U.S. and Israeli Officials Claim Hamas Was High During Oct. 7 Attack. Is It True?

The Israel Defense Forces and U.S. government have both recently claimed that Hamas militants were high on captagon, a type of amphetamine popular in the Middle East, during the group’s brutal October 7 attack on Israel. The drug increased Hamas’ willingness to kill and torture civilians, officials said.

According to one of the world’s foremost experts on captagon, whom Motherboard spoke to, it’s an incredibly unlikely claim with little evidence to back it up. While it’s possible that some militants were high on uppers at the time of the attack, recent reports that captagon induces a violent mania are unfounded—while claims that Islamic extremists routinely use captagon to go into battle is a rumor that has been discredited before.

The reports that Hamas fighters were high on captagon during the attacks originated with Israel news agency Channel 12 before they made their way to USA Today and Semafor. According to the reports, unnamed officials from the IDF and U.S. government confirmed that captagon was found on the bodies of dead Hamas soldiers. The anonymous officials told Semafor that the drug was used to “stimulate [Hamas’] willingness to attack, kill, and in some cases, torture, civilians,” but the report did not quote officials directly. 

Notably, U.S. officials made a point of telling Semafor that captagon was used by ISIS. Equating Hamas to ISIS has been a key part of Israel’s strategy to justify its ongoing siege of Gaza, which has killed thousands of civilians, to destroy Hamas. 

Caroline Rose, director of New Lines Institute’s Strategic Blind Spots Portfolio, was skeptical of officials’ claims around captagon. “There was this claim that captagon was on his body, but there was no video evidence of this,” she told Motherboard. Rose tracks the movement of captagon as part of her work with New Lines and said that the drug is in Gaza—narcotics regularly make their way into the strip, and Hamas previously seized a shipment of captagon while blaming Israeli sources for trafficking the drug—but stressed that the popular amphetamine pill is not a wonder drug that explains the violence of the attacks.

Captagon is a bit of a mystery. It’s the brand name for a fenethylline, a synthetic upper first produced in Germany in the 1960s as an amphetamine alternative. “It’s very similar to Ritalin,” Rose said. “It allows people to stay up late. It allows people to stave off hunger, to focus, and concentrate.”

The drug fell out of favor in the decades after its initial manufacture. In the early 2000s, as official production dwindled, the remaining supplies moved onto the black market. It became popular in the Middle East and is currently manufactured primarily in Syria. Now, captagon is a catch-all name for a wide variety of substances, usually taken in pill form, that produce an amphetamine-like high. 

“We don’t have a comprehensive definition for the substance,” Rose said. “But once it came to the Middle East, we started to see the formula change quite drastically. It did not mimic fenethylline whatsoever, instead it incorporated little to no amphetamine or, sometimes, up to 47 percent of amphetamine metabolites inside a pill that was a mixture of caffeine, quinine, procaine, and sometimes toxic levels of zinc and copper from the tableting machine…we would see a very wide spectrum of anything producers could find to put inside these captagon pills.”

Rose said that some captagon pills contain just minimal levels of amphetamine—the active ingredient in many common ADD medications—and cutting agents. She said that reports of captagon causing a violent mania are strictly anecdotal. “When we look at the surveys and the comprehensive studies that are conducted on captagon consumption, and to be fair there aren’t that many, it doesn’t seem to be inciting this kind of crazed behavior,” she said.

She also noted that some of the facts in the USA Today story didn’t make sense. “What’s notable is that they said they were methamphetamine-like stimulants. Captagon is an amphetamine type stimulant, not methamphetamine,” she said. “Israeli security said that small batches were found in the form of a cocaine-like powder. And they also said that small bottles containing a white fluid with traces of captagon were also found. I look at captagon seizures a lot and I’ve seen power in the sense of precursor materials, but not captagon powder. And I’ve never seen captagon in liquid form before. So I find it somewhat difficult to believe that, in one raid, we find two new forms of captagon.”

Politicians have long pointed to captagon as a source of militant violence, especially in the Middle East. Often, this ends up portraying the perpetrators of extreme terroristic violence as bloodthirsty, drug-fueled zombies—a kind of unstoppable evil. 

“There is this rush to blame captagon for the violent behavior that’s perpetrated, when it’s very clear that there was extensive planning and preparation for these operations,” Rose said. She pointed to reports in 2015 that captagon fueled Islamic State attacks in Paris. “In fact, that operation required a lot of planning and a lot of preparation.” A tox screen of the Paris attackers later revealed they had no drugs in their system.

“It helps some people try and rationalize some of the violence that’s conducted,” Rose said. “The attack we saw in early October was catastrophic. Additionally, it’s an illicit activity that people can pin on bad actors that are already identified as bad actors.”

Drug use by soldiers, especially the use of stimulants, is common. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Pentagon kept nuclear equipped B-52 bombers in the air above the world 24 hours a day. The pilots chewed dexedrine pills to keep awake during long flights. During the Vietnam war, the DoD pumped soldiers full of speed. World War II was, famously, fought on amphetamine. U.S. pilots reported amphetamine use in the Gulf War and the War on Terror; two service members even tried to blame amphetamines for a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan. “They’re all pretty much used for the same thing, which is to stay up, stave off hunger, stay focused,” Rose said.

She said she’d tracked seizures of captagon in Gaza, but stressed that there’s no pill that unlocks a person’s ability to conduct brutal attacks and there’s no evidence that captagon use was widespread or a key part of Hamas’ plan. “Fighters might have taken cocaine right before, or captagon, or no substances at all. Some might have taken caffeine, some may be sleep deprived,” she said. “There’s so many different stimulants that heighten awareness and attention during an operation, but there's no way that captagon was a factor to blame in the violence and atrocities that we witnessed on October 7.”

“I think when it comes to the mystique of militant use of substances, we’ve seen this story again and again and again. It’s not new,” she said.

Correction: The original article stated that Strategic Air Command nuclear equipped B-2s during the 1950s and ‘60s. It was the B-52, not the B-2. We’ve updated the article.