The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have captured many documents during the war with HAMAS and the other elements of the Islamic Revolution in Gaza. Releasing batches of these documents has made concrete evidence available to the public about a number of aspects of the HAMAS-led invasion and massacre in Israel on 7 October 2023, and has been an important part of how the Jewish State has tried to combat the massive information war waged against it. The latest documents released show how the jihadists planned the information war itself.
PRIOR DOCUMENT RELEASES
An early set of captured documents was the most gruesome, relating to the one component of the 7 October pogrom that Islamists and their Leftist allies have found embarrassing enough to seek to deny: the mass-rape and sexual torture of Israeli civilians. The denialism has taken basically two forms: outright, and what we might call the David Irving school—that is, admitting it happened, while minimising the scale and exculpating the leadership, arguing that such crimes as occurred were lapses by underlings acting outside the intentions and instructions of their superiors. The captured documents tore these lies to shreds.
The clearest evidence that there was nothing spontaneous about HAMAS’s savage sexual violence on 7 October was the language guide issued by HAMAS commanders to their jihadists before they were sent into Israel. The guide contained various Hebrew phrases, given phonetically in Arabic so the terrorists would know how to pronounce them, which included phrases to be used during the rapes: “Lie down”, “Take off your pants”, “Take off your clothes”, and “Raise your hands and spread your legs”.1 The mass-rape of Israelis—women, men, and children—was integral to HAMAS’s 7 October plan, intended to terrorise and humiliate—to “dirty them”, as one terrorist captive later put it.
The same phrasebook confirmed the rest of what happened that Saturday was by the design of HAMAS’s central leadership. There were phrases to assist the foot-soldiers in the taking of hostages—“I will kill you”, “Get in”, “Where are your friends?”, “Don’t move”, “You are a captive”—and the utilisation of hostages to deter any attempts by Israeli civilians to fight back and to impede the IDF response, such as: “We have hostages”, “We will kill the captives”, and “Throw down the weapon”. Other jihadists on 7 October had a note inciting them to exterminate Jews—“a disease that has no cure other than cutting off heads and cutting out hearts and livers”—which was signed off, “In the name of the God of Khaybar”, an oasis apparently north of Medina where the Prophet Muhammad is said to have slaughtered Jews.
Other documents found on the HAMAS jihadists and released quickly disclosed that the terrorists had alarmingly good intelligence about the areas of Israel they invaded. The intelligence was used to produce detailed maps and lists of targets, in particular primary schools and Jewish youth centres, where HAMAS operatives were ordered to “kills as many as possible” and “capture hostages”.
Subsequent batches of documents showed how intimately the Iranian leaders of the Islamic Revolution had been involved in planning for what became the Simchat Torah Pogrom, intended as the opening shot of a decisive campaign to destroy Israel and her people. HAMAS leader Yahya Sinwar indicated his plans to the late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani shortly after the May 2021 war with Israel. They approved, and Mohammad Said Izadi, the head of the IRGC’s “Palestinian Office” that manages HAMAS and the other IRGC units in former Mandate Palestine, was clued-in a month later. Sinwar kept Tehran updated on his “big project” and Qaani supplied money, training, and strategic direction on lulling Israel into a false sense of security to lower its defences, while setting up a Joint Operations Chamber (JOC) to coordinate HAMAS’s actions with the IRGC’s “external armies”, notably Hizballah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Some of this coordination was facilitated by HAMAS’s “political wing” in Qatar. The Iranians eventually picked the 7 October 2023 date after several times ordering Sinwar to delay “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”.
Captured documents have disclosed the extent of the terrorists’ control over the NGOs in Gaza, able to manoeuvre their operatives in this sympathetic milieu into leadership positions, and use the “humanitarian” organisations as fronts to order equipment for military purposes (above all the tunnels) and raise money.
The documents recording Sinwar’s thinking about how to wage the war removed all doubt that HAMAS’s human sacrifice strategy with the captive Palestinian population was a conscious decision taken in the belief it was central to how HAMAS would prevail, not something arrived at contingently. Palestinian deaths “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honour”,2 Sinwar told the HAMAS “political” officials in Doha a few months after 7 October. In another missive, Sinwar celebrated the deaths of Palestinian civilians as the “necessary sacrifices” to achieve victory.
Perhaps the most interesting find was a memo written by Sinwar in August 2022, discovered in 2025 after his brother and successor was killed in a tunnel under a hospital in Gaza. The memo was released with a package of intercepted HAMAS communications from 7 October. Sinwar was fixated on ensuring his planned attack on Israel had a dimension of literal holocaust, ordering that his troops be supplied with “gasoline or diesel” when they invaded Israel so they could burn “entire” kibbutzim. HAMAS commanders on the day of the pogrom relayed these instructions. “I want the whole kibbutz to be in flames”, one said. “Set fire to anything”, said another. Sinwar conceived a surprise attack, the use of bulldozers to break down the border fence, and staggered waves of invaders: all this would be done.
More than a year in advance, Sinwar was also keenly aware of “Al-Aqsa Flood” as a media event. Sinwar insisted HAMAS murder Israelis in as shocking a manner as possible and film what they did so it could be broadcast, with the intention of frightening Israelis and drawing global support to HAMAS from the large constituency excited by the spectacle of Jews being slaughtered. “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”, Sinwar wrote. His deputies delivered on 7 October, telling obedient HAMAS killer brigades, “Slit their throats. Slit them as you are trained”, and, “Document the scenes of horror, now, and broadcast them on TV channels to the whole world.”
