Hamas militants were high on 'poor man's cocaine' during the October 7 terrorist attacks, report says

• Hamas militants were high on Captagon pills during the October 7 terrorist attacks, reports say.
• Captagon is a brand name of the synthetic stimulant fenethylline hydrochloride.

Captagon pills fueled Hamas militants during the October 7 terrorist attacks, Israel's Channel 12 News reported.

The drug, which is also known as "poor man's cocaine," is a highly addictive, synthetic stimulant that is widely consumed across the Middle East.

The Hebrew-language news channel reported that pills of the drug had been found on the bodies of Hamas prisoners and fighters killed in the conflict, suggesting that they had taken the drug before carrying out their "inhumane murders."

The IDF told Insider by email that it did "not have information or a comment on this subject."

Israeli security guards in the southern West Bank stopped thousands of Captagon pills hidden in a shipment of refrigerators from being smuggled into Gaza in January, The Times of Israel reported.

More than 1,400 people were killed in Israel during the attacks earlier this month, while over 200 people were also taken hostage by Hamas.

Fenethylline hydrochloride and the Middle East

Captagon is the brand name of the drug fenethylline hydrochloride. The substance was created in the 1960s in West Germany to help treat conditions such as attention deficit disorder, depression, and narcolepsy.

Its highly addictive nature led to it being banned in the 1980s, but a clandestine trade of counterfeit versions of the pills began in the Middle East. Its popularity particularly blossomed in Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

Following Israeli military action against the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, production of Captagon increased in Lebanon as the group sought to build up its depleted finances, and production became rife along the Syrian border.

The drug, a mixture of amphetamine and theophylline, often cut with other substances such as caffeine and paracetamol, became particularly popular with fighters in the Syrian civil war and with Islamic State (ISIS), as they sought to stave off sleep and remain focused.

According to the American Chemical Society, militant groups use the drug to increase what they deem to be "desirable characteristics" in their fighters, such as "aggressiveness, alertness, and fearlessness."

The drug has since become a "significant revenue stream" for Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, helping it "stay afloat as sanctions and other economic measures are squeezing it," Natalie Ecanow, a research analyst at the think tank The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which focuses on Lebanon, Jordan, and the Levant, told Insider.

According to the UK government, around 80% of the global supply of the drug is produced in the country, and Assad "has been able to leverage the drug trade" to gain concessions from other Arab leaders, Ecanow added — which led to his eventual welcome back into the Arab League.

"The Syrian regime's trafficking of billions of dollars' worth of captagon has helped to spread violence across the region; Hamas terrorists' reported use of the drug only adds to the carnage," David Adesnik, Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the FDD, said.

A key link to Assad's regime came in 2018, when the cargo ship Noka, sailing from the Syrian port of Latakia to eastern Libya, was raided as it passed the Greek island of Crete.

On board, authorities discovered more than $100 million worth of cannabis and Captagon pills that had been hidden among sawdust, coffee, and spices.

Two years later, Italian police seized one of the largest hauls of Captagon after they found 14 tonnes of the drug, worth around 1 billion euros, just over $1 billion, at the port of Salerno, near Naples in southern Italy.

According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a combination of ship tracking data, court documents, company data, and information from authorities linked many of these Captagon hauls back to the Mediterranean port of Latakia, Syria's main port.

The OCCRP describes Latakia as "an impenetrable Assad fiefdom," is controlled by Assad's brother, Maher Al-Assad, and his notorious Fourth Division army.

In 2021, data on seizures in the region valued the Captagon trade at $5.7 billion, per the FDD.