How Hamas Helped Derail the Israel-Saudi Normalization Track

Since 2020, after the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, the United States led efforts to broker a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Hamas officials and its media repeatedly warned that such an agreement would endanger the Palestinian cause, and after the October 7, 2023 attack, Hamas publications made clear that blocking normalization had been one of the operation’s goals.

According to Hamas documents seized by the IDF in Gaza during the war in Gaza, the movement’s leadership closely tracked the talks from the start and treated them as a strategic threat. The files show Hamas devoted regular meetings, resources and recommendations to stopping the process, with Yahya Sinwar leading the effort in Gaza. Hamas believed a Saudi-Israeli deal could bring other Arab states into the same framework and effectively remove the Palestinian issue from the Arab and international agenda.

As the talks advanced, Hamas tried to counter them on several fronts, while avoiding direct public attacks on Saudi Arabia so as not to damage relations with the kingdom. Instead, it ran a sustained media campaign through official and unofficial outlets, warning Saudi and Arab audiences about the dangers of normalization and amplifying skeptical voices from Israeli media. The campaign intensified in 2023.

The article says the normalization effort began unofficially in 2019 to 2020, accelerated after the Abraham Accords in September 2020, and gained additional momentum under both the Trump and Biden administrations. In November 2020, it was reported that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met Benjamin Netanyahu and the head of the Mossad, with the U.S. secretary of state present. Saudi Arabia later allowed Israeli flights through its airspace in July 2022, and in August 2023 U.S. officials were cautiously optimistic a deal could be reached within 9 to 10 months.

Hamas documents also indicate that by 2023 Sinwar had concluded its efforts were not stopping the process, which he viewed as nearing completion under steady American pressure. At a Hamas political bureau meeting in Gaza on October 2, 2023, the last before the attack, he described normalization as a path to regional escalation and said only an “extraordinary action” could stop it. The documents further suggest he knew an attack was imminent but did not spell it out, reflecting tight internal secrecy at the top of Hamas.