THE NEW DOCUMENT RELEASE
The world largely reacted to the 7 October massacre as Sinwar desired. The official condemnations of HAMAS by Western governments notwithstanding, the immediate reaction was popular enthusiasm on the streets all across the West, where the only violence condemned was the impending Israeli response to HAMAS,3 and elite institutions supplied the more polished justifications for the carnage as an act of “liberation” and “decolonisation”. The journalists, academics, and public intellectuals who spoke this way—and the “human rights” groups and the United Nations accusing Israel of breaking “international law” before the bodies had even been counted—could have been reading from the script Sinwar had prepared.
On the same day Sinwar wrote the above memo, 24 August 2022, he wrote a second tactical document, an important part of which focused on how to present the HAMAS rampage in Israel to a global audience. The Islamic and exterminatory motives of “Al-Aqsa Flood” were to be concealed, and HAMAS propaganda would instead emphasise the “civilian, humanitarian, [and] national” nature of the operation. (This dovetailed with the instructions discovered in other documents to avoid displaying HAMAS insignia in atrocity videos the terrorists disseminated, which allowed HAMAS to play the double game of claiming credit for 7 October before sympathetic audiences while “officially” denying responsibility for the crimes of its Einsatzgruppen when convenient, casting the blame onto the Gazan civilians who followed the invaders into Israel. As the war unfolded, this standard IRGC warfare tactic of preventing visuals of its troops being broadcast assisted in fostering the “genocide” narrative: since nobody ever saw the combatants against whom Israel was engaged, it made it easier to claim Israel was waging war against civilians.)
Sinwar instructed HAMAS’s Media Department to describe the purpose of 7 October as achieving Palestinian “rights”, specifically “the right of return”, i.e., the movement of the Arab refugees from the 1948 war in Mandate Palestine and all of their descendants—nearly six million people—into Israel. This call for Israel’s destruction by other means was to be disguised through the presentation of the false Palestinian nationalist version of history that has come to be associated with the word nakba (“catastrophe”), wherein “the Zionists” intentionally and systematically ethnically cleansed Arabs to recreate Israel in 1948. Thus would aggression be transformed into anti-colonial liberation. Added to this polemical history, Sinwar said there should be an emphasis on the “human dimension”, using pictures and videos from Palestinian villages of people delighted by the prospect of “Returning Home”, a slogan to be promoted in multiple languages. Sinwar even wrote the slogan in English to underline the point.
All Israelis were referred to as “settlers” by Sinwar, reinforcing this “return” paradigm and legitimating their “expulsion” in decolonial terms. In the instructions for HAMAS’s internal use, Sinwar was more specific that those Israelis not murdered should be expelled “toward the sea”, an echo of the Arab propaganda about throwing the Jews into the sea in the build-up to the Six-Day War, the disastrous (for Arabs) conflict in 1967 that concluded with Israel occupying Gaza (until then occupied by Egypt) and the West Bank (until then occupied—formally annexed—by Jordan).
Sinwar went on to instruct the Political Department that in their propaganda they should “rely on international law”, a concept that has served HAMAS well. “The objective of the plan”—what became 7 October—should be described as trying “to implement the [international] law which is not being implemented”, Sinwar explained.
The rest of the pages Sinwar wrote contained tactical minutiae on achieving surprise, the numbers of HAMAS terrorists to be sent into Israel, how they were to be divided up to seize junctions and kibbutzim, and the methods to encircle and “neutralise” military bases. There was one illuminating section, though, where Sinwar wrote: “The enemy will not hesitate to use all the means and weapons at its disposal … It may even use a nuclear bomb.” Sinwar, unsurprisingly given his view of Palestinian civilian deaths as necessary to achieve victory, was not overly concerned about this: “This campaign is a battle of life or death, and there will be life, with Allah’s help.”
FOOTNOTES
The documents were first made available by Palestinian Media Watch in July 2024. Most other media outlets chose not to publish the documents themselves, but NBC News had seen them and reported on them as early as December 2023. The documents were subsequently made available to the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes Against Women and Children, which noted in its May 2026 report (p. 58) that, as well as the phrasebook, the HAMAS rapists were issued with “kits containing zip ties and other materials to physically restrain victims”.
The word translated as “nation” is probably umma, which refers to the global Islamic community.
It would be wrong to suggest these celebrations-cum-protests on 7 October 2023 and in the days immediately afterwards were not expressions of authentic sentiment. A lot of people were enthused by seeing Jews raped and burned alive, and they had already designated any Israeli response as “genocide”.
There is, however, a question over how organic the capacity to mobilise the display of this sentiment was. In Britain, specifically, the scale, persistence, and uniformity of this type of activism invites suspicion about where the organisational skills and money came from, and there was detectable IRGC involvement with the “pro-Palestine” movement from its earliest days, which has continued right up to the present.
Good summary. It also seems like Hezbollah/Iran et al were genuinely surprised by Oct 7 and thus weren’t fully prepared to join in, even though they had been included in the earlier planning and just hadn’t coordinated the full “GO” order and their own preparations, meaning that HAMAS jumped the gun a bit. Does that interpretation disagree with this new documentation?