Macron is enabling the next Oct. 7 — and France will pay the price

Fiction frequently anticipates friction. Fauda’s fifth season treats the French-Hamas nexus in Marseille as an operational fact, mirroring a grim reality. This TV show previously presaged the Oct. 7, 2023, tunnel raid — a scenario its own writers initially discarded as too far-fetched for television. My recent analysis for these pages exposed this exact channel: on Oct. 16, 2020, a General Directorate for External Security emissary met with Mousa Abu Marzook and Khaled Mashal in Doha, Qatar. Authorized by French President Emmanuel Macron, this backdoor diplomacy occurred while Hamas was simultaneously plotting the biggest massacre of Jews since the Shoah.Unchastened by this legacy, on Tuesday, Macron stripped off his diplomatic mask at the U.N. General Assembly and falsely claimed that “Hamas has never been active in the West Bank.” Yet, a Hamas gunman shattered Macron’s hoax days before on Yom Kippur by murdering Netanel Shukrun, a dual French Israeli citizen, at the Ein Raya spring in the West Bank. Using his final breath to tell his son to run, Shukrun’s sacrifice stands as a stark reminder of the human cost of European delusion.As the former Rothschild banker charade proves, French officialdom treats Shukrun’s death as a footnote, clinging instead to the fiction that the West Bank remains “free of Hamas.” Ironically for the French leader, my previous Times of Israel analyses have documented how Hamas systematically expands this Judean infrastructure via cell networks, active weapons command nodes, and external funds for daily assaults. Paris willfully ignores this reality abroad while erasing Islamist threats at home. By swapping moral clarity for wishful thinking, Paris commits a form of strategic suicide: It blindfolds itself to the Islamist threat at home to sustain the fiction that the danger is contained. Directly shattering this institutional cowardice, French courts and allied intelligence services flatly contradict Macron’s defeatist, terrorism-apologist narrative. In February, the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office indicted Khaled al Shuli, Faysal Sellami, and Kamel Laifi for terrorism finance, exposing money men who moved $34 million through zakat fronts directly into Hamas’s Gaza dawa. Across the border, Germany’s domestic intelligence counted 650 active Hamas operatives on German soil in 2025, while Mossad-backed raids across Austria and Germany also seized massive weapons caches built explicitly “for the day the order is given.” Public polling in France confirms this domestic rot, revealing 38% of respondents endorsing Islamist positions, with 24% favoring the Muslim Brotherhood.Indeed, quisling-style accommodation has a long, ignominious pedigree in Paris. In 1984, former Directorate of Territorial Surveillance director Yves Bonnet struck a verbal nonaggression pact with the Palestinian Abu Nidal thugs: Paris eased pursuit, and these fedayeen promised to spare French streets. A January 1985 diplomatic note records France receiving those treacherous terms “with the greatest interest.” However, history proves that appeasement never erases Palestinian terrorism — it merely relocates the threat, a strategic folly that Macron is now actively replicating. In honor of the more than 55 French Israeli citizens slaughtered by Hamas since 1987, Israel must immediately shatter French complacency and implement three sweeping measures.First, the Jewish state must initiate Operation Return to Sanctuary. The Knesset should authorize an expulsion instrument designating France as the mandatory destination for every Hamas operative captured in Gaza and the West Bank after a fixed date. Authorities must stamp each travel packet with the Oct. 16, 2020, Doha meeting details, then fly the first cohort via a daylight El Al charter directly into Marseille, France.Second, Israel should establish a digitized, publicly viewable “Macron Ledger” at the French Embassy in Tel Aviv. Alongside lodging a certified consignment of each deportee’s interrogation, the Jewish state will stream a live countdown clock outside the embassy, demanding a written French determination within 30 days on whether these networks “do not exist” once the men clear passport control.DISARM FIRST, REBUILD SECOND: TRUMP’S BOARD OF PEACE FORCES HAMAS TO CHOOSE ON $2.45 BILLION GAZA PLANThird, Jerusalem should weaponize its intelligence dominance to isolate Paris’s interests globally. Israel must enforce a total counterterrorism intelligence blackout on France, severing the General Directorate for External Security from all regional threat databases. Concurrently, utilizing the cutting-edge emerging Abrahamic Security Network, the Jewish state should radically expand its strategic and signals-intelligence integration with Azerbaijan. Deepening this specific axis, which maintains robust diplomatic synergy across the Abraham Accords geography, will systematically blindside Paris across the strategic Eurasian corridor.Funding the fiction of “Palestinian moderation” will inevitably force France to host the domestic sequel to the very terrorist networks it coddles. Should Macron continue treating Israeli security as an expendable bargaining chip, Jerusalem must execute its deportation mandates and sever all intelligence sharing — utilizing an expanded partnership with Azerbaijan to systematically blindside the Elysee Palace abroad while leaving Paris to face its new, self-inflicted Hamas reality entirely alone.Jose Lev Alvarez is an American Israeli scholar specializing in international security policy. A multilingual veteran of the Israeli special forces and the U.S. Army, he holds three master’s degrees and is completing a doctorate in intelligence and global security in the Washington area.