Internal Files Show the 7 October Massacre in Israel Went Exactly As HAMAS Intended
The Islamic Revolution headquartered in Tehran sees eliminating the State of Israel as the immediate priority in its theological-strategic program that ultimately intends to purge the Middle East of Western influence and impose the Revolution’s version of Islam upon the whole region. To that end, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) sought to surround Israel—with Hizballah in Lebanon, HAMAS and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza, the Hashd al-Shabi militia conglomerate in Iraq, the hizballahi in Syria, and Ansarallah in Yemen—and through these “external armies” deter Israel from attempting to destroy the nuclear-weapons facilities in Iran, while the IRGC waged an attritional war to make life in the Jewish State untenable.
The 7 October 2023 pogrom in Israel by the IRGC’s Palestinian units was part of this design and as late as mid-2024 it appeared to be working. Israel had responded against the IRGC base in Gaza and gone no further. This was of a piece with the habit Israel had got into of trying to compartmentalise the war with the Islamic Revolution, leading to a situation where even tactical successes—notably infiltrating and paralysing the foreign terrorism apparatus of the IRGC—did little to alter the strategic trendline of the Revolution’s “ring of fire” around Israel becoming increasingly suffocating.
In late 2024, Israel changed course. By the time Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the IRGC’s man on the spot in Gaza, on 16 October 2024, the famous pagers’ operation against Hizballah was a month in the past and Hassan Nasrallah was no more. After a few more weeks of fighting, the IRGC in Lebanon was debilitated, removing the support system for the Islamic Revolution’s outpost in Syria, which collapsed in December. The IRGC’s Iraqi front openly bowed out of the war and Ansarallah’s will to fight on outstripped its capacity. There was nothing the Yemeni IRGC could do when Israel struck at the Revolution within Iran in June 2025, devastating its military and nuclear infrastructure with an assist from the United States.
The ongoing military ambiguity on the Gaza front and the success of the IRGC’s information war surrounding that theatre has somewhat obscured this picture. However, assuming the twenty remaining living Israeli hostages are returned as planned tomorrow and IRGC/HAMAS refrains from any further recklessness, a cessation of hostilities in Gaza is imminent.
Perhaps the political warfare against Israel—specifically the absurd charge of “genocide”, enabled by elite international institutions—which has done so much to bury the memory of 7 October will prevail. Disinformation campaigns can have very long-lasting impacts. It is possible, though, that once the media hysteria simmers down and many activists move on to the next thing, a measure of public reason will be reasserted. In a more objective environment, the idea that the political damage to Israel’s reputation—even if it does not prove to be ephemeral—was a worthwhile pay-off for what the IRGC has done is unlikely to seem credible, and the focus will be on assessing the exact extent of the catastrophe the Islamic Revolution brought upon itself and the Palestinians with the 7 October “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation.
If the anti-Israel propaganda campaign’s ability to dictate the public understanding of the last two years does fade, the horrors of the 7 October pogrom are going to loom much larger, and a crucial part of the collective memory will be the premeditated nature of the Judeocide that day.
Sinwar was released from an Israeli prison in 2011 as part of the exchange for Gilad Shalit, quickly became dominant over HAMAS in the Gaza Strip, and was formally named leader in 2017. Sinwar’s ideological loyalty to the Islamic Revolution was undisguised and when HAMAS launched its fourth war against Israel in May 2021 it fought openly as one front in a coordinated IRGC jihad. Sinwar’s obsession in the wake of that war with “the Last Promise”, an apocalyptic showdown to destroy Israel, opened the road to 7 October.
Previously-released caches of captured documents disclosed details about how the plan for 7 October was formulated and made possible, in particular the way Sinwar ran an information operation for two years to convince Israel he was a pragmatist set on keeping Gaza calm—playing into what Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu above all, wanted to believe about HAMAS being more interested in the material benefits of ruling the Strip than jihad—while Sinwar simultaneously coordinated with Esmail Qaani, the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, and Mohammad Said Izadi, the head of the IRGC’s “Palestinian Office”, to gather resources and plan for his “big project”. HAMAS was given additional money and training. Sinwar’s initial proposal to invade Israel in the summer of 2022 was vetoed by Tehran and a year later IRGC Centre imposed another delay to allow time for the “external armies” in Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere to be properly prepared for their assigned roles in the coming war.
More materials from within HAMAS have now been published by The New York Times disclosing details about the plan for 7 October itself. The key document was recovered in an Israeli operation after Muhammad Sinwar, Yahya’s brother and successor, was killed in a tunnel under the European Hospital—so named because it was built with European Union funds—in Khan Younis in May 2025. A computer unconnected to any network, thus accessible only if physically possessed, contained images of a six-page memo, handwritten by Yahya, dated 24 August 2022. The Times was also given a package of HAMAS communications from 7 October 2023 recorded by Unit 8200, the Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) signals intelligence outfit: “The Times reviewed and translated hours of the intercepted recordings, which included communications in Arabic among commanders and eight groups of fighters.”
