Yahya Sinwar, who is thought to have had a central role in planning the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and who was killed about a year into the resulting war, is greeted by supporters in Gaza City on April 14, 2023. An image of a memo found in a Hamas underground complex that Israeli intelligence believes was written by Sinwar suggests that the militant group's assault intended from the outset to target civilians, a claim its leaders have publicly denied. Photo / Samar Abu Elouf, The New York Times
After assassinating a top Hamas commander, Muhammed Sinwar, in May, the Israeli military sent a special unit into an underground complex he had used.
There, they found a computer unconnected to a network — and much harder to access by Israeli operations spying on Hamas communications.
The computer held an image of a six-page memo, handwritten in Arabic, that the Israeli intelligence community believes was by his brother Yahya Sinwar, who as the powerful leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip helped plot the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Dated August 24, 2022, it appears to be a directive from Sinwar with instructions for the assault, according to seven Israeli officials.
The memo, a copy of which was obtained by the New York Times, calls for fighters to target soldiers and civilian communities — as well as to broadcast the violent acts so as to evoke fear in Israelis and destabilise the country.
Commanders then issued similar instructions on October 7, according to hours of previously unreported communications between commanders and subordinates intercepted by Israel during the assault and shared with the New York Times.
The Israeli officials say the memo shows that Sinwar wanted his fighters to target civilians from the outset, contradicting what the group’s leadership has publicly claimed.
Although the memo does not explicitly mention plans to kidnap or kill civilians, it lays out orders for fighters to enter residential neighbourhoods and set them on fire “with gasoline or diesel from a tanker”.
“Two or three operations, in which an entire neighbourhood, kibbutz, or something similar will be burned, must be prepared,” the memo said.
In an echo to the memo, just before 10am on October 7, a commander from a Gaza City battalion referred to as Abu Muhammed told subordinates: “Start setting homes on fire”.
“Burn, burn,” he said, according to the intercepts. “I want the whole kibbutz to be in flames.”
“Set fire to anything,” a commander in the northern Gaza city of Jabalia referred to as Abu al-Abed said around the same time.
The memo and the intercepts broaden the understanding of Hamas’ planning and execution of the October 7 attack, much of which is based on other documents and recordings collected by Israel during the war.
Israel and Hamas have now agreed to a ceasefire, with the militant group’s future in Gaza uncertain.
Sima Ankona, who formerly served as a document examination expert in the Israeli police, said the handwriting in the memo matches other examples from Sinwar, who was killed by Israeli forces in October 2024.
Ankona, at the request of the Times, compared the document with samples that Israeli authorities had collected, including those captured by the military in Gaza, a note Sinwar wrote to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018 and his signature on a statement to the Israeli police in 1989. He was convicted later that year of killing four Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.
The Times translated the memo. Several words and phrases in it appear in other Hamas documents previously reviewed by the Times.
Izzat al-Rishq, the Qatar-based director of Hamas’ media office, did not respond to a list of detailed questions, including whether Hamas’ leadership outside Gaza was aware of the memo and the orders that commanders gave militants on October 7.
Ibrahim Madhoun, a Palestinian analyst close to Hamas, cast doubt on the authenticity of the memo, asserting that most of the acts described in the document did not occur in the October 7 assault, such as the burning of entire neighbourhoods. (Many homes were set on fire in the course of the attacks.)
He added that the memo did not represent the culture of Hamas’ military wing.
The intercepts were collected on the day of the attack by 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence unit, according to three Israeli security officials, who shared them with the Times. The Times reviewed and translated hours of the intercepted recordings, which included communications in Arabic among commanders and eight groups of fighters.
The memo and the intercepts, said several Israeli officials, have been studied by Israel to deepen their understanding of Hamas’ attack. The Gazit Institute, a think-tank affiliated with the Israeli military intelligence directorate, prepared a confidential report on the materials, saying that “Hamas leadership planned and carried out an attack that featured acts of ‘extraordinary brutality’.”
