HMM: Someone bet against the Israeli stock market in the days before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.

According to Columbia Law School Professor Joshua Mitts, one of the authors of the study, “that’s extremely unusual.” It was also profitable: the shares sold short for one Israeli company alone yielded a profit of nearly $900,000.

Mitts and his co-author, Professor Robert J. Jackson Jr., ran a number of comparisons over the past 13 years to see whether the same thing had happened before other major moments of instability in Israel, like the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the judicial reform initiative that led millions of Israelis to take to the streets in protest.

They found that the short-selling activity in early October was “really extraordinary, even when you compare it to those periods of instability, which there were many.”

Something similar had happened before, though — on April 3, a couple of days before the Jewish holiday of Passover. The study links this to an Israeli media report claiming Hamas had initially planned its attack for the eve of Passover.

“It’s almost the same magnitude.What are the odds?” asks Mitts.

“The other thing we know,” he adds, “is that this looks to have been the product of a single trader, based on what we can see in the data. This is extraordinarily unusual.”

All of this led them to their conclusion that the trades were not a coincidence, but a tactic by someone who knew the attack was coming.

“We think it’s virtually impossible this happened by chance,” Mitts told CBS News.

Underground rocket factories don’t pay for themselves, you know.