The element of literal holocaust to the 7 October carnage was integral to HAMAS’s plan from the beginning. Yahya Sinwar wrote in his 2022 memo of the need for his troops to have “gasoline or diesel” with them when they invaded Israeli civilian neighbourhoods, adding: “Two or three operations, in which an entire neighbourhood, kibbutz, or something similar will be burned, must be prepared”. Abu Muhammad, the commander of a HAMAS Gaza City battalion, is shown in the intercepts giving an order at 10 AM on 7 October: “Start setting homes on fire.” “Burn, burn,” he went on. “I want the whole kibbutz to be in flames.” Abu al-Abed, a HAMAS commander in Jabaliya, told his subordinates around the same time: “Set fire to anything.”
More than a year before the Simchat Torah pogrom, Sinwar instructed that HAMAS should carry out a surprise attack that would break through the border fence with bulldozers, for several waves of attackers to pour through, and for the terrorists to carry out shockingly brutal murders and broadcast the crimes to terrorise Israelis. All of this would be done.
Sinwar recommended “opening fire on soldiers at point-blank range, slaughtering some of them with knives, blowing up tanks.” “Stomp on the heads of soldiers,” Sinwar’s memo said. On 7 October, a HAMAS commander in northern Gaza told his troops: “Slit their throats. Slit them as you are trained.” About 300 IDF soldiers were among the nearly 1,200 Israelis massacred on 7 October.
A HAMAS commander from a Jabaliya battalion, Abu Muath, was asked by the invaders what to do about a group of civilians fleeing on a road. “Kill everyone on the road,” Abu Muath ordered. “Kill everyone you encounter.” Another HAMAS operative can be heard in the intercepts confirming he has done as he was told: “We have wiped out those in [the kibbutz]. There are settlers whom we killed.” Abu Muath also reminded HAMAS’s forces of the other part of their mission: “Guys, take a lot of hostages.”
Sinwar wrote in the memo:
It needs to be affirmed to the unit commanders to undertake these actions [shocking atrocities] intentionally, film them and broadcast images of them as fast as possible.
Sinwar was convinced that the umma (Islamic community or nation) would “respond positively” to broadcasts showing Jews being gruesomely slaughtered, indeed that such scenes would make Muslims in the West Bank and beyond attentive to HAMAS’s calls “to join the revolution”. Sinwar’s lieutenants on the day acted in accordance with this instruction and under these beliefs.
“Document the scenes of horror, now, and broadcast them on TV channels to the whole world,” Abu al-Baraa, a commander from Gaza City, told HAMAS forces in Kibbutz Sa’ad. “Slaughter them. End the children of Israel.” Abu Muath can be heard in the intercepts saying: “It is essential that you bring the drone in so it films for the entire Islamic world.”
From Beirut, Saleh al-Aruri, a senior HAMAS military official and deputy of the group’s nominal “Political Bureau”, went on Al-Jazeera during the pogrom to incite Muslims in the region to attack Israel, since the State “won’t be able to attend to confrontations on other fronts” Al-Aruri, channelling the most infamous speech of the Islamic State spokesman, told listeners: “After today, no one can hold back his rifle, bullet, pistol, knife, car, or Molotov cocktail.”
Another notable aspect in Sinwar’s memo was the demand to conceal the insignia and identities of HAMAS fighters in published images and videos. This fed into HAMAS’s messaging in two mutually-reinforcing ways. First, starting in the days after the pogrom with Al-Aruri, HAMAS sought to insulate itself from some of the international opprobrium by “officially” denying that its forces had deliberately murdered any Israeli civilians, even as the group ensured it benefited from the popular global approval for doing just that. HAMAS claimed that if there were any such “excesses”, they were committed by the Gazan civilians who followed HAMAS into Israel—an incredibly cynical piece of propaganda given that HAMAS was already claiming Israel intended a “genocide” in Gaza. Second, it conformed to the standard IRGC way of war by hiding its fighters to foster the visual impression Israel confronted no combatants and must, therefore, be waging war on civilians, the narrative architecture adopted by the United Nations in its description of the Gaza war.
The systematism of HAMAS’s atrocities in Israel—a standard template of rape, torture, mutilation, mass-murder, desecration of corpses, burning, and kidnapping in every place the terrorists occupied—meant there was never any doubt that what happened on 7 October 2023 was precisely what HAMAS intended to happen. To have the files from within HAMAS confirming this is important for the historical record and perhaps in time it will impact the popular understanding of the 7 October war, albeit the most determined denialists will never be moved since their position has nothing to do with evidence.
Once again, an excellent piece on the war. There is one issue that I would be interested in hearing your views on, which is the issue of South Africa's co-operation with Iran and its wider ramifications. There have been discussions about South Africa and Iran having military and nuclear ties, and the ANC's accusations of genocide were likely motivated just as much by their ideological priors as it was by the likely Iranian injections of cash that have helped keep the ANC alive. What do you think should be done about South Africa and what do you think likely will be done? Personally, I would like the ANC to be internationally condemned and for sanctions to be placed upon South Africa, both due to its support of Iran and because of its numerous anti-White racist policies.