“Its aim was to cause great turmoil in the country and the military,” said the report, which was reviewed by the Times.
The security lapses revealed in the October 7 attack, including Israel’s failure to find such documents ahead of time and its disregard of other warnings, have prompted a broad examination by the Israeli intelligence community. The attack, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, shattered Israeli’s sense of security.
During the October 7 attack, Hamas and its allies killed some 1200 people and abducted about 250 others to Gaza. Israel, in response, unleashed its full military might in a war that has killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza, displaced most of its residents and reduced cities to rubble.
Israel has been condemned internationally for its conduct in the war and faced accusations of war crimes from human rights groups. It has been accused by a United Nations commission of committing genocide, which the Israeli Government has denied.
In May 2024, Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, accused Yahya Sinwar and two other senior Hamas officials of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “extermination” and “murder”. The crimes were committed as a part of “a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Israel by Hamas and other armed groups”, Khan said when he announced the charges.
Under international law, armies and armed groups must not deliberately target civilians or inflict disproportionate harm on them to achieve military goals. In particular, killing and taking as hostages those who are uninvolved in hostilities are serious violations of the Geneva Conventions.
The handwritten memo and intercepts offer a more granular look at the group’s thinking and its actions in real time.
The memo outlined a plan for a surprise attack on Israel, calling for bulldozers to make openings in the fence separating Gaza and Israel, and multiple waves of attackers.
It expressed hope that the acts would have high shock value. “Stomp on the heads of soldiers,” it said.
It listed “opening fire on soldiers at point-blank range, slaughtering some of them with knives, blowing up tanks”.
Commanders echoed similar instructions on the day of the attack, according to the intercepts. “Slit their throats,” a commander from a battalion in northern Gaza told his team. “Slit them as you are trained.”
Roughly 300 soldiers were killed in the October 7 attack, according to Israeli authorities.
The intercepts captured Hamas combatants broadly calling for violence and taking captives.
When a militant asked if he should confront people on the road, a commander from a Jabalia battalion referred to as Abu Muath responded in the affirmative: “Kill everyone on the road,” he said. “Kill everyone you encounter.”
“Now we are at the beginning of the kibbutz,” said one combatant. “We have wiped out those in it. There are settlers whom we killed.”
“Guys, take a lot of hostages,” said Abu Muath, according to the intercepts. “Take a lot of hostages.”
The group’s actions, the memo said, should be broadcast to the Arab world to mobilise people outside Gaza to join the fight. The plan envisioned that Palestinians in the West Bank, Arabs in Israel and “our nation” — either a reference to Arabs or Muslims or both — would “respond positively to calls for them to join the revolution”.
“It needs to be affirmed to the unit commanders to undertake these actions intentionally, film them and broadcast images of them as fast as possible,” the memo said.
The minutes of Hamas’ secret meetings in the run-up to the October 7 attack also show how Sinwar was determined to persuade Hamas’ allies, Iran and Hezbollah, to join in the assault or commit to a broader fight with Israel.
In the Oct. 7 intercepts, Hamas commanders can be heard urging combatants to film their actions to likewise encourage others to join the fight.
“Document the scenes of horror, now, and broadcast them on TV channels to the whole world,” a commander from Gaza City called Abu al-Baraa told operatives in the area of Kibbutz Sa’ad. “Slaughter them. End the children of Israel.”
Abu Muath, the commander, said, “It is essential that you bring the drone in so it films for the entire Islamic world.”
Hamas officials also made public statements on the day of the attack, encouraging people outside Gaza to participate in the battle, though they ultimately failed to incite a popular uprising.
The Israeli military “won’t be able to attend to confrontations on other fronts”, Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy leader of Hamas’ political office said in a recorded message broadcast on Al Jazeera on October 7.
“After today, no one can hold back his rifle, bullet, pistol, knife, car or Molotov cocktail.”
Israel assassinated al-Arouri in January 2024.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ronen Bergman and Adam Rasgon
Photographs by: Samar Abu Elouf, Avishag Shaar-Yashuv
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