.
But the intelligence assistance to Israel has also been crucial. U.S. intelligence helped locate the four hostages who were rescued by Israeli commandos in June.
And from nearly the beginning of the war, the U.S. military and intelligence cells were focused not just on looking for hostages, but also hunting for the top leaders of Hamas.
America’s top brass is not claiming credit for the Israeli operation that killed Hamas’s leader Yahya Sinwar, an architect of the Oct. 7 attack. But they note that their intelligence aided the hunt.
“Shortly after the Oct. 7 massacres, I directed Special Operations personnel and our intelligence professionals to work side by side with their Israeli counterparts to help locate and track Sinwar and other Hamas leaders hiding in Gaza,” President Biden said in a statement on Thursday after Israel announced that it had killed Mr. Sinwar.
Over the course of the war in Gaza, according to senior officials, the U.S. “fusion cells” have shifted their emphasis based on the most current actionable intelligence. Sometimes, the best tips were on the locations of hostages. Other times, the cells focused on the whereabouts of the Hamas leaders. But neither mission was ever set aside.
The two American groups analyzing intelligence, in Israel and at C.I.A. headquarters, regularly exchanged information and insights.
Defense Department officials have insisted that they are not directly supporting Israeli military operations on the ground in Gaza, a campaign that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and reduced the territory to rubble.
But the search for top Hamas leaders was different, officials said.
Hamas-led groups seized about 250 hostages in the attacks last year, including Americans. Mr. Sinwar and other high-level Hamas commanders have kept captives near them, in hopes of deterring Israeli attempts to kill them with a bomb strike. Hamas leaders issued standing orders to shoot hostages if Israeli forces were detected nearby, a strategy designed to deter Israeli commando teams from entering the tunnel network where Mr. Sinwar was long believed to be hiding.
For much of the yearlong war, U.S. military officials have said the search for hostages was their prime mission in Israel. But senior administration officials have described the search for hostages and for the leaders of Hamas as intertwined.
In an interview earlier this year, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said the American military and spy agencies had gained expertise in finding high-value targets from hunting Osama bin Laden and other terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan that was of use to the Israelis.
“We’re putting that experience to use and have been since the early weeks after Oct. 7,” Mr. Sullivan said.
U.S. officials said that senior White House officials regularly met with William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, and Lloyd J. Austin III, the defense secretary, about what more support the targeting cells might need to speed the hunt for Mr. Sinwar.
Officials have not revealed many details about the kind of intelligence the cells have provided Israel.
At least six MQ-9 Reapers controlled by U.S. Special Operations forces have flown missions to assist in locating hostages, monitor for signs of life and pass potential leads to the Israel Defense Forces, the officials said.
The drones cannot map out Hamas’s vast subterranean tunnel network — Israel is using highly classified ground-based sensors to do that — but their infrared radar can detect the heat signatures of people entering or leaving the tunnels from above ground, officials said.
In the end it was a random Israeli unit on patrol in southern Gaza that discovered Mr. Sinwar, the highest-value target of them all.
Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Thursday that no U.S. forces had been directly involved in the operation that killed the Hamas leader. “This was an Israeli operation,” he said.
But, American officials insist, the United States helped collect intelligence that helped the Israeli military narrow its search.
In the weeks after Hamas killed a group of hostages in the tunnels below Rafah in southern Gaza, American and Israeli intelligence agencies had focused on the area, believing that could be where Mr. Sinwar was hiding.
<
