US ‘Fusion Cells’ assist in Israel’s hunt for Hamas leaders

Washington: 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, US 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 CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

For more than a year much of the attention, and criticism, around US support for Israel has focused on the US-made bombs and weaponry Israel has used to attack the Gaza Strip.

But the intelligence assistance to Israel has also been crucial. US 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.

U.S. top brass is not claiming credit for the Israeli operation that killed Hamas’ leader Yahya Sinwar, an architect of the Oct. 7 attack. But they note that their intelligence aided the hunt.

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.

U.S. officials said senior White House officials regularly met with CIA Director William Burns and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin about what more support the targeting cells might need to speed the hunt for Sinwar.

In the end it was a random Israeli unit on patrol in southern Gaza that discovered Sinwar.

Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said 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, U.S. 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, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies had focused on the area, believing that could be where Sinwar was hiding.