As al-Barghouti notes, as part of the “deception strategy,” al-Sinwar spent the two years prior to the Tufan al-Aqsa operation feigning containment; for instance, he “went to the Egyptians to develop trade” and “spoke with the Qataris about expanding the economy in Gaza.” Al-Barghouti recounts that “[a]ll these matters were taking place as part of the deception.”[12] Simultaneously, al-Sinwar publicly “disbanded the Elite Force (Quwwat al-Nukhba)” of al-Qassam to further deepen the appearance that Hamas was seeking normalized relations with the occupation; after the “Elite Unit,” or al-Nukhba Force, was dissolved, “everything was restructured into brigades.” This cell-based rearrangement, in many ways a return to the early distributed al-Mujāhidūn al-Filasṭīniyyūn and Qassam formations of the mid-to-late 1980s and the First Intifada, would allow for decentralized structures that could, should conditions permit, operate semi-autonomously.

One of the more perspicacious covert preparations was al-Sinwar’s creation of a paragliding shell company that, though initially open for public use, soon imposed exorbitant prices, which prohibited non-militants from flying and thereby licensed the resistance to train using its equipment. As Mahmoud Mardawi states in the interview, the “paragliding that people saw” on 7 October 2023 “was part of a long-term plan from the start.”[15] Hamas created a company that would rent out the flying gear. Initially, “anyone who wanted to fly could do so.”[16] However, soon “the price was raised so high that not everyone could afford it. They raised the price on the assumption that people wouldn’t be able to pay.”[17] After most would-be ordinary paragliders were discouraged, the company lowered the price again, but by this point “essentially it was only for training the Qassam Brigades,” as all future sessions had been booked.[18] Indeed, as Mohamed Abdou argues in his “Communiqué #3” article from 20 May 2025, Sinwar’s spearheading this endeavor was galvanized by a broader instrumentalization of “covert deception”; Abdou’s article, which remains the sole scholarly reflection on this mechanism at the point of this article’s writing, also illuminates how:

On 12 September 2023, Palestinian resistance groups conducted the joint exercise “Al-Rukn Al-Shadid 4” (Mighty Pillar 4), designed to evaluate the speed and coordination of the resistance’s response in the event of an emergency. When Abdel Fattah al-Tanani—commander of a sniper squad in the Northern Battalion of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the military wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—returned from the exercise, he characterized it in striking terms. His remarks were neither casual nor a routine summary of training; rather, he stated plainly: “This time is completely different.”[22]

According to al-Tanani, the distinction lay not in technical details but in the underlying concept of the exercise. The offensive model implemented during the drill moved beyond hypothetical defensive scenarios and centered on above-ground maneuvering and the storming of the occupation’s fortifications using vehicles, in a simulation designed to approximate as closely as possible what would later unfold at zero hour.

The exercise, organized by the Joint Operations Room, carried particular weight because it was directly overseen by Ayman Nofal—the Al-Qassam Brigades’ commander of military relations, a member of its military council, commander of the Central Province Brigade, and former head of military intelligence. His leadership underscored the exceptional importance attributed to the Joint Operations Room in the broader context of preparations for the Battle of Al-Aqsa and the development of a comprehensive defensive framework to confront any large-scale assault by the occupation’s military on the Gaza Strip.

In an exclusive interview with Metras, a fighter from the PFLP’s Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades stated that the recent sessions conducted under joint command placed significant emphasis on anti-armor capabilities. For the first time, the Yassin 105 weapon was incorporated into the joint training environment, accompanied by direct attention from senior military leaders. This involvement was reflected in field inspections and visits to training sites attended by commanders from the Al-Qassam Brigades, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, Saraya Al-Quds, and the Al-Nasser Brigades. As Hamas member Mahmoud Mardawi notes in the aforementioned interview with Ahmed Mansour, al-Sinwar had directed the commanders overseeing this training operation to ensure that the training was done publicly “because the enemy would detect any covert operation through aircraft.”[23] This is, at least, the reasoning that he provided the resistance soldiers who participated in the training session. The real reason was, in fact, far-sighted: if the exercise was conducted openly, al-Sinwar determined, it would give the impression that Hamas was attempting to quell its rank-and-file who—given the recent disbanding of the al-Nukhba Force, Hamas’ increased appearances of “containment,” and the Qassam leadership’s recent decision not to participate directly in the 5–7 August 2022 “Unity of the Fields” and 9–13 May 2023 “Revenge of the Free” confrontations between Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the occupation—were worried that Hamas was abandoning its decades-long strategy of militarily confronting the occupation. Indeed, this is precisely how the occupation’s own Shin Bet received the open military exercise, as evidenced by its own after-action assessment.[24]