Palestinian politician Dr. Sufian Abu Zayyad, a senior Fatah and PLO figure and former Palestinian Authority minister for prisoner affairs, revealed Thursday in a Facebook video that he is the source code-named "coal eyes", the intermediary who passed along a mid-September warning that Yahya Sinwar was planning an attack on Israel.
Abu Zayyad said he would elaborate "in the coming days" on the message he received from Sinwar, as well as on his role mediating contacts between Israel and Hamas.
According to an investigative report published by Shlomi Eldar in Haaretz, Sinwar held a private, one-on-one meeting with Abu Zayyad in September 2023, just weeks before the massacre.
During that conversation, Sinwar demanded that a stark message be conveyed to Israel: "Tell the Israelis that if they don't make progress, I'm preparing an enormous surprise for them." Sinwar used the Arabic keyword "zilzal"—earthquake, an unusual signal that should have set off alarm bells across the intelligence